How Nunavut came to be: all the dreams, all the blunders

The first sitting of the Nunavut Legislative Assembly, held April 1, 1999 inside the gym at Iqaluit’s Inuksuk High School. Made in Nunavut: An Experiment in Decentralized Government, by Jack Hicks and Graham White, tells the story of how that day came to be and how after that day the Nunavut government implemented the decentralization of territorial government headquarters jobs. (FILE PHOTO)

Jean Chrétien, then the prime minister, during celebrations held April 1, 1999 to mark the birth of Nunavut. The process leading up to that event was heavily influenced by Liberal partisanship and patronage, but at the same time, federal officials at the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and other departments were committed to getting the new territory up and running. (FILE PHOTO)

You can order copies of Made in Nunavut: An Experiment in Decentralized Government from UBC Press or download a PDF from Google Play Books. A soft cover version will appear June 1, 2016.

Thanks to two well-known academics, it’s now down on paper: the convoluted, surprising story of how Nunavut came to be.

In a magisterial book that pulls no punches, entitled Made in Nunavut: An Experiment in Decentralized Government, Jack Hicks and Graham White follow the tortuous journey that Nunavut’s planners began in 1993 when they set out to create the Nunavut territory promised in Article 4 of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement.

Hicks, a university and college lecturer living in Saskatchewan, spent many years in Nunavut, and in 1995 helped create the Nunavut Implementation Commission’s first blueprint for Nunavut, Footprints in New Snow.

For co-author White, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto’s Department of Political Science who specializes in studying the structures of government, the creation of Nunavut offered a rare chance to watch people build a new government from scratch.

“That’s the Super Bowl for guys like me,” White said in an interview.

It’s not just for academics — Made in Nunavut is written for anyone who wants to know how and why the Nunavut government became what it is today.

“We really hope it will be read for some time in the high schools and by NS [Nunavut Sivuniksavut] people and so on. We have this really important slice of Canadian history, not just Nunavut history,” White said.

They’ve dedicated their book to the memory of Laura Ulluriaq Gauthier, a brilliant young staff member at Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. who died suddenly in 2001 from a brain aneurysm at the age of 30.

“We are convinced that, had she lived, the GN would have been noticeably more successful,” they write in their preface.

And to represent their overarching theme, they turn to a quote from Ulluriaq Gauthier: “Inuit don’t want a government that’s different, we want a government that’s better.”

And did the Inuit of Nunavut get a government’s that’s better?

No, they didn’t. Hicks and White find that from its very birth, Nunavut was served poorly by its political leaders — and its government still suffers from anemic leadership.

But that’s not the fault of decentralization — the policy under which 459 Government of Nunavut head office jobs were distributed among 10 communities outside Iqaluit after 1999.

They find that decentralization — which should more accurately be called “deconcentration” — was, on balance, a qualified success and that it’s not to blame for the political and bureaucratic bungling that continues to plague Nunavut.

“The GN has throughout its history been hampered by a lack of competence, resulting in serious policy and administrative failures. Decentralization, like other GN initiatives, has suffered from political and bureaucratic incompetence,” Hicks and White said.

They also dispel some common misconceptions about the GN’s decentralization policy, which former Premier Paul Okalik implemented during his first term.

One is the notion that Okalik invented the policy himself and then arbitrarily imposed it on Nunavut, an unfounded conspiracy theory that led many critics to refer to it as “Paul’s folly.”

But some kind of decentralized government structure had been part of the dream of Nunavut since the late 1970s.

And the GN’s decentralization model — first created by the Nunavut Implementation Commission — enjoyed universal support: from Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., the federal government, and eventually the Government of the Northwest Territories.

“People can argue about decentralization, but I don’t think we should blame Okalik. At that time it was a collective leadership decision. He made a decision and he did it. Personally I think that’s to his credit,” Hicks said in an interview.

White said he was surprised to discover the deep commitment to Nunavut among staff at the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development who worked for DIAND’s Nunavut secretariat.

“I heard again and again — and I believe this unquestionably to be true — that the key people at the Nunavut secretariat in DIAND really wanted to make this happen,” White said.

Hicks said the federal government played the role of “honest broker” in co-operation with NTI and the NIC and that it was the Government of the Northwest Territories that behaved in an “arrogant and distant” manner.

He also said they found that when political leaders pounded their chests and fought each other in public, their unelected officials kept working together.

“At various times, people were steaming and stomping their feet, but everybody remained committed to the ultimate goal. And some people were under orders to make it happen regardless,” Hicks said.

They also point out that decentralization has helped the territorial government get a little closer to its Inuit employment targets.

The proportion of Inuit employment in the 10 communities that received decentralized GN headquarters jobs — 55 per cent — is much higher than in Iqaluit and higher than the GN’s Nunavut-wide Inuit employment figure of about 50 per cent.

“It is worth observing that one hears far more complaining about decentralization in Iqaluit than in the rest of Nunavut,” the book says.

But there’s one big objective that decentralization failed to achieve: government closer to the people.

The headquarters employees located in the 10 smaller communities brought little power or authority with them — and political power continues to be concentrated increasingly in Iqaluit.

And since the territory’s early years, half a dozen assistant deputy minister jobs located outside of Iqaluit by Interim Commissioner Jack Anawak in 1998 have all been pulled back to the capital.

In addition, the GN has quietly shifted many other decentralized jobs back to Iqaluit.

Another big problem is that Nunavut planners assumed the territory would get a state-of-the art telecommunications system.

That never happened and “woefully inadequate satellite-based IT has had debilitating effects on decentralization and on the GN generally.”

Another mistaken assumption was that most GN jobs, including decentralized jobs, would be easy to fill.

That never happened either — because few NWT employees were willing to move to Nunavut and a big wave of highly-qualified job applications they expected to receive from southern Canada never materialized.

And at many of the decentralized GN job sites in the smaller communities, the available openings required professional qualifications that few Inuit in the communities possessed.

However, one belated success story is the wildlife office in Igloolik, which in 2010 was held up as a disastrous failure, with less than half of its 22 jobs filled. But by 2013, it was fully staffed.

As for the GN’s long record of incompetence and policy failure, which they describe at length in the final chapters of the book, one contributing factor was the hiring of inexperienced people near the beginning of the project.

White said this included the 12 Inuit assistant deputy ministers that Interim Commissioner Anawak hired in March and April of 1998.

Some did well — but many did not.

“Frankly it became clear to me in a couple of meetings I was at with some of them that they didn’t necessarily have the kind of experience that was going to be needed. I really have the sense that – not intentionally – a lot of the Inuit were being set up to fail,” White said.

For Nunavut political junkies, the book is loaded with juicy insider revelations, some related to the partisan political patronage that tainted the process in the years leading up to April 1, 1999.

One is that Dennis Patterson, then a prominent Progressive Conservative, was rejected as chief commissioner of the NIC by the Liberal government that took power in 1993.

And even Laura Ulluriaq Gauthier, hired in 1998 as assistant deputy minister of the Department of Executive and Intergovernmental Affairs, was told that after April 1, 1999, she would not keep her job — because of her lack of Liberal connections.

This occurred at a time when the Office of the Interim Commissioner, headed by former Liberal MP Jack Anawak, was stuffed with Liberal consultants and operatives.

Hicks and White also highlight the Nunavut government’s nearly unbroken record of failure in social policy, such as its bungled suicide prevention strategy and its promised but non-existent family violence strategy.

“The real failure of the GN to date has been the failure to address the historic trauma in the society and the many ways that it plays out,’ Hicks said.

“So we say in the book that there are days when it seems as though the GN simply lacks the capacity to address these problems — I mean capacity in the biggest sense, including political leadership.

“I don’t know what Nunavut’s going to be like in 20 years. What’s it going to be like in 20 years if the government doesn’t start dealing with stuff?”

You can order a copy from UBC Press through this web page.

Made in Nunavut: An Experiment in Decentralized Government
University of British Columbia Press, 2015, 392 pages.
Hardcover: ISBN 9780774831031, Dec. 1, 2015 — $95
Paperback: ISBN 9780774831048, June 1, 2016 — $34.95
Google Play Books: ISBN 9780774831062, Dec. 1, 2015 — $21.46
Kobo: Available soon.