Premiers talk funding, climate change

Canada’s three territorial premiers signed a new deal, shook hands with elders and feasted with Iqalummiut earlier this week, after a meeting that focused on federal funding, infrastructure, devolution, Arctic sovereignty and climate change.
Paul Okalik, the Nunavut premier, said the biggest issue that he and his two colleagues discussed is their desire to strike a new deal with Ottawa on the federal formula for financing territorial governments, known as the “TFF.”

“We stress that the federal government should address our issues because we are in real need of additional dollars for our operations in the territories,” Okalik said.

Right now, Nunavut’s annual transfer of money from the federal government increases by 3.5 per cent a year, under an arrangement struck with Paul Martin’s government in 2004.

But Nunavut’s spending needs increase by a rate of about seven per cent a year. That, and rising fuel costs, have put Nunavut’s budget under tremendous pressure.

After seeing their position endorsed earlier this year by provincial premiers, the territorial premiers hope to get a new funding formula deal by the start of the 2007-08 fiscal year.

“Any changes to the TFF will have a profound impact on the North and its future…” the northern premiers said in a communiqué.

The northern premiers also say they want Ottawa to create a new pot of money called the “Strategic Northern Infrastructure Fund” to help pay for projects that would unlock the North’s resources.

“Premiers call on Canada to assist them in finishing the job of building Canada — in the same way that Canada was built over the last 150 years,” their communiqué says.

And on another issue that’s intimately connected to northern Canada’s resource wealth, devolution, premiers say they will also press Ottawa for deals that make northerners the “primary beneficiaries” of resource exploitation.

Joe Handley, the premier of the Northwest Territories, joked with Okalik about the two frustrating decades of negotiations that his government endured in its quest for a devolution deal — which is not yet completed.

“We have been negotiating devolution for almost 20 years. So to premier Okalik, don’t let it take you 20 years. It’s an exhausting business and it’s taken far too long,” Handley said.

And Dennis Fentie, the premier of Yukon, said devolution is more than just a financial and administrative arrangement and that it’s purpose should be “to ensure a positive, constructive political, social, and economic development of the North.”

As for climate change, premiers says they want the federal government to work with territorial governments to help northerners adapt to it.

To that end, they want the research money that will be spent on International Polar Year to focus on finding ways to help northerners adapt.

“We’re stressing that International Polar Year is a good time to study adaptation and how we can make the conditions work. I refer to the ice roads that are melting and there is erosion happening in some of the coastal communities and our hunters are challenged,” Okalik said.

Handley added that there is tremendous potential in the northern territories for cleaner energy technologies, such as wind power, solar energy and hydroelectricity.

Premiers also want to create a new legal institution that they say would improve court systems in all three territories — a “northern court of appeal.”

Right now, appeal courts for the three territories are made up of judges borrowed from the supreme courts of various western provinces.

But a pan-northern appeal court would hear appeals of decisions made within all three territorial court systems, and would produce a consistent body of northern case law.

Premiers also renewed their co-operation agreement, first signed in Cambridge Bay in 2003, for another three years.