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Editorial

April 5, 2002 - Between now and the next election

April 12, 2002 - A good decision by NTI

April 19, 2002 - Bad gas, bad facts?

April 26, 2002 - Lawsuit anyone?

April 5, 2002

Between now and the next election

If the legislative assembly observes convention, the most likely date for Nunavut’s next territorial election will be the fall of 2003, four and half years after our first election in February, 1999.

That date is not official. But if the assembly chooses to do so, it means that, practically speaking, members of Nunavut’s first elected government have about a year in which to accomplish something substantive.

That’s not a lot of time. So this week we thought we’d have some fun by looking at Nunavut’s cabinet members — focusing on the quality of their performances so far, and their political prospects up to and beyond the next territorial election.

Paul Okalik:

Just when it seemed as if the federal government had run out of ways to screw Nunavut, they’ve come up with another one — handing Nunavut’s commercial fishing rights to the Makivik Corporation as a kind of signing bonus for the settlement of Nunavik’s offshore claim.

Okalik’s reaction to this outrage demonstrates that he’s grown and matured within his job— unlike some of his colleagues. When defending Nunavut’s interests, Okalik now shows real fire in his belly, a quality that ought to help get him re-confirmed as premier in the next assembly. When you consider that he never really wanted to become Nunavut’s government leader until after the Feb. 15, 1999 election, when he benefitted from an anybody-but-Anawak movement, this is impressive.

Because of the nature of the consensus system, where cabinet ministers are chosen by the assembly and not the premier, Okalik’s ability to control other ministers is severely limited. Imposing vision and direction on the government will continue to be a challenge for him.

But given his wise decision to vote against the ill-timed MLA pension bill last month, Okalik will be an unassailable candidate should he decide to contest the Iqaluit West seat again in the next election. Who knows? He may even turn out be a two-term premier.

Olayuk Akesuk

Now that he has a competent new deputy minister (Alex Campbell, who replaced Katherine Trumper), and a new assistant deputy minister (Rosemary Keenainak, who replaced Peter Ittinuar), Akesuk has a chance to redeem his department’s tattered reputation.

But he’d better act soon, because the pressure is on. His Sustainable Development department is expected to not only produce a draft Wildlife Act by the fall, but also a credible consultation process that’s good enough to satisfy Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. and Nunavut’s hunters’ organizations.

His department is also the lead territorial agency responsible for working out the disposition of the Nanisivik mine’s assets. Within a few months, they’ll have to produce an agreement on an alternative use for the site, and they had better pray that the cash-strapped Breakwater Resources firm stays afloat long enough to pay its share of the clean-up costs.

On some other issues, Sustainable Development is still a black hole where creative ideas disappear forever, never to be heard again. After nearly two years, they’ve done nothing to support the development of a film industry in Nunavut, despite having been given specific proposals on how to do it. And the department is still sitting on its broadband task force report, which should have been released many months ago. Akesuk and his new senior officials will have their work cut out for them.

As for his re-election chances in South Baffin, Akesuk ought to win again next year, but you never know — in small communities, vote splits can produce bizarre election results.

Peter Kilabuk

To be a politically successful education minister in northern Canada, you have to learn how to defend the indefensible.

But Kilabuk just isn’t very good at it. His method of justifying the school system’s sorry record is to trot out meaningless graduation statistics and then to brazen his way towards total avoidance of all other issues: overcrowded classrooms, the absence of Inuktitut curricula, deteriorating school buildings, inadequate student financial assistance, and, well — you get the picture.

Now he has the job of moving the newly tabled Education Act through the assembly. But even after two years, no one in his department seems able to say what’s in it, or why it has to be amended. The new act will contain a lot of brave new words about Inuktitut education — but Kilabuk shows no sign of being able to find the money or the administrative know-how needed to make them real.

It’s likely that the department’s other responsibilities, daycare and income support, will continue to suffer, but that won’t cause any political problems for Kilabuk. In this legislative assembly, there’s little compassion for working families and the poor.

Ed Picco

When Premier Okalik gave Picco the health and social services portfolio in 1999, he may as well have hung a "kick me" sign around Picco’s neck.

He inherited three dysfunctional health boards, several years worth of accumulated deficits, a shaky plan for the privatized construction and lease-back of three new health facilities, and staff shortages everywhere, especially in nursing.

So far, Picco’s managed to tough it out. But over the coming months, officials in his department, together with their counterparts in Public Works and Finance, will have to figure out how to pay for three new health facilities in a way that won’t cripple the health system’s finances for an entire generation. He’ll also face more pressure to improve mental health services in Nunavut.

The appointment of the well-respected Abraham Tagalik as assistant deputy minister of Health and Social Services will help Picco stave off criticisms that there aren’t enough Inuit running his department. And the little man from Portugal Cove is still popular with his constituents. Should he run again, he’s a likely shoo-in for Iqaluit East.

Peter Kattuk

Some people say that the key to success in northern territorial politics is to do and say as little as possible. If so, Kattuk is destined for a long and remunerative career.

It’s difficult to hold Kattuk responsible for the problems with the CLEY department that preceded his move to Public Works. But the quiet man from Sanikiluaq is likely to face some tough questions soon over Nunavut’s sub-standard gasoline supplies, especially on whether the government intends to compensate disgruntled snowmobile owners.

As for his re-election chances, a cabinet minister from a small community always puts himself at risk when he or she spends too much time in the territorial capital. If a long list of candidates emerge to contest Kattuk’s Hudson Bay seat in the next election, anything can happen.

Manitok Thompson

Thompson is probably one of the more competent ministers in the Nunavut government.

But her overbearing arrogance and defensiveness may yet turn out to be a fatal flaw, especially in her new job as minister of Community Government and Transportation. Thompson also has a history of being unpopular with the employees of whatever department she’s in charge of — not a good trait if you rely on the same people to get things done.

That department’s well-known former deputy minister, the well-respected Mike Ferris, is being replaced by somebody called John Walsh, who has served as a deputy minister in the British Columbia and Yukon governments. Thompson will need all the help she can get to deal with Nunavut’s disgruntled mayors and hamlet officials. Every community in Nunavut is struggling with mounting infrastructure problems, and many municipal officials feel that territorial government officials haven’t been aggressive enough in lobbying Ottawa for more money.

That’s one reason why the Nunavut Association of Municipalities is holding its next general meeting in Ottawa. Not only is it cheaper — the NAM also believes they can lobby Ottawa officials more effectively than Nunavut’s cabinet ministers.

As for her re-election chances, Thompson could be vulnerable in Rankin Inlet South. In 1999, she beat Levinia Brown by only 13 votes, with Harry Towtongie finishing a close third.

Jack Anawak

The Nunavut cabinet’s human pinball, Jack Anawak has bounced from the departments of Justice and Community Government to the department with the grandest title and the smallest budget: Culture, Languages, Elders and Youth.

At $6.3 million in 2001-2002, the CLEY department’s budget is the smallest of all territorial government departments. But Anawak will likely get a few more dollars to play with after the government’s 2002-3 O&M budget is tabled later this month.

Like Thompson, Anawak could be vulnerable in the next election. In 1999, he beat the late Louis Pilakapsi by only 13 votes, with Lorne Kusugak finishing a close third.

Kelvin Ng

Cambridge Bay’s rumour mill has it that Ng will not run again in the next election, and will settle permanently in Yellowknife to resume his business career. Since growing numbers of his consituents are getting restive about an MLA who appears to spend more time outside of Nunavut, in Yellowknife, than in Cambridge Bay, this is good timing from his point of view.

That means until the next election Ng will likely do what he does best — play a defensive game by avoiding controversy and keeping a low profile. On those rare occasions in the House when some MLA manages to ask him a tough question, Ng usually defends himself by just fogging up the room with carefully-worded verbosity.

But he should count himself lucky. Ng has presided over one of the Nunavut government’s greatest fiascos — its staff housing shortage. It may take years for the GN to dig itself out of that particular hole. Until then, get used to an understaffed government run by a small army of short-term contract consultants from the South, and an over-worked, over-stressed permanent northern work-force.

JB

TOP

April 12, 2002

Betrayal by negligence

"Failure to adequately monitor and maintain the quality of education in the Arctic is, in my view, an act of negligence that has contributed more than any other single factor to the establishment of "structural racism." At the present time, parents blame teachers, and teachers blame parents, for educational failure. But testing identifies the good and the poor among students, among households and parents, among classes and teachers, among schools and principals, and among communities and regions. When testing is done, the failures can be corrected with knowledge gained from the successes."

—Colin Irwin: Lords of the Arctic: Wards of the State, published in 1989 by the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee

Sound familiar?

Colin Irwin, a sociologist and former Kivalliq resident, wrote those words 13 years ago, in a research paper produced for the federal government that was re-published and widely circulated by the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee.

His essay, Lords of the Arctic: Wards of the State, was ignored by those who ran the territorial school system at that time. Then, as now, no one wanted to hear ugly truths like this:

"Many white families with children of senior elementary and high school age try to transfer to Yellowknife, if they work for the GNWT, or move south, so that their children’s education will not suffer during these critical years. As a consequence, the children of white parents often receive a much better education than their Inuit counterparts and are, therefore, able to successfully complete a program of higher education in southern Canada."

Or this:

"If current trends continue, most of the Inuit living in the Arctic in the year 2025 will be second-generation wards of the state, whose society, economy, and culture may have more in common with an urban slum than with the life their grandparents knew."

But government officials at all levels, including the Nunavut government’s education department, have thus far provided us with no reason to believe that Nunavut’s future will differ much from Irwin’s dystopian vision. Judged by its actions, as opposed to its mendacious rhetoric, it’s Irwin’s Nunavut that the Nunavut government appears content to strive for, not the Disneyland world of the Bathurst Mandate.

Last week, Nunavut residents received more support for this view — the results of the latest in a series of national academic skill tests that the Council of Ministers of Education have been conducting since 1993.

The test’s designers created five levels of difficulty. Of those, "Level 2" was set as the desired target for 13-year-olds, and "Level 3" the desired target for 16-year-olds.

Even when you take into account that for many Nunavut students, English is a second language, the results are disgraceful. Only 8 per cent of Nunavut’s 13-year-olds met or exceeded the Level 2 target, compared with 64.4 per cent for the rest of Canada, in the content section of the test.

In the problem-solving section of the test, where weak English comprehension would be expected to pose a greater barrier for Nunavut students, only 2.3 per cent of Nunavut’s 13-year-olds met or exceeded Level 2. That’s compared to 67.6 per cent of 13-year-olds across Canada.

In other words, only two of every 100 13-year-olds in Nunavut are able to do what two-thirds of their counterparts in Canada are able to do. The results for Nunavut’s 16-year-olds are slightly better, but not by a significant margin.

These are tomorrow’s voting citizens and job-seekers. This is the generation from which the Nunavut government hopes to hire 80 per cent of its civil servants by 2020. The reality, however is that many, perhaps most, won’t even understand the simple numbers and comparisons used in this editorial.

Don’t blame the children however. Blame the system, and the self-serving hacks and mediocrities who have created and sustained it.

Those who run Nunavut’s school system will hasten to mention that their government is only three years old, and that it’s therefore unfair to measure its performance against education departments in affluent provinces such as Ontario and Alberta. Although there’s a grain of truth in this argument, it’s still a weak excuse.

Nunavut’s education department is not a new creation. It is part of a continuum. That continuum began in the late 1960s with the devolution of Arctic education from the federal government to the government of the Northwest Territories.

Nunavut’s department of education is staffed by many of the same people who ran the NWT’s school system in the Nunavut regions before 1999, whether they worked for the now-defunct divisional boards, or for the department itself. It employs many of the same teachers, principals, and administrators. It uses most of the policies and practices that existed before 1999, and until it’s amended or replaced, the same Education Act.

Most of all, it’s inspired by the same relentless avoidance of accountability.

As Irwin pointed out 13 years ago, accountability in education can be achieved only through regular testing and evaluation. Test results, as he said, can show us what works and what doesn’t. It’s an essential tool for teachers and administrators. It’s also an essential tool for students, because it provides an honest basis for the building of confidence and genuine self-worth.

Above all, it’s an essential tool for citizens, without which they cannot hold the education bureaucracy to account. That’s why the national tests run through the Student Assessment Indicator Program, or SAIP, are essential tools, despite their imperfections.

The first time around, no one could reasonably expect Nunavut students to perform as well as students in southern Canada. But the performance gap between Nunavut and the rest of Canada is so enormous, it cannot possibly be explained away by arguments that appeal to language and culture.

The children of Nunavut are the intellectual equals of children anywhere else in Canada. It demeans them to suggest that administrators, teachers and suspect educational policies are not to blame.

The people of Nunavut need better tools for holding the education bureaucracy to account for its work. That means Nunavut’s educators must not only do their own testing and evaluation of schools, teachers, and students, they must also be willing to report the results to the public honestly. Honesty may be a stretch for many GN bureaucrats. But the public must demand it in order to get the information needed to hold the department accountable.

There is a generation of trusting children passing through the Nunavut school system right now. The SAIP test shows that most will never get a chance to become accountants, auditors, computer programmers, economists or scientists. Most won’t even learn the math skills needed to pass a trades entrance exam.

Besides evaluating itself, the department must immediately work on finding ways to teach mathematics in Inuktitut, and take a hard look at all its teaching practices, including the dubious policy of not allowing Inuit students to study extensively in English until Grades 4 or 5.

Too many innocent people in Nunavut have already been betrayed by the negligence of unaccountable educators. It would be morally reprehensible for the department to allow this to continue.

JB

TOP

April 19, 2002

GNWT shows Nunavut how to do it

Few Nunavut residents know about it. But this week, three Northwest Territories cabinet ministers are providing their counterparts in Nunavut with a lesson in how to serve the people they represent.

Stephen Kakfwi, the NWT’s premier, Joe Handley, the NWT’s minister of Finance, and Jim Antoine, the NWT’s minister of Renewable Resources and Economic Development, visited Ottawa this week for what they described as a "concentrated three-day lobby for infrastructure funding."

On Tuesday, the second day of their tour, they met with Paul Martin, the federal minister of Finance, while Antoine spoke to the House of Commons standing committee on aboriginal affairs. On other days, they met with other ministers and federal public officials.

Although the NWT has a stronger economy than Nunavut, its government has been stung by the same short-sighted federal policies that have crippled Nunavut over the past three years. They, too, need more money for basic infrastructure and basic public services. They, too, are tired of coping with federal transfer programs that distribute Ottawa’s money solely on a per capita basis, without taking into account the enormous costs created by northern Canada’s climate and geography.

So they did what the people of the Northwest Territories would expect them to do. They went to Ottawa to conduct an organized, assertive lobby.

Has the Nunavut cabinet done the same? Some key ministers, on some occasions, have conveyed the right messages to Ottawa. Others have not. But overall, the Nunavut government’s stance towards the federal government appears to be unfocused and poorly coordinated.

The premier, Paul Okalik, along with the other two territorial premiers, has clearly and forcefully explained the weaknesses of per capita infrastructure funding at various federal-provincial gatherings over the past two and a half years. Ed Picco, the health minister, has at times made the same kinds of arguments with respect to health care financing.

On the other hand, Kelvin Ng, the finance minister, appears reluctant to say anything that might be offensive to Ottawa. Manitok Thompson and Jack Anawak, the two ministers who, one after the other, have been responsible for the department most directly concerned with infrastructure, Community Government and Transportation, seem quite content with the status quo.

Indeed, Anawak, just a few months after being taken out of the Community Government portfolio, was responsible last month for uttering one of the most embarassing idiocies we’ve heard so far within the Nunavut legislative assembly.

In a childish rant against the Nunavut Association of Municipalities, Anawak slammed the organization for deciding to hold its annual general meeting at the end of this month in Ottawa, rather than Cambridge Bay. Anawak’s outburst was inspired by NAM’s opposition to the fat new supplementary pension plan and transition allowance that MLAs voted for themselves after many months of secret discussions.

But while they’re in Ottawa, the NAM will do what Anawak failed to do when he was the minister responsible for Nunavut’s cash-starved municipalities — they will lobby the federal government on the infrastructure issue. They plan to address the House of Commons standing committee on finance. Labour Minister Claudette Bradshaw, Public Works Minister Don Boudrias and DIAND Minister Bob Nault are all expected to attend.

And guess what? Nunavut’s current community government minister, Manitok Thompson, is scheduled to attend as well.

But Nunavut’s cabinet ministers should still be embarrassed. Given the large number of prominent Liberals in the Nunavut government, it’s astounding that so few of them have used their connections with the governing party for the betterment of Nunavut.

JB

TOP

April 26, 2002

Comic relief

A Sámi language researcher living in Norway came up with a brilliant suggestion recently. He said that Donald Duck comic books ought to be translated into the Sámi language, as they once were in the 1980s.

We hope that Nils Øyvind Helander, a Sámi language researcher, succeeds in putting the noble comic book back into the hands of Sámi-speaking children — and their parents.

"The simple texts are the first door to the world of the written word," journalist Aslak Mikal Mienna of Norway’s Sámi radio network said in support of Helander’s idea, on the grounds that Donald Duck would be more useful for people to read than government documents.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. We hope that someone, preferably someone with talent and some access to grant money, does the same thing in Inuktitut.

Why not? Some of the brightest people in Nunavut are interpreter-translators. But many are obliged to waste their God-given brilliance on the translation of garbage written in English into garbage written in Inuktitut. To get a taste of what we mean by this, view any issue of the Nunavut Hansard or a copy of the Bathurst Mandate.

Wouldn’t it be more socially useful, though, to have Nunavut’s talented language workers expend at least part of their energies on producing stuff that people actually want to read? Besides, you’re likely to find more wisdom and common sense within the pages of a single comic book than in a hundred government reports.

Comic books, comic strips and animated cartoons may use the techniques of modern technology and mass reproduction, but they perform an ancient function: the telling of mythical tales. They give modern people a chance to revel in the kinds of stories their distant ancestors once told each other while sitting around the fire at night — stories where animals talk to each other like human beings and magic happens.

Kids understand this instinctively — adults too.

Surely, the narrative content of Inuit legend could be fitted easily into media like the comic book and the animated cartoon. Some creative people in Nunavut have already recognized this.

For example, Igloolik Isuma Productions is looking into the production of plastic action-figure toys based on characters in Atanarjuat, an idea borrowed from the comic book industry. Alootook Ipellie, the Iqaluit artist and writer who now lives in Ottawa, was heavily influenced by comic books he read as a child, and created some comic-strip characters of his own, such as "Nuna" and "Vut." Yet another example was the famous "Super Shamou," who many of us remember fondly as the Inuit Superman created by the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation in the 1980s.

So should Donald Duck be translated into Inuktitut? You bet. So should Spiderman, Wonder Woman and Batman.

As well, the rich world of Inuit legend contains enough material to create an entire library’s worth of comic books — an ideal resource for all those educators who are wringing their hands over the lack of Inuktitut teaching materials.

JB

TOP

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