Mad Mom’s mad about the Nunavut government

What am I mad about you ask?

I want to know whatever happened to Inuit Qaujimajatuqaangit? At the start of establishing Nunavut, it’s all we talked about: finally, respect for traditional knowledge, newcomers being schooled in our ways, our values, rich history and our hopes and aspirations on why we wanted Nunavut and what we expected in getting it.

We looked forward to time spent combining traditional wisdom and approaches with systems that helped get things done that we wanted to tackle.

Creativity, resourcefulness, working collaboratively with other people, understanding and doing things the northern way — where did it all go?

So many consultations with people throughout the territory in 1997 and 1998, who brought to the table all their energy and thoughts for a new, more humane, more user-friendly government.

IQ committees were set up in each department. Finally, Inuit were going to see it incorporated into everything from the top to the bottom — within all services and programs, just like the public wanted. Oh there was so much activity and talk about it back then!

What the heck happened so very quickly after that?. Where did it all go?

How did it happen and who allowed every newcomer to miss the point and comfortably establish all their own systems and create such a smothering bureaucracy — so similar to the ones they had come from, so familiar to them, so unappreciated and unwanted by us?

When did IQ become a buzzword in order to be politically correct but become nothing more than a day out of the office?

When did message control by southern professional spin doctors become a rule in each department, while being disguised as a mere process?

When were civil servants not allowed to speak to the media? When and how did we let the spin doctors change and manipulate the message while making things sound so great, when everyone out there knew things certainly were not.

Who let them run away from acknowledging the truth and gave them the power to do it?

Who has forgotten what the people said and what they wanted?

Who didn’t remember, when they got to positions of power? Who was too weak or unknowing to force the issue by compelling people coming up to bring their skill set but not their old thinking?

Many Inuit who believed, have now voted with their feet and left their jobs in the Nunavut Government. They no longer have to suffer the daily, painful reminder of seeing their workplaces unrecognizable to Nunavummiut.

They no longer have to view how few Inuit are left or how appallingly powerless they are.

Busy, busy little bureaucrats scurry here and scurry there, in their endless meetings, deadlines and pronouncements; little time is made to develop any relationships or even notice they are in the Inuit homeland.

Powerful people rule; they talk only to other powerful people, as northerners quickly notice, as they realize they are not one of them, so don’t get addressed very much.

Powerful people bring other powerful people, who they knew in another life and they become immediately powerful in this bureaucracy, who soon come to truly believe that no one else’s opinion would be worth knowing either.

Ah, but it goes on and on these days, as people who should be having a voice aren’t even “in the loop.”

The MLAs are not helping things get any better; only a few truly qualify as serving their constituents; most unsuccessfully grapple with a giant bureaucracy or are too naive to know they are being handled and manipulated with contrived answers in the legislative assembly by a government that can no longer afford to tell the awful truth.

All this in only 14 years — we must have “achieved” this faster than any other government bureaucracy in the country! What a shame.

(Name withheld by request)
Iqaluit

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