The real hypocrites

Near the end of last month, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told international leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland that the world’s richest countries should do more to help pregnant women and young children in the world’s poorest countries.

In those remarks, and in an opinion piece published Jan. 26 in the Toronto Star, it’s clear that Harper was talking about nations like Sierra Leone, Afganistan, Chad and Somalia, whose infant mortality rates are many times higher than even the worst regions of Canada’s Arctic.

Of every 10 children born today in Sierra Leone, for example, nearly three will die before their fifth year of life. The Inuit of the Canadian Arctic have not experienced such death rates since the 1940s, when, according to Statistics Canada, an Inuk born in those years could expect to live only 28 to 35 years. That’s because, in the era before nursing stations and settled communities, more Inuit were dying than were being born, which is definitely not the case now.

It’s also clear that Harper was talking about the grim conditions that afflict pregnant women in the world’s poorest countries, where 500,000 women perish every year during pregnancy or while giving birth. This is because they live in places where there are no doctors, nurses, clinics or hospitals. Again, this is not the case in Nunavut and other regions of the Canadian Arctic, where it is now extremely rare for a woman to die while giving birth.

It remains to be seen if the Harper government’s actions on foreign aid will match the prime minister’s rhetoric. Only time will tell.

As we’ve said, it’s clear Harper was talking about nations where even Nunavut’s mediocre health indicators would be considered miraculous achievements.

These obvious facts, however, didn’t stop the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and Inuit leaders from leaping into the issue with some highly uninformed commentary.

Pita Aatami, president of Nunavik’s Makivik Corp., essentially accused Harper of hypocrisy, in an article distributed last week by the Canadian Press:

“If you’re going to talk the talk, you might as well practice it in your own country,” Aatami said.

It’s Aatami’s hypocrisy, however, that is breathtaking. If Aatami wants to know what hypocrisy looks like, he should take a look at the face staring back at him when he shaves every morning.

Aatami’s Makivik Corp. operates within a failing region, Nunavik, where nearly every health and social indicator — including life expectancy, infant mortality, and suicide — are worse than in any Arctic region in Canada.

Yet Makivik rarely uses its considerable influence to expose these issues and press governments to better the lives of women and children in the region it purports to represent.

In 2007, for example. the Quebec commission on human rights and the rights of children issued an embarrassing report on the complete failure of the Nunavik region’s child protection system. Makivik’s reaction? Near total silence.

In 2008, reporter Agnès Gruda of La Presse wrote a devastating series of articles on homeless children living like animals in Aatami’s hometown of Kuujjuaq. Again, Makivik reacted with near total silence.

And when the Inuulitsivik Health Centre, which manages one of the region’s two hospitals, teetered on the edge of collapse, beset by numerous scandals, including its inability to cope with the sexual abuse of children, Makivik’s reaction was muted at best.

Furthermore, any direct entreaty to the Prime Minister of Canada about Inuit health care is a waste of time anyway. It’s territorial and provincial governments who run health programs for Inuit in Canada.

The federal government does provide much of the funding for this, without requiring much in the way of accountability. That absence of accountability on part of the territories and provinces does deserve much criticism, but Canada’s Inuit organizations rarely do that.

For example, in July of 2009, a study presented at the International Congress of Circumpolar Health in Yellowknife revealed that half of Nunavut’s children aged three to five don’t get enough to eat. Another found that seven in 10 Nunavut families go hungry for at least part of the year. Yet another found that about half of pregnant women in the Baffin region don’t get enough to eat.

And yet it took Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami more than six months to arouse itself from its habitual state of apathetic torpor to comment on this issue, which they did only last week, long after the information was made public in Yellowknife last summer.

Nunavut institutions aren’t much better. It took an outside body, the North Sky Consulting firm, to point out, in the Qanukkaniq report card, to propose that Nunavut desperately needs anti-poverty and nutrition programs for children and families.

So far, no Inuit organization has ever forumlated and put forward a coherent position on this issue. That should tell you all you need to know about who the real hypocrites are in the Canadian Arctic. JB