Inuit land claims org says work on 2015 settlement deal moving too slowly

Bernard Valcourt, then the Conservative minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, Cathy Towtongie, then the president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., and Peter Taptuna, premier of Nunavut, at the signing ceremony held May 4, 2015 for the big out-of-court settlement agreement that resolved a lawsuit NTI filed against Ottawa in December 2006. Ottawa paid NTI $255.5 million in compensation. Of that, NTI received spend $175 million for its Inuit training corporation. NTI chose to sue the remaining $80.5 million for its own purposes. (FILE PHOTO)

Two years after signing an out-of-court deal to settle its 2006 lawsuit against the federal government, Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. isn’t happy about how that settlement agreement, signed May 4, 2015, is working out and says “much work needs to be done.”

That’s because “key commitments are taking longer than anticipated,” James Eetoolook, NTI’s vice president, said in a statement issued May 4.

Those commitments include “the completion of a full set of department-by-department Inuit Employment Plans within the Government of Canada and the GN, and the adoption of a federal contracting policy specific to Nunavut,” the NTI statement said.

Under the settlement agreement, NTI and the federal government agreed to a process for working out ways in which Ottawa can comply with Article 24, the section of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement that says governments should do things to help Inuit firms win government contracts.

The 2015 deal does not actually settle NTI’s Article 24 dispute with Ottawa.

But it does contain a long list of “potential elements” that could be included in a future federal contracting policy for Inuit firms, such as set-asides for Inuit firms, bid price differentials, and ways of creating benefits for Inuit within federal contracts.

The settlement deal says Ottawa was supposed to make “reasonable efforts to adopt a new Article 24 policy by Dec. 31, 2015 and would get it adopted by July 31, 2016.

Those deadlines, however, are now long passed and no Article 24 deal is in sight.

NTI also complains that the governments of Nunavut and Canada have not yet created department-by-department Inuit employment plans, as required by the 2015 settlement agreement.

That’s supposed to be part of the implementation of Article 23, the section of the land claims agreement that says governments should do things to help Inuit job-seekers get government jobs, until such time as the proportion of Inuit in government employment is equal to the proportion of Inuit living in Nunavut.

To do that, Ottawa is required to pay for a big study called the Nunavut Inuit Labour Force Analysis.

That, in turn, would be used by the Government of Nunavut and the federal government to develop a long list of measures, including a central Inuit recruiting office at each government and numerous employment and pre-employment plans.

“NTI will continue to press our federal government and GN partners so that specific implementation promises are kept. NTI will ensure the Nunavut Agreement is used as a key building block in developing a territory that enhances Inuit political, social and economic self-determination,” said Eetoolook.

And outside of the compensation payments set out in the 2015 settlement agreement, Ottawa is supposed to spend $50 million, until 2023, on activities aimed at increasing Inuit employment at the governments of Canada and Nunavut.

In earlier statements, NTI now says it wants that $50 million dedicated to the training of Inuit language educators.

As for compensation, in 2015, Ottawa paid NTI a total of $255.5 million.

Of that, NTI took $80.5 million for itself. The remaining $175 million was put into an entity called the Makigiaqta Inuit Training Corp., whose seven-member board contains five members nominated by NTI.

Over the past two years, the training corporation has operated quietly, but this past January, they did announce $3 million in handouts to variety of entities.

NTI now claims that it has upheld its end of the settlement agreement by launching the training corporation and implementing a new version of Article 38, which contains a new dispute resolution process.

The May 4, 2015 settlement agreement was signed by Bernard Valcourt, then the Conservative minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, Cathy Towtongie, president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., and Peter Taptuna, premier of Nunavut, at a signing ceremony in Iqaluit.

The deal resolved a lawsuit that NTI filed against Ottawa in December 2006, following a long loud squabble over implementation of the Nunavut Land Claims agreement.