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Editorial

December 6, 2002 - Nunavut human rights law a welcome step
December 13, 2002 - Does Nunavut need a child’s rights advocate?
December 20, 2002 - GN must watch Iqaluit like a hawk
December 20, 2002 - The GN takes a stand

December 6, 2002

What makes Rankin so special?

Since the creation of Nunavut on April 1, 1999, the decentralization of Nunavut government jobs has disrupted the lives of hundreds of territorial government workers and their families.

The government always knew this would happen. They knew that many government workers, especially those with well-established roots in Iqaluit, would resist the idea of moving to one of the 10 smaller communities. Furthermore, they were aware that decentralization could cost a lot of money.

But they also knew that decentralization would bring badly needed economic benefits to those communities, and that to abandon the idea would be seen as a massive betrayal by virtually everyone outside of Iqaluit.

So the Nunavut cabinet made a political decision. They weighed the costs of decentralization, including the human cost, against its benefits. And they decided that, at the end of the day, decentralization is worth doing.

Was this decision in the public interest? That’s a legitimate subject of dispute, and there are valid positions on both sides. A recent GN report on decentralization, for example, shows that the initiative has produced mixed results. It has worked well in some places, but not in others. Morale among people working in some decentralized sites is low, and they suffer from serious communication problems with their head offices in Iqaluit.

At the same time though, many community residents, especially Inuit, now have jobs they might not otherwise have had a chance to get. That’s an indisputable benefit.

Now, as a result of the most recent decentralization initiative to come forward, one group of territorial government workers has stepped forward to ask that they be treated differently than all the other hundreds of territorial government employees who have been affected by decentralization over the past three years.

The 16 employees of the petroleum products division in Rankin Inlet have circulated a petition saying they don’t want to move to Baker Lake under a proposed restructuring scheme that would shift their jobs into a new energy corporation.

Rankin Inlet’s two MLAs, both cabinet ministers, have been fighting this move inside cabinet. It’s hard to blame them for doing this. The consensus system encourages all members to put local concerns above the interests of the whole territory, and they both won their seats by razor-thin margins in the last election. So if Manitok Thompson and Jack Anawak don’t oppose the Rankin-to-Baker move of PPD jobs, their political careers will come to an abrupt end after next fall’s election.

On the other hand, Premier Paul Okalik, the minister responsible for decentralization, said in an interview last week that this move is in the best interests of Nunavummiut, and that his goal is to move the PPD office to Baker Lake.

Okalik has no choice but to take this position. This is not the first time that groups of employees have resisted decentralization, and this is not the first time that the government has pressed ahead anyway.

Last year, several employees of the department of sustainable development resisted a plan to move their unit to Igloolik. One wrote an angry, bitter letter to Nunatsiaq News. And a report on decentralization prepared for the Nunavut government even recommended that the move of DSD jobs to Igloolik be cancelled.

But Okalik and his decentralization team forged ahead with the Iqaluit-Igloolik move anyway, as they have with so many others.

Given that context, why should 16 employees in Rankin Inlet be treated differently than hundreds of other territorial workers?

Yes, many of those 16 PPD workers are homeowners, well-established in a community they love. But many dozens of well-established Iqaluit homeowners, who also lived in a community that they loved, have been forced to confront the same dilemma: move or quit your job.

The 16 PPD workers from Rankin, and their supporters, have provided no evidence as to why they should be treated differently than any of the other group of territorial workers who have already been affected by decentralization.

If their PPD transfer to Baker Lake makes economic and administrative sense, then the government of Nunavut should make it so.

JB

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December 13, 2002

A bad time to be Liberal

After the auditor general of Canada revealed last week that our Liberal government in Ottawa may have spent as much as a billion dollars on a national gun registry that’s still incomplete, everyone in Nunavut who voted Liberal, or who in any way associated themselves with the Liberal party in the last election, must now be hanging their heads in abject shame.

As James Eetoolook, the first vice president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., says in a letter published in these pages, the true cost of the Liberal’s ill-conceived gun licencing and registration system extends far beyond the hundreds of millions that the government wasted on it.

Consider its corrosive effect on the Inuit hunting culture. While we now know that Inuit owners of unlicenced weapons are temporarily exempt from prosecution, the Liberal government’s new gun regulations are still preventing many Inuit from harvesting country food. That’s because they don’t have the piece of paper that permits them to buy ammunition.

Numbers released by Statistics Canada this week show that Nunavut households spend an average of 23 per cent of their household budget on food, compared with a national average of only 11 per cent.

Against this background the federal government’s gun licencing system is literally taking food out of the mouths of Nunavummiut, food that many cannot afford to replace by going to the nearest store.

Some provisions contained in Ottawa’s 1995 gun legislation are useful, to a degree, such as minimum prison sentences for those convicted of using firearms to commit crimes, and tighter safety regulations.

But the worst parts of the new system — the gun registry and the heavy-handed licencing system that accompanies it — cannot even be excused as good intentions gone wrong. The Liberal gun law was not well-intentioned. It was a cynical, poll-driven exercise aimed at winning votes from naive urban Canadians who, because they are not gun-owners, will never experience the system’s absurdities.

The legislation that gave effect to Ottawa’s billion dollar gun registry was influenced by the wave of emotion that arose after a deranged gun-man murdered 14 women at l’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.

But the law that the Liberals created was not a response to those emotions. It was a manipulation of them. There is no evidence that Ottawa’s new gun registration system has prevented any crime or saved any lives, including the lives of women killed by men.

We’re sure that Nunavummiut could easily find a long list of areas where the federal government could have better spent the billion dollars they wasted on their botched gun registry. Our list would include things like housing, literacy, substance abuse treatment, and mental health services — the kinds of things that might actually prevent violent crime in Nunavut.

As for members of the Nunavut Liberals Association, who’s beloved political party is responsible for the gun registry fiasco, we’ve heard reliable rumours that many are ready to bolt if one of the other parties were to produce a credible candidate. Who can blame them?

JB

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December 20, 2002

GN must watch Iqaluit like a hawk

It was reassuring to hear Manitok Thompson, the minister of community government, tell the public this week that her department will closely monitor the $31 million that the GN will give the City of Iqaluit over the next five years.

Within Iqaluit’s municipal government, there is a long history of financial and administrative ineptitude and dishonesty, especially with regard to the use and misuse of territorial government money. The least that the government of Nunavut can do is to assure the people of Nunavut that their money will be managed well.

The most recent example is the well-known sewage treatment plant fiasco, in which more than $7 million, most of it territorial government money, has thus far been wasted. The city now says that the plant, which was supposed to be up and running in 1999, will be working by 2007 — after the city sinks another $4.1 million into it.

Many residents will also remember when, in 1994, the Government of the Northwest Territories used its powers under the Municipal Act to fire Iqaluit’s mayor, senior administrative officer, and all eight councillors. The Municipality of Iqaluit had misused $9 million worth of grant money that it was supposed to give back to the government after negotiating debentures.

Afterwards, territorial government reports and audits showed that Iqaluit’s elected councillors were not being provided with accurate information about the municipality’s financial position, and that the municipality’s record-keeping and financial reporting habits were poor.

If it can happen once, it can happen again. There is constant turnover at the top of Iqaluit’s municial administration, and there is no guarantee that over the next five years, Iqaluit will have the capacity to manage the financial obligations that it’s proposing to take on.

The GN should do more than just "monitor." If necessary they should interfere, no matter how loudly the City of Iqaluit may whine about it.

JB

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December 20, 2002

The GN takes a stand

Every human being is capable of violence. It’s a quality that was once essential for human survival, and to claim otherwise would be to deny our humanity.

But in Nunavut, far too many people are committing devastating acts of violence against each other, and too often against those they love the most. That’s not a secret anymore, even though some people still pretend as if it were. Our annual crime statistics tell part of this story, revealing that Nunavut has a higher per capita rate of violent crime than any other province or territory of Canada. The most painful part of this story, however, is told behind closed doors, where too many victims of domestic violence suffer in fear and silence. It’s people who are least able to defend themselves who suffer the most — women, children and the elderly.

There are those who say that talking openly about Nunavut’s high rates of domestic violence is harmful — on the grounds that it might give Nunavut a bad image. But we say this: those who deny the reality of violence in Nunavut are not friends of Nunavut; they are some of Nunavut’s worst enemies.

The government of Nunavut deserves praise, then, for standing up and telling the rest of Nunavut society that domestic violence is unnacceptable.

On its own, the poster campaign that Jack Anawak, Ed Picco, Paul Okalik and Peter Kilabuk unveiled this week isn’t likely to bring about any immediate reduction in family violence among Nunavummiut.

But the work of government is more than new laws, programs, policies and budgets, important as those things are. Government is also about values.

And every government must, from time to time, communicate those values in an assertive and public manner. That’s part of the responsibility of leadership — to encourage the best by displaying the best. This week, the GN told us what it stands for. It’s what we should stand for too.

JB

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