Tories probe supporters for interest in Nunavut nomination

DWANE WILKIN

When Nunavut’s first Progressive Conservative party riding association held its inaugural meeting last February, just five people showed up.

Not exactly a high-water mark for northern Tories. But nothing to get discouraged about, either, says the man who’s taken a lead role organizing the Progressive Conservative election machine in Canada’s newest riding.

“I think there’s no lack of people capable of taking a leadership role in Nunavut,” Duncan Cunningham says from his home-office in Apex.

“What’s hard (on MPs) is having to leave Nunavut and spend so much time in Ottawa.”

Tories rebuilding

Reduced to just two seats in Parliament during the last federal election, the once powerful Progressive Conservative party has spent much of the last four years under leader Jean Charest, trying to regain traditional grass-roots support it lost mainly to Reformers in 1993.

Here in Nunavut, Cunningham has been thinking a lot about the party’s prospects in Canada’s newest territory. And he thinks the party’s efforts to reform itself have not gone unnoticed.

It doesn’t hurt to have well-known and well-connected northerners like former government leader Dennis Patterson on your side. That it was a Conservative government that inked the deal on the Nunavut land-claims agreement, helps too.

But Cunningham predicts the party’s new grassroots orientation will bode particularly well for anyone faced with having to represent such a large riding at the national level.

“In Nunatsiaq the candidate has always had a close relationship with the electorate. The problem has traditionally been that a single MP in the North is just a dot.

“I think with the with the grassroots approach Conservative candidates will find they can have some say in the policy direction of the North.”

A former executive director of the Baffin Regional Inuit Association, Cunningham forms the nucleus of Nunavut’s PC movement along with Iqaluit businessman Steve Birrell, the fledgling riding association’s secretary-treasurer.

Although he wouldn’t divulge any names, Cunningham said the party has been in contact with several people in Nunavut who expressed interest in the Tory nomination in the past, and is awaiting feedback.

“In terms of Nunavut what we’re looking at is making sure our new government is ready to go in April 1999,” said Cunningham. “What we need is someone in Ottawa promoting that and making sure northern and Inuit interests are upheld.”

Not on the list of Nunavut’s Tory hopefuls: former Iqaluit mayor and one-time Tory candidate for Nunatsiaq riding, Bryan Pearson, who chuckled at the thought of a repeat performance.

“That’s history,” Pearson quipped. “We only deal with the future here.”

Nor does Pearson envy the logistical task that awaits the party’s organizers as they begin to cast about for a name to pin their hopes on, one association meeting after another, in a nomination process that is as notoriously unwieldy as the riding itself.