A tale of two trades schools

The Nunavut territory does not have a trades and technical training school. When the Northwest Territories divided in 1999, the old NWT Arctic College system divided along with it, and the new Nunavut Arctic College lost access to a well-equipped trades training centre at Thebacha College in Fort Smith.

Even before division, many thoughtful Nunavut residents drew attention to this loss, but their warnings were ignored.

That’s too bad. Within the next two to four years, at least three mining projects in Nunavut are likely to be either operating, or under construction: the Tahera Corp.’s Jericho diamond mine, Miramar’s collection of gold deposits at Hope Bay, and Cumberland Resources’ proposed Meadowbank gold mine near Baker Lake. These companies will need qualified Inuit trades people. At the same time, Inuit throughout Nunavut, but especially those who live in the Kitikmeot and Kivalliq regions, expect to get good, well-paying jobs on these and other projects.

Now, the Nunavut government has at least two proposals in front of it for the creation of trades training centres.

One, made by the Hamlet of Arctic Bay, would see the creation of a trades centre at the old Nanisivik town site. People in Arctic Bay have been asking for this since the fall of 2001, when Breakwater Resources announced the closing of the Nanisivik mine. On the surface, the idea makes a lot of sense. Nanisivik’s mothballed town site contains enough infrastructure to house a small community – there’s single family housing, a recreation centre, and buildings that once held a school, a Northern store and other services.

But Arctic Bay residents have received little help and support in advancing their proposal, and their aspirations are now drowning in bureaucratic inertia. The GN still hasn’t even finished studies aimed at assessing the condition of the buildings at Nanisivik and figuring out the cost of running a training school there. At the same time, Breakwater is preparing to bulldoze most of those buildings this summer as part of its clean-up plan.

Meanwhile, Education Minister Ed Picco said in the legislative assembly last week that early estimates put the cost of upgrading the Nanisivik site at about $5 million, and the cost of running a training school there at about $5 million a year. The idea of a training school at Arctic Bay “doesn’t make any sense,” Picco said, meaning that the government can’t afford it.

The Nanisivik training school proposal is a lost cause. We hope the Nunavut government – which likes to pretend it cares about the economic health of so-called have-not communities that do not benefit from decentralized government jobs – soon finds a way of breaking this news to the people of Arctic Bay.

The second proposal, made by the Kitikmeot Corp. and the Kitikmeot Inuit Association, involves another abandoned site: the Lupin gold mine near Contwoyto Lake in the Kitikmeot region. Lupin’s current owner, Kinross Gold Corp., will spend this year scooping up the last remnants of gold-bearing ore contained in rock pillars left behind within the mine shaft, and then close it in mid-2005.

Unlike their counterparts in the eastern part of Nunavut, the Kitikmeot’s Inuit organizations aren’t waiting for the government to do something for them. They’ve proposed to buy the Lupin site from Kinross for use as a trades training school, and they’re now seeking the GN’s support for this idea.

It will be far more difficult for the GN to ignore this proposal.

Cambridge Bay MLA Keith Peterson told MLAs last week that the Lupin site already contains trades shops and classroom space. He pointed out that it’s also a vital piece of transportation infrastructure, with a 6,000-foot runway and a weather observation station. It’s located at the end of a winter supply road that stretches all the way to Yellowknife, and sits only 25 km from Tahera’s proposed Jericho mine.

Perhaps because they lost faith in the Nunavut government a long time ago, the people of the Kitikmeot know that if they want something done, they’ll have to do it themselves. That’s a lesson that other communities and regions may also soon learn. JB