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Yes? Or No? Nunavik chooses next week

Beneficiaries to vote on offshore claim agreement

JANE GEORGE

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This map shows the extent of the Nunavik marine area.You can find more maps and information www.nilca.ca

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The NILCA offers Makivik about $32 million as capital transfers and associated funds. Another $53 or so million goes to a Nunavik Inuit Trust, which will be able to make payments to individual Nunavimmiut.

The $85.6 million total will be paid out over nine years.

The money creates co-management bodies such as the new seven-member Nunavik Marine Region Wildlife Management Board, with three Inuit members from Nunavik and four representatives appointed by governments, including Nunavut.

The new groups will have decision-making authority on wildlife, land management, and development impact issues.

Since Makivik and the federal government first entered negotiations in 1993 and set an original deadline of August 1996 for completing the offshore deal, conflicting aboriginal claims over the area, and the wide gulf between Makivik’s original demands and the federal government’s counter-offers delayed negotiations for years.

In 1994, Makivik sent its first offshore proposal to the federal government. The proposal asked for the same treaty status as the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement and $500 million in compensation.

Overlapping claims also stalled the talks for years. Makivik had to drop a court case claiming overlapping rights to the Torngat Mountains of Labrador to secure its AIP with the federal government.

The final NILCA contains the same overlap arrangements with Nunavut as found in Article 40 of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. It confirms joint ownership of the lands, how the two groups share resources and other benefits, and how the areas are jointly managed.

The NILCA provides for fishing rights outside the actual settlement area: commercial fishing rights in the Davis Strait and offshore Labrador. It also recognizes “the principle of adjacency and economic dependency of communities in Nunavik on marine resources” and promises to give “special consideration to these factors” when handing out commercial fishing licenses within Hudson Bay.

But the NILCA protects Nunavut’s greater claim to adjacency in waters off Baffin Island – something not mentioned in Nunavut’s land claim agreement.

Section 5.4.7 of the NILCA says “the commercial harvesting benefits provided to Nunavut Inuit by the Government in the Southern and Northern Davis Strait Zones shall exceed the commercial harvesting benefits provided by Government to Nunavik Inuit in those Zones.”

Nunavut’s premier, Paul Okalik, told delegates at a Makivik gathering in 2000 that he had no problem with Nunavik’s traditional use of the Davis Strait region. But both he and Paul Quassa, the president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. at that time, said Makivik should drop the area from their offshore claim.

This is how the NILCA ended up handling access to the multi-million dollar commercial fishery in Davis Strait: it gives Nunavik 2.54 per cent of turbot quota in the southern Davis Strait, an area where Nunavut now has 27 per cent of the catch, and 10 per cent of any increase or any new quota for other groundfish in the region known as 0B.

As for turbot in the northern Davis Strait, or area 0A, the NICLA says Nunavik may get a part of any increase in the turbot allocation for northern Davis Strait. Nunavut interests now get 100 per cent of the allowable catch in area 0A.

As for shrimp in the southern Davis Strait, Nunavik will get seven per cent of any increase handed out, and in the northern Davis Strait Nunavik will get 8.8 per cent of any increase.

Aboriginal fishing rights are also similarly entrenched in the Nisg’aa and Nunatsiavut land claims.

The NICLA also gives Nunavimmiut ownership over 80 per cent of all the offshore islands, with both surface and subsurface rights, in what’s called the “Nunavik Marine Region.”

Canada holds on to the Ottawa Islands, and strips of land on Akpatok Island, Digges Island and Killiniq Island. Nunavimmiut may still visit these islands for harvesting and all related activities.

“You just don’t own them,” says the NICLA ratification web site at http://www.nilca.ca.

Taylor and Gillies Islands, near Umiujaq, have been owned by Americans “for a long time,” and Makivik says during the NILCA negotiations it “not possible” to recover these islands.

Nunavik Inuit will receive a share in any resource royalties coming to government from development activities in the Nunavik Marine Region.

The NICLA doesn’t contain any extinguishment clause found in earlier land claims agrements. Instead, there’s a “non-assertion” condition.

“Non-assertion” means that Nunavik Inuit may exercise their treaty rights under the JBNQA, or any other aboriginal right, in the offshore area, as long as they don’t affect lands or natural resources.

But this can change.

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