Inuit candidate asks Nunavut court to quash QIA election result

QIA and NTI beneficiaries waiting for election results on election night, this past Dec. 8. The legality of the Iqaluit community director election is still in dispute, following an application that candidate Madeleine Redfern filed Jan. 7 at the Nunavut Court of Justice. (PHOTO BY JIM BELL)

Madeleine Redfern, a candidate in the Qikiqtani Inuit Association’s Dec. 8, 2014 elections, wants the Nunavut Court of Justice to quash the Iqaluit community director election result and order a new vote.

In an application for a judicial review filed at the Nunavut court Jan. 7, she alleges that, by failing to provide them with ballots, the QIA discriminated against eligible Inuit voters who were in Ottawa on election day.

She also alleges that the QIA breached a duty of procedural fairness owed to candidates and eligible voters by failing to adhere to its elections procedures, and failing to meet the legitimate expectations of candidates and voters.

“A new election is needed to get a valid result. It is necessary to ensure electoral fairness, transparency and accountability,” Redfern said Jan. 8 in a news release.

Questions about voter and candidate eligibility, and voter confusion, had already surfaced during the election period and continued past the QIA election day Dec. 8.

Redfern finished one vote behind incumbent Simon Nattaq in the Dec. 8 Iqaluit community director election following a recount held Dec. 9, by a margin of 396 votes to 395.

Because of that one-vote margin, she alleges that discrimination against certain voters and misleading information that the QIA provided to voters tainted the final vote count.

To support that, she alleges that eligible Qikiqtani beneficiaries who went to two polling stations which the QIA set up in Ottawa — at the Baffin Larga patient home and the Tungasuvvingat Inuit office — could not cast ballots for community director candidates.

“I have heard from eligible voter who were upset that ballots for the community director races were not provided at either Ottawa polling stations,” Redfern said in her news release.

Eligible Qikiqtani voters in Ottawa were able to cast ballots for the QIA president’s election — but for community director elections, they learned they could do so only by proxy. That’s a process where one eligible voter delegates their vote to another eligible voter.

But an election notice published by the QIA this past Nov. 21 did not say that eligible Qikiqtani voters in Ottawa on election day could only vote for community director by proxy.

The voter information ad provided a list of polling stations — including the two polling stations in Ottawa — but didn’t say that procedures there were different than for polling stations located in Baffin communities.

The notice suggested that all eligible voters could vote the same way at every listed polling station and suggested proxy voting as an additional option.

“Polling stations are located in every Qikiqtani Community as well as Ottawa. You can also vote by Proxy,” the ad said.

And the QIA provided no information to voters about the difference in voting procedures used at the two Ottawa polling places, Redfern said in an affidavit attached to her application.

“I verily believe that QIA led voters to legitimately expect that voting procedures at all polling stations would be the same and that ballots for community director positions would be available at the Ottawa Polling Stations,” Redfern’s affidavit said.

That, she said in her application, means the QIA “inappropriately, unreasonably and arbitrarily distinguished between voters who attended the Ottawa Polling Stations and those who attended polling stations in the Qikiqtani region.”

To fix the mess, Redfern wants the court to order a new election for Iqaluit community director.

“We all expect good corporate governance from our Inuit organizations and need to know that our democratic rights are not casually dismissed or undermined,” she said.

Redfern said in her affidavit that she has also instructed her lawyer, Teresa Haykowsky of Edmonton, to file a separate petition asking the court to challenge the QIA election under the Local Authorities Elections Act.

Under the 1997 version of QIA’s bylaws, known as “Bylaw #4,” the territorial Local Authorities Elections Act may be applied to QIA elections “in any matter not provided for herein or in the [QIA] Elections Regulations.”

Those 1997 bylaws were supposed to be replaced by a new set of bylaws, known as “Bylaw #5,” passed Oct. 7, 2014.

But the new bylaws were not legally registered as of Oct. 20, when the QIA issued a call for nominations for positions that were up for election.

On Nov. 14, after the QIA election process was well underway, Redfern said she learned that the old 1997 bylaws, in Bylaw #4, were still in force.

“I was informed by Natalie Helps-Lafrance [at Nunavut Legal Registries] that the current registered Bylaws for QIA was Bylaw #4.”

But two days earlier, on Nov. 12, Redfern said QIA’s executive director told her the QIA was using Bylaw #5 — which had not been legally registered and was not in force.

On Nov. 25, the QIA’s chief returning officer, Nancy Karetak-Lindell, told Redfern in an email that Bylaw #5 had finally been legally registered, earlier that day.

The 1997 set of rules states that any amendments to QIA bylaws “shall not take effect until registered by the Registrar appointed under the Act.”

But in a letter to Nunatsiaq News published Dec. 15, Karetak-Lindell said it doesn’t matter which set of rules were in place.

“Even if we worked with the old By-Laws, nothing would have changed in how I made rulings,” Karetak-Lindell said.