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October 27, 2006

Iqaluit should have only one DEA

After a one-week extension of the nomination period for Iqaluit’s Oct. 16 elections, the Iqaluit District Education Authority just managed last month to scrape up enough candidates to fill seven vacant seats, via acclamation.

None are able to claim the political legitimacy that an election could have conferred. This is not their fault, of course, but it’s not a healthy situation for a body now lobbying for more power and responsibility.

As for the Apex District Education Authority, the response was even worse.

After a one-week extension, only one person was nominated. The Local Authorities Elections Act states that this person must appoint the other six members. That’s an absurd job to dump on anyone’s shoulders.

It’s all taking place within a surreal structure that demands Iqaluit be served by two volunteer school committees: a seven-person Apex body that deals with one small two-teacher school, and a seven-person Iqaluit body that deals with two elementary schools, a middle school and a high school.

The irony of all this is that if all of Iqaluit were served by only one seven-person school committee, eight candidates would have been available this year, enough to trigger an election and create a semblance of democracy.

The solution to this mess is simple: dissolve the Apex DEA and make the Iqaluit DEA responsible for the whole community.

In its early years, Apex did possess a distinct identity. Those days are gone. Apex is now an integral part of Iqaluit: a neighbourhood, not a community. It now contains the same mixture of Inuktitut, English and French speaking residents that you’ll find in every other Iqaluit neighbourhood. And the needs of Apex school children are no different than the needs of school children in the rest of Iqaluit; when they get older they attend a common middle school and high school.

There is no reason, therefore, to justify the continued existence of a separate Apex school body, especially a body that no one wants to serve on. JB

October 27, 2006

The food mail farce

The challenge that Canadian North airlines mounted recently against Ottawa’s latest food mail air transport contract sheds new light on one of Indian and Northern Affairs’s most absurd northern programs: food mail.

The program’s stated goal is necessary and laudable: to supply northern communities with fresh, nutritious food at prices close to those in the South, using subsidized postal rates.

Calling it “mail,” by the way, is a bureaucratic fiction. It’s an air cargo subsidy program. Under it, food is handled, shipped and stored by airlines, not by Canada Post.

It’s also a dysfunctional mess. That’s because you can’t ship food mail directly by air from places where wholesale food costs are actually low, such as Ottawa, Montreal or Winnipeg. Instead, Ottawa demands that you ship it from ridiculous places such as Val d’Or and Churchill.

For example, if you do buy cheap food from Montreal, you have to ship it along a seven-hour truck route to Val d’Or before you can use the low food mail rate. The most likely explanation is political patronage: Ottawa’s desire to subsidize the ailing economies of Val d’Or and Churchill. The greatest benefits appear to flow towards a handful of business people who operate wholesale businesses in those places, not to northern consumers.

If Canadian North’s recent allegations are accurate, Ottawa may also be using food mail to subsidize inefficient airline monopolies, such as that enjoyed by First Air in northern Quebec and many routes in Nunavut.

Ninety per cent of food shipped under the program goes to eastern Nunavut and Nunavik. If it were made to work well, it could become a vital tool for combating our unbearable cost of living.

So INAC should do more than simply “review” its food mail program. They should burn it down and start all over again. They should dump Canada Post and transform it into an air cargo subsidy program, which is what it really is, and allow us to ship nutritious food from the lowest-cost places, using airlines that actually compete for the business. JB

October 13, 2006

We are learning

“We are just learning how to go to school, stay in school and why we need to be educated.”

Ann Meekitjuk Hanson, C.M.
Commissioner of Nunavut
Special to Nunatsiaq News

It is very encouraging to hear more and more Inuit talking about classroom instruction education. We are learning how to encourage our young people to stay in school, after all, classroom instruction is very new to us.

The first school in all of Baffin Island was built in 1955 in Apex. After that, more schools were built in other communities in the eastern Arctic. Some Baffin communities didn’t have their schools built until as late as the 1960s.

When I started school at 11 years of age in 1957, I had to learn how to go to school. No one in my age group from Kimmirut spoke any English. When we started school, Iqaluit kids had already been in school since 1955, so they knew some English by then. They were our interpreters.

Learning to go to school was a big responsibility and very exciting. It was the first time we paid attention to time. Since we lived in the Iqaluit village, in tents and huts, we walked or ran to Apex each morning, then walked back in the dark during winter. It was often a little scary, since wolves were roaming around. We always had to walk in groups and were lectured each day never to walk alone.

Our guardians, parents, grandparents, relatives and the whole village had to get used to not having children and young people around. It must have been a very empty village for several hours a day. The people no longer had anyone to help them with babies, toddlers, the elderly or the very sick. This was one of the major changes in our Inuit way of life.

We had no one to encourage us to stay in school because our people had never been to classroom learning. We were the first generation to be taught by a teacher who was teaching a room full of people, big and small. We were used to being taught on a one-on-one basis by a parent, aunts, uncles, elders or anyone who wanted to pass on knowledge.

Our children, the second generation to go to school, fared a lot better because they started early and by this time, Bob, my husband, and I were able to encourage them, praise them, help them and tell them how important their education was, not only important, but essential in order to survive.

Our grandchildren, the third generation to go to school will know even more about why education is important because their parents are able to tell them from experience, trial and error. The children today will want to stay in school because they have many role models right here in the North. They also have many groups, individuals, governments and media telling them we need educated people.

Yes, we do have many people who do not stay in school. This is because of many reasons, one of them being that classroom instruction is only three generations old in this region. We are just learning how to go to school, stay in school and why we need to be educated.

In my generation, we stopped going to school because tradition ruled us. When nature indicated we were ready for bearing children, we were forced to get married. Also, many women in our generation stopped going to school because we had to help with chores. The young men had to learn to hunt in all seasons and help their fathers and grandfathers. Many of us felt we were too old to stay in school, since we started school at 11 or 12 years of age.

When people talk about how shocking it is that we have a high dropout rate, I think about all the successes we have had in three generations! We have teachers, nurses, lawyers, office administrators, counselors, politicians, entrepreneurs, journeymen, journalists, writers and all the other positions that require education.

I wonder sometimes too, when formal education was new to the Caucasians, they probably had a high dropout rate for three generations or so. They probably had to help with farming and fishing too.

I am absolutely delighted when I hear people talking about education, all education. We have many sources today, so much more information, financial help for secondary education, parents encouraging, the work force demanding more educated people, culturally relevant courses being created and so many community groups and individuals praising and celebrating those who graduate. I also applaud and praise those who go back to school at later age!

Each school year is a very exciting time. It is a time of having goals, hope, vision, optimism and all the other good things that come with a plan.

Yes, I am learning that education is vitally important, a need and a must.

I wish everyone well and thank you for caring.

October 6, 2006

GN must save Qimaavik

It’s not surprising that the Agvvik Society’s Qimaavik shelter for battered woman is now teetering on the edge of oblivion.

From the very beginning, its mission was never popular. For most of its existence, the Qimaavik shelter faced, and still faces, opposition and indifference from the community, from territorial governments, and from many elected leaders. Given the large numbers of wife-beaters, drunks and substance abusers who have held positions of authority in Nunavut over the past many years, this too, is unremarkable.

By coincidence, the Agvvik Society announced its plans to close the shelter on the very day that Statistics Canada released a new set of numbers on violence against women in Canada, including Nunavut.

For Nunavut, what those numbers reveal is old news. But given the suffocating blanket of denial that stifles public debate in Nunavut, they’re worth repeating:

• Nunavut women are 10 times more likely to go to a shelter than women in the rest of Canada;
• the rate of spousal homicide in Nunavut is seven times higher than the rest of Canada;
• the rate of sexual offences in Nunavut is at least 10 times higher than the rest of Canada;
• Nunavut women are more likely to suffer potentially life-threatening forms of violence;
• the amount of domestic violence in Nunavut is at least twice as high as the rest of Canada.

This sort of information is common knowledge. The recent Statistics Canada report merely re-assembles numbers that have existed in the public domain since before Nunavut was even created.

It’s information that Government of Nunavut officials also know, or ought to know.

And the logical message contained within that information is this: the Qimaavik women’s shelter is a vital public service whose continued existence is a life-and-death matter. Unlike some government programs, it is not a frill. If the service disappears, more people, mostly women, will suffer from family violence and some of them will die.

So why did the Government of Nunavut, especially its Department of Health and Social Services, allow Qimaavik to decline to the point where it has no choice but to close?

The Agvvik Society’s three remaining board members all say the Qimaavik Shelter has been so badly underfunded that it’s produced annual deficits for years. Their annual grant from the GN, its main source of revenue, is about $600,000. But the shelter needs close to a million dollars a year to operate.

With a gap that wide between revenue and expenditures, it’s a miracle the service lasted as long as it did. A business facing that kind of situation would have declared bankruptcy long ago.

For the GN, this is an appalling, inexcusable screw-up. Their officials have known, or ought to have known, that their $600,000 annual contribution is not nearly enough. Their officials, from the health minister on down, have a lot of explaining to do.

The Qimaavik shelter, once known as “Nutaraq’s Place,” has provided a life-saving service to the Baffin region since 1986. Throughout all those years, its board and its underpaid workers faced widespread denial, ignorance and lukewarm community support. But their work has protected hundreds of women and children from violence, misery, and in some cases, untimely death.

The GN, therefore, must find a way to save the Qimaavik shelter and provide for its long-term survival. This crisis represents the kind of test that the GN must pass if it is to be taken seriously as a legitimate government. JB

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