The true cost of sovereignty

The report on Arctic Canada’s yawning infrastructure gap, released late last month by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, puts into words what few Nunavut leaders have ever articulated.

Namely, that making the infrastructure improvements desperately needed by Northern communities, especially in Nunavut and much of the provincial North, is going to be breathtakingly expensive.

It need not have been this way, but as the FCM report points out—and as Northerners already know—interest by Ottawa in Northern development over the years has been, to put it charitably, inconsistent.

The results are well known to Nunavummiut: lower life expectancy, literacy and employment prospects and higher rates of poverty, crime and suicide. “Coupled with a shortage of adequate housing and reliable infrastructure, northern municipalities have become transient communities that are unable to sufficiently provide for, or retain their citizens,” the FCM report reads.

The report goes on to call for the creation of an inventory of community needs to be presented to the federal government.

For Nunavut alone, the cost of this inventory would be staggering. The territory desperately needs:

• To wean itself off obsolete and volatile diesel, which provides almost all of the territory’s power. While such a move would pay for itself many times over, the up-front cost would be enormous: $200 million or more just for a South Baffin hydroelectric project. And hundreds of millions more to convert other communities to the most feasible power source;

• A fix for the education system that produces mostly high school dropouts. The current piecemeal network of training programs produces some skilled workers, but the North needs a university to help create generations of citizens who are not merely trained, but educated. This cost, likely hundreds of millions of dollars to start, could be shared with the other territories and would pay for itself in the long run;

• Transportation infrastructure. A road link to Northern Manitoba and the Bathurst Inlet road and port project would together cost at least $1.5 billion. Communities need small craft harbours to make life easier for hunters, fishermen and tourists. Nunavut’s hub airports in Iqaluit, Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay need roughly $100 million in upgrades;

• Housing. Depsite the Nunavut Housing Corporation’s own bungling of federal housing funds, the territory needs hundreds of millions of dollars more to bring housing stock up to basic livable standards;

• Information infrastructure. Nunavut’s internet connections are so bad, there are days when it seems like carrier pigeons would be a more effective mode of data transmission. Plans are in the works for new satellites (price tag: at least half a billion dollars) that would better serve the Nunavut’s internet needs, but plans need to be put into action. With better web access, Nunavut can implement long-distance education and health care, and cut the need for expensive government travel.

That list doesn’t even include the other basic municipal needs like upgrades to straining garbage, sewage and water systems, or bricks and mortar for recreation facilities. So $5 billion, give or take a few hundred million, sounds like a good start.

The FCM report will likely be met with howls of protest from some southerners who regard the spending of tax dollars on Northern infrastructure as pandering to an obscure special interest. But those very same people enjoy living standards that grew directly from nearly 150 years of federal spending on services and infrastructure that’s mostly been unavailable to the North.

Prime Minister Steven Harper’s government has taken some tentative steps forward, particularly on housing and upgrading the Coast Guard’s fleet of aging icebreakers. And Harper has helped foster a degree of unprecedented interest in Northern affairs by the south.

But Harper’s obsession with playing up fake threats to Canada’s Arctic sovereignty (like the recent flyby of Russian military aircraft) shows he’s more obsessed with appearing locked in a manly struggle against dastardly foreigners than actually providing the North with good governance.

It’s now clear that the prime minister’s famous Arctic mantra “use it or lose it” is woefully out of touch with what the North actually needs.

“Put up or shut up” might be more apt. (CW)