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Editorial

May 3, 2002 - A little smoke, a couple of mirrors

May 10, 2002 - The next question: Who pays?

May 17, 2002 - Betty Windsor’s paving project

May 17, 2002 - Signs of improvement at the Ledge

May 24, 2002 - What could have been

May 31, 2002 - Ottawa’s back into housing — but not in Nunavut

May 3, 2002

A little smoke, a couple of mirrors

A little smoke, a couple of mirrors — that’s the way to sell a so-so budget to a hungry population.

Nunavut Finance Minister Kelvin Ng’s 2002-3 operating budget is not deceptive — strictly speaking. For those willing to take the time to pore through it, its strengths and weaknesses are all there to be found. But when the shine wears off, the show-piece items the government is using this week to dazzle the eyes of the public, its weaknesses will become easier for the public to find.

The brightest show-piece items are measures that will bring real benefits to wage-earners, especially middle-income workers who earn between $30,000 and $100,000 a year. This relatively small group contributes 70 per cent of the territory’s personal income tax revenue, even though they only make up about 30 per cent of all Nunavut taxpapers.

There’s no doubt that the government’s reduction in personal income tax rates will put real dollars into the hands of working people in Nunavut. Not only will this provide some modest relief from our punishing cost of living, it will make Nunavut a slightly more attractive place to live for skilled professionals and trades-people, which Ng says should help the government in its recruitment efforts. The higher personal tax credits may also help some lower-income people, reducing taxable income to a level where they will pay no tax. It may not be much, but it today’s conditions, every dollar counts.

The reductions in corporate income tax will do no harm either. Ng says that, together with lower personal tax rates, these measures will make Nunavut more competitive with other provinces and territories. The government hopes that this will encourage investment by providing businesses with an incentive to locate in Nunavut.

Perhaps Ng is right — it’s a strategy that has worked for business in other jurisdictions. But Ng must also know, surely, that businesses face many other disincentives in Nunavut: high fuel and power costs, rising transportation costs, severe shortages of affordable office space and staff housing, and a shortage of skilled labour.

Still, cutting income tax rates is a fairly easy thing for the Nunavut government to do. The lost revenue is minor concern — because it represents only a tiny proportion of Nunavut’s revenue.

The government’s total tax package is expected to cost the government only $6.7 million in lost cash. Compared with the $745.5 million that the government expects to receive in 2002-3, and the $681.8 million that Ottawa will contribute to that, it’s a pittance.

So the government is paying a rummage-sale price for a high-class piece of political goodwill, and they’re sure to exploit it now to help us forget the fat new pension plan that MLAs voted for themselves not so long ago. But they also deserve some moderate praise for using the tax system as a social and economic policy tool.

Another glittering bauble is the increased budget for the department of health and social services, which is now projected at $156.9 million for 2002-3, compared with the $123.4 million projected for 2001-2. But almost all of that increase merely reflects what it actually costs to run Nunavut’s health-care system — not what the cabinet would like it to cost. That perennially under-funded department actually spent $151.6 million last year.

The extra money for mental health services and alcohol and drug treatment are welcome, of course. But the systemic health-care problems in Nunavut that were recently revealed at the Romanow Commission’s recent hearing in Iqaluit are likely to plague us for some time to come.

Soon enough, Nunavummiut will notice the budget’s weaknesses. They’ll notice that the department of education’s budget has actually shrunk a little. It’s projected at $172 million, down from the $174 million projected last year.

The education department’s capital budget is almost $15 million lower than last year’s, and there’s no new money for curriculum development, the production of teaching resources, or student and teacher evaluation. In a year when Education Minister Peter Kilabuk and his officials will want public to support for their new Education Act, this won’t help their credibility. And their credibility with teachers will sink even lower than it is now.

The government is also making a lot of noise about the extra money going to the tiny culture, language, elders and youth department. The increase, somewhere between $1.5 million and $2 million, is small in real terms, and looks large only in comparison with its minuscule budget.

The Nunavut government got lucky this year, taking advantage of a surplus produced by last year’s one-time bump in federal transfers to produce a feel-good budget 18 months before the next election. Nunavut’s financial stability over the long term is still uncertain.

JB

TOP

May 10, 2002

The next question: Who pays?

At long last, the Nunavut government has acknowledged what snowmobile owners throughout Baffin and Kivalliq have known to be true for months: gasoline supplies throughout the two regions are below the Canadian standard, and they’ve wreaked havoc upon snowmobile, ATV and boat engines in at least 20 Nunavut communities.

Now for the next question: Who pays?

Regional wildlife boards, local hunters and trappers organizations, along with many individual hunters, trappers and snowmobile owners, seem to assume it’s the government of Nunavut who must compensate them for their losses.

Those losses include not only the direct cost of fixing ravaged engines. They also include the loss of income from fur sales and the replacement cost of country food that has not been harvested.

People in most communities have faithfully kept the receipts and invoices produced by the expensive engine repairs and part replacements they’ve been forced to pay for all winter.

MLAs are pestering government ministers with questions about when a compensation program will start. Inuit association leaders are going on the radio to urge the government to start handing out the money now.

This is natural. The Nunavut government, after all, is the sole wholesaler for bulk fuel in every community in Nunavut outside of Iqaluit. Those who bought the Nunavut government’s gasoline last winter have a right to be compensated. They spent good money on an inferior product that damaged their machines and sometimes exposed them to danger on the land. Their anger has a valid basis.

But those who think that the Nunavut government will cut compensation cheques any time soon had better think again — because the question of who’s at fault is still a long, long way from being answered.

Indeed, the government of Nunavut may not be legally liable at all. Was it the company contracted to purchase and ship the gasoline to Nunavut, the Inuit-owned Northern Transportation Company Ltd.? Was it an unscrupulous petroleum products vendor in either southern Canada or the United States who sold the substandard gasoline to NTCL? Was NTCL’s gasoline tested at a reputable laboratory before it was shipped? Did NTCL buy a cut-rate batch of gasoline simply to lower its costs and increase its profit margin?

Meanwhile, new revelations are emerging this week that may shed more light on the entire issue. The French-language television network TVA is reporting this week that vehicle owners throughout southern Quebec, and possibly other parts of Canada, are suffering engine problems involving the same gummy substance that has been fouling up snowmobile engines in Nunavut all winter. These irate motorists all say they bought their gasoline from Shell stations. Is this linked to Nunavut’s situation?

It appears as if Nunavut government officials are asking the same questions — as they should. Frustrating though it may be for Nunavut snowmobile owners, it would be irresponsible for the government to spend public money on compensation payments before it finds out who, exactly, screwed up.

Premier Paul Okalik and other Nunavut government officials have not committed themselves to a compensation program. In the legislative assembly, Okalik has been dealing with MLAs’ questions on the issue with opaque answers like, "We are examining our legal options."

That’s a sign, likely, that Nunavut government lawyers and other officials are poring over their contract with NTCL to determine whether the company fulfilled its contractual obligations. If they find any evidence to support the idea that NTCL should pay, it’s likely that they’ll try to use it.

Okalik, however, appears to be seeking an amicable, co-operative solution to the issue. As a lawyer, he is well aware that if the question ends up in court, it could be years before anyone sees a compensation cheque.

It would also be useful for him to remind Nunavut land claim beneficiaries that it’s their own company that supplied them with substandard gasoline. NTCL, of course, is owned by Norterra, the same 50-50 Inuit-Inuvialuit partnership that operates the Canadian North airline. Indirectly, but in a very real sense, NTCL sold that shoddy product to its own shareholders.

And don’t forget that the Nunavut government performed a big favour to NTCL recently. It extended by one year the period during which companies like NTCL will be deemed "Inuit-owned" under the Nunavummi Nangminiqaqtunik Ikajuuti, or NNI, policy. Under that policy, NTCL would not be considered "Inuit," because Nunavut Inuit own 50, not 51 per cent of the company.

It’s not clear why the Nunavut government caved in on that issue.

But this much is obvious. NTCL’s current fuel-supply contract expires this fall. When it responds to the Nunavut government’s request for proposals seeking a shipper and a supplier of fuel to Nunavut, the company will enjoy a competitive advantage that they would not otherwise have.

So it’s not surprising to hear Premier Okalik suggest that NTCL ought to shoulder the cost of the bad gas fiasco. At the end of the day, "Inuit ownership" ought to at least mean something.

JB

TOP

May 17, 2002

Betty Windsor’s paving project

Thanks to an aging English aristocrat by the name of Betty Windsor, the City of Iqaluit’s long-suffering citizens may yet cast their dust-reddened eyes upon an unfamiliar sight: paved roads.

Ms. Windsor, better known as Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, will touch down upon on Iqaluit this fall.

Out of concern for the well-being of her royal buttocks, that they may emerge unbruised from a risky motor-car expedition over the pot-holed trails of Iqaluit, some now suggest that the way before her should be smoothed, as it were.

Kidney specialists, dentists, and automotive parts suppliers will, of course, lament this development. But everyone else will celebrate it.

In Iqaluit, a walk around the Ring Road on a busy day can raise one’s blood pressure far more effectively than anything Evel Knievel ever tried. A simple drive to the grocery store and back can be like an extreme sports competition.

The people of Iqaluit know, of course, that their opinions on these issues don’t matter much to the powers that be. The city’s voters learned long ago to accept their irrelevance with sullen resignation.

Betty Windsor, on the other hand, does matter. When your face is printed on the twenty-dollar bill, people tend to pay attention to your every whim, even if you’re just another inbred aristocrat.

So we wish Betty Windor’s supporters well in their desire to spare her sovereign eyes from the sight of what we’re forced to look at every day.

Not only may this produce more paved road — this time around the city may actually hire a contractor who knows how to do the work. Long live Betty Windsor!

JB

TOP

May 17, 2002

Signs of improvement at the Ledge

Without a doubt, the sitting of the Nunavut legislative assembly that MLAs inflicted upon us between Feb. 20 and March 6 was an unmitigated embarrassment.

The session began with a series of attacks on battered women and the under-funded shelters set up to protect them, and ended with MLAs voting, not only for a $70,000 transition allowance for those who leave office, but for an obscenely enriched supplementary pension plan that will provide most of them with incomes for the rest of their lives.

For those who believe in the potential of the Nunavut legislative assembly, it was a disappointing time.

Fortunately, MLAs went a long way toward redeeming themselves this time around, in the sitting that opened April 24 and ended this week.

Many MLAs used members’ statements and questions to raise real public issues, rather than personal grudges and prejudices.

For example, Qutikktuq MLA Rebecca Williams asked numerous questions aimed at exposing weaknesses in the administration of the justice system, especially the lack of probation officers in many communities.

Uqqummiut MLA David Iqaqrialu asked questions about the lack of Inuktitut-speaking social workers, helping to expose the fact that Arctic College does not offer a social work training program anymore.

Baker Lake MLA Glenn McLean asked a set of serious questions about the income support system. Given the large number of Nunavut residents who get welfare for all or part of the year, it’s appalling that the issue receives virtually no public discussion. McLean obviously feels much compassion for the poor and the under-employed, and he deserves praise for attempting to raise the issue.

There are other examples that we could have mentioned, too. In this session, MLAs generally showed that when they focus their minds on the public interest, the public interest ends up being served.

Perhaps this is because better script-writers and consultants are now helping out behind the scenes. But isn’t it rather more encouraging to think that, after three years, Nunavut’s legislative assembly is finally maturing into respectability?

JB

TOP

May 24, 2002

What could have been

Goo Mosa Arlooktoo was a good and gentle man and he did not deserve to die at 38, an age when most men have not yet reached the best of their years.

Neither did he deserve the indignities he endured after losing the Feb. 15, 1999, election in Baffin South. Nor did he deserve the hypocritical outpouring of hollow sentiment that greeted his death, especially from those who not so long ago ranked among his worst tormentors.

Goo Arlooktoo possessed two outstanding personal qualities. One was his genius-level intelligence, which he applied assiduously to his work. The other was his sensitivity, which, perhaps, made him far too fragile for the knife-in-the-back, boot-in-the-groin world of northern politics. The coroner said a heart attack was the cause of his death. It may also be true to say that he suffered from a wounded soul, and that this may have hastened his passing.

At any rate, the story of how he got to where he was on the eve of his death says much about the distempers that have infected northern Canada’s political culture for the past two decades.

It was inevitable that Arlooktoo would want to hold elected office. His father served as an MLA in the 1980s, and as a young members’ assistant at the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife, Arlooktoo displayed rare abilities, especially serving the unilingual Inuit members of the Nunavut caucus.

So in the fall of 1995, when at 31 he was elected to represent Kimmirut, Cape Dorset and Sanikiluaq in the NWT legislature, many hoped that Arlooktoo would reach his full potential. Then, as now, Nunavut desperately lacked credible political leaders. Then, as now, politics often attracted the worst, not the best people in Nunavut.

But Arlooktoo never had time or space to safely mature as a politician. Due to a severe shortage of talent within the Nunavut caucus, the rookie MLA found himself in the cabinet, and ended up as minister of the department of public works.

His worst enemies could not have chosen a worse portfolio for him. During his time in that position, the public works department was rocked by scandal and controversy, most of which was not his doing, but for which he paid an enormous price, personally and politically.

When he took over DPW, it was already embroiled in several controversies, including an ill-fated plan to turn Rankin Inlet into a fuel distribution centre for the Keewatin, an issue that was related to a conflict-of-interest scandal involving the eastern Arctic fuel resupply contract. In a tour of the Keewatin in 1996, people in one community accused Arlooktoo of being a traitor to the Inuit. For a sensitive young man at the beginning of his political career, that must have hurt him deeply.

The worst blow, perhaps, was his association with the conflict-of-interest scandal that led to the resignation of former NWT Premier Don Morin just before division. The department of public works, at time when the GNWT had more office space than it needed, signed a lucrative lease for extra office space with a company owned by a man who was a close friend of the Premier and who had built the Premier’s house for him.

As deputy premier of the NWT, Arlooktoo was closely associated with Morin. Inevitably, the sleaze rubbed off, and he carried the stink with him into Nunavut’s first election, on Feb. 15, 1999.

During that campaign, Arlooktoo and his supporters spent a lot of money. They distributed leather hats with the words "Team Arlooktoo" printed on them. They bought expensive newspaper ads and distributed slick brochures.

Most of all, they assumed Arlooktoo would win Baffin South automatically, and they were already promoting him as Nunavut’s first premier. But he lost badly, probably because he spent too much time in Yellowknife, and because his home community, Kimmirut, has fewer voters than Cape Dorset.

After that crushing blow, it appears as if his life went into a downward spiral. Used to earning more than $100,000 a year as a cabinet minister, Arlooktoo eked out a living as a consultant and a contract employee. Early in his career he had admitted publicly, in the media, to having had a serious drinking problem and being in recovery. But those who know him say this old demon came back to haunt him in the time after his defeat. Others say he was badly depressed.

With his raw intelligence and his experience, Arlooktoo could have offered much to the Nunavut government, and to many other organizations. It must have been galling for him to see lesser people than he getting elected to high office or being handed senior jobs in government for which they were totally unqualified. Many of those are the same people who have been coming out of the woodwork lately to heap praise upon him now that he’s safely dead. But if they really thought so highly of him, why didn’t they offer him a job while he was still alive?

Such is the fate of defeated politicians in Nunavut. Out of office, they’re treated like used toilet paper — and it’s the most intelligent and articulate who seem to suffer the most. Goo Arlooktoo deserved better treatment. He could have been much, much more than he was — had he only been given a chance.

Requiescat in pace.

JB

TOP

May 31, 2002

Ottawa’s back into housing — but not in Nunavut

It was in 1993 that Ottawa finally stopped spending money on the construction of new social housing across Canada, including the northern territories.

From the perspective of the new Liberal government elected that year, it was a convenient move, for two reasons: it helped Finance Minister Paul Martin’s deficit-cutting efforts, and it won favour from provincial governments who objected to what they have long seen as unconstitutional federal incursions into areas of provincial responsibility.

From the perspective of the people of Nunavut, however, it was an unmitigated disaster.

Consider the effects on public health, for example:

• Since January of this year, at least 80 cases of respiratory synctial virus, or RSV, have been reported in Nunavut. There’s no vaccine or treatment for this disease, which causes severe breathing problems for infants and spreads rapidly among people living in overcrowded housing.

• Thanks to the research work of Dr. Anna Banarji of the B.C. Children’s Hospital, we know that Inuit children are admitted to hospital for serious lung infections at a staggering, frightening rate: 484 admissions for every 1,000 children.

• Tuberculosis, that classic disease of poverty, was thought to be eliminated just 10 years ago. But now, TB rates in Nunavut are 13 times the national average. We’ve seen serious outbreaks in Arviat, Iqaluit and several other communities. In the Baffin region alone, seven per cent of children have tested positive for the TB bacillus.

It is no exaggeration then, to say that when federal officials stopped building social housing in Nunavut, they imposed death sentences on innocent Nunavut children who were yet to be born, and condemned many more to lives of ill-health and permanent incapacity.

And then there’s the effect on the Nunavut government’s operations. During that farcical period between April 1997 and April 1999, when the Office of the Interim Commissioner was "planning" for the creation of Nunavut, they assumed that at least 50 per cent of new government employees could be housed within Nunavut’s existing housing supply, much of which consists of social housing.

The obvious fact that Nunavut’s social housing stock was, and is, desperately overcrowded, never seemed to influence their thinking. The result is, as a recent report on decentralization pointed out, that the Nunavut government’s decentralization efforts have been seriously compromised, and its staffing efforts in Iqaluit have ground to a standstill.

Why are we reminding you of all this? Because Ottawa is returning to the social housing game in a big way — but not in Nunavut.

The Toronto Star reported on May 23 that the federal government will spend $245 million as part of a federal-provincial scheme to build 10,000 new affordable housing units in Ontario — 3,000 of them in Toronto. The provincial government and other partners will contribute an equal amount, to bring total spending on new social, or affordable, housing up to a whopping $490 million.

The money will likely go to municipal corporations, which are now responsible for social housing in Ontario, as well as housing co-operatives and private builders.

The people of Ontario, especially the thousands of homeless who every night pile into overcrowded shelters in Toronto, need the affordable housing that this money will help build. Due to a long list of factors, including a severe shortage of units, rents there are about as high as they are in Iqaluit.

But it still demonstrates that Ottawa’s approach to social housing does next to nothing for Nunavut. It’s worth noting that the Ontario funding announcement was made by a Liberal member of parliament, in a manner calculated to extract maximum political benefit for the Liberal party in vote-rich Ontario.

It’s no mystery that Ottawa ignores Nunavut. The Liberal Party of Canada doesn’t need us to win re-election.

JB

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