Why Nunavut is floundering

Minerals. Oil and gas. Royalties. Northerners controlling their own natural resources.

In 1979, when the Nunavut project started moving forward, those words were on everyone’s lips – because that’s a big part of what the Nunavut project was all about in those days.

Everyone assumed that after the division of the Northwest Territories, the Nunavut government wouldn’t have to worry about finding enough money to serve the people of Nunavut. That, Nunavut leaders thought, would come from special taxes – called royalties – on the revenue generated by mining and by oil and gas production.

Most of them also assumed that any future Nunavut agreement would give Nunavut the right to do that.

In September, 1979, at a meeting of Nunavut leaders in Igloolik, the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada handed out a paper called Political Development in Nunavut – a kind of early blueprint for a Nunavut territory.

In his coverage of that meeting, Art King of CBC radio in Iqaluit (then called Frobisher Bay) quoted Nunavut leaders as saying that Nunavut would have “a long-term revenue base that is probably as good as or better than Alberta.”

Today that looks like the fanciful product of an LSD-inspired hallucination.

But it wasn’t. In the late 1970s, many informed people believed Nunavut would soon become a source of enormous wealth – with good reason. Drill ships were slipping through the waters of Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, Lancaster Sound, and the High Arctic islands, searching for natural gas and oil under the floor of the ocean. With the help of the federal government, one company was already shipping token amounts of oil from a site near Little Cornwallis Island.

Peter Ittinuar, then the member of Parliament for Nunatsiaq, said, in an interview in 1979, that it was essential for a new Nunavut territory to gain control over its natural resources.

“Taking out the the economic resources of Nunavut would undermine Nunavut, it would undermine the natural political evolution of that territory, of the geography and its people,” Ittinuar told CBC radio in a 1979 interview.

Itinnuar meant that, to make the Nunavut project work, Nunavut must have control over its natural resources, and the money those resources would produce.

He was right. Though the Arctic oil and gas boom of the late 1970s soon turned into a bust, the Nunavut process went ahead anyway, without the rich, resource-based economy once thought to be just around the corner.

On April 1, 1999, the Nunavut territory was born – with no economic base.

And guess what? The Nunavut government is now unable to keep up with the demands of its people for social housing, jobs, better schools, better health care and… well, you can add your own items to that much-recited list. Nunavut isn’t working, and it’s painfully obvious.

The idea that Nunavut would have “a long-term revenue base that is probably as good as or better than Alberta” was long forgotten. Even now, the Nunavut government still has no control over Nunavut’s natural resources and has no power to collect special mining taxes or royalties – after all these years.

And so Nunavut is floundering, and powerless to do anything about it. Voters know that now too, and in this election, but will nevertheless ask election candidates to do a lot of things for them that the Nunavut government cannot afford.

There is still room for hope though. At least three new mines – in the Kivalliq and Kitikmeot regions – may start producing within the life of the next Nunavut government. That’s why it’s important for the Nunavut government to get control over non-renewable resources and a share of resource revenues through what is now called a “devolution” agreement. It would be a major step towards creating the Nunavut that Nunavut’s founders actually envisioned back in the 1970s.

Devolution won’t be much of an election issue on Feb. 16 – but it should be. JB