Language complaint shuts down English-only election in Nunavut hamlet

Kugluktuk residents gather at the opening of the community’s new hamlet office in 2012. Kugluktuk’s hamlet election will be rescheduled after a complaint from a voter that election material wasn’t made available in Inuinnaqtun. (FILE PHOTO)

Voters in western Nunavut’s Kugluktuk will get another chance to cast their ballots in that community’s municipal election—and this time, in Inuinnaqtun.

Municipal elections took place across Nunavut Dec. 11, although voting was halted mid-day in the Kitikmeot community after an intervention by the Office of the Languages Commissioner of Nunavut.

The languages commissioner had received a complaint from a Kugluktuk resident on Friday, Dec. 8—three days before the election—alleging all the election material in the hamlet was printed in English and not in Inuinnaqtun, the Inuktut dialect spoken in the community.

Helen Klengenberg, Nunavut’s languages commissioner, said she wrote to the hamlet’s senior administrative officer and acting mayor the same day, advising them of their responsibilities.

Under Nunavut’s Official Languages Act and its Inuit Languages Protection Act, hamlets are required to provide communications to residents in Inuktut.

Klengenberg also applied to the Nunavut Court of Justice that same day for an injunction to halt the election, on the basis it was contravening both acts.

When the commissioner still hadn’t received a response from the hamlet on election day Dec. 11, she gave the municipality notice of the injunction.

“They were in the midst of an election on Monday, but they stopped it and destroyed the ballots,” Klengenberg said.

The language commissioner’s office has asked the court to stand down on the application.

Now the hamlet must provide 10 days’ notice of its rescheduled election date and ensure that election materials are translated into Inuinnaqtun.

“We’re going to have to reschedule and we’re working with elections people on it,” said Kugluktuk’s senior administrative officer Donald LeBlanc Dec. 13. LeBlanc declined to comment further.

The Kugluktuk complainant, Robert Pihoak Ayalik, also wrote an open letter last week calling on the Government of Nunavut and other Inuit organizations to take issue with the lack of language enforcement in Nunavut.

Ayalik said this isn’t the first municipal election in Kugluktuk to be held only in English, and he accused the hamlet of communicating largely in English with the Kitikmeot community of about 1,500.

“This election is so morally reprehensible on so many levels, I will be boycotting and not voting,” Ayalik wrote Dec. 6.

Klengenberg, who is also from Kugluktuk, estimates that about 60 per cent of the population speaks Inuinnaqtun as their first language.

“If you’re not receiving those messages in your language, how can we expect people to continue to speak it?” Klengenberg said.

Inuktuk is already threatened and it’s up to Nunavut organizations and communities to ensure its continued use, she added.

Kugluktuk wasn’t the only community that had language issues leading up to its municipal election; the language commissioner’s office also received a complaint from Coral Harbour on Dec. 12, alleging voters there only received election material in English.

A source told Nunatsiaq News some elders in Coral Harbour cast ballots in that community Dec. 11 without knowing who they were voting for.

“It’s unfortunate that the complaint came in after the fact,” Klengenberg said. “There’s not much I can do now that they’ve legally conducted their election.”

“But we obviously need to do more to publicize our Inuit languages act and make sure every organization is aware that we’re here to enforce it.”

Klengenberg said her office will be drafting a letter to all of Nunavut’s municipalities advising them of their obligation to communicate in Inuktut.

Community and Government Services, the department that oversees municipal elections, has yet to release elections results.

Nunatsiaq News will publish those results once they’re available.