Sheila Fraser bids farewell to Nunavut

Sheila Fraser in Iqaluit with legislative interpreter Mary Nashook, who’s just one of the many Nunavummiut whose lives Fraser touched during her 10-year stint as Auditor General of Canada. Fraser, whose term expires May 31, appeared before the Nunavut legislative assembly’s standing committee on operations April 14 to discuss her report on services for children and youth in the territory. (PHOTO BY JIM BELL)

After a 10-year career in which she became Nunavut’s best-liked non-resident bureaucrat, Sheila Fraser bade farewell to the territory last week in her eighth and final session with Nunavut MLAs.

“In appointing you as auditor general, Canada has helped us immensely,” John Ningark, the MLA for Nattilik, said April 14 in the territorial legislature.

For Fraser, whose term expires May 31, it was her final appearance before a legislative committee anywhere in Canada.

“It has been an immense pleasure,” Fraser told MLAs, saying she hopes her often critical audits of the GN’s finances have been helpful.

Fraser issued her first report on the Nunavut government’s finances in November 2001.

Since then, she’s probed the Government of Nunavut deeply, using her various reports to expose numerous shortfalls, especially poor financial management and the government’s inability to meet its stated goals.

Some of those revelations include:

• the GN’s inability to recruit and retain qualified financial staff and to create good financial management systems;

• the unexpected costs run up by the creation of the Nunavut Power Corp. in 2001;

• the waste of money produced by the way the GN leased office space from private companies;

• the financial management fiasco at the Nunavut Business Credit Corp.; and,

• the Nunavut Housing Corp.’s inability to monitor local housing associations and housing authorities.

In all of her reports, Fraser hammered away at one big problem, to which she attributed most of the Nunavut government’s dysfunctions: lack of capacity in most GN departments and agencies.

And in nearly every unit of the GN in which she found big problems, she also found short-staffing coupled with too few people who are able to do their jobs well.

“The issue of capacity up here I think is a significant issue, but steps are being taken to address that,” Fraser said.

In reflecting on her deep involvement with the trials and travails of the GN, Fraser said she hopes her often highly critical reports on the GN’s finances have “been helpful” and that Nunavut is making progress in some areas.

“Yes, our audits can at times be critical and we see some of the statistics and one could become discouraged, but I think we have to remain optimistic and say, you know, this is a new territory, it has a young population, things will get better and things will improve,” Fraser told reporters after the hearing.

And for those who are disappointed at how Nunavut has turned out, she counsels patience.

“In all honesty, when Nunavut was created, expectations and aspirations were very high at the time. But I think the realization today is probably that things are a lot more difficult to accomplish than people may have thought they were 10 years ago. It’s just going to take longer than people initially expected.”