Aboriginal rights legend hired to break impasse

Thomas Berger may turn out to be the last best hope for Inuit beneficiaries in Nunavut who fear the Nunavut land claims agreement might never be fully implemented.

Berger, who as a lawyer, judge and elected politician has championed the rights of aboriginal people since the 1950s, was appointed May 26 as a conciliator to help resolve an intractable four-year dispute over a new 10-year contract for the implementation of the Nunavut land claims agreement.

“We are honoured that Mr. Berger has taken on the role of conciliator,” said Paul Kaludjak, the president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.

The appointment of a conciliator was first proposed by Ethel Blondin-Andrew, the Liberal government’s political boss for the northern territories, during DIAND minister Andy Scott’s tour of Nunavut this past March.

Berger, whose appointment was announced after Scott, Kaludjak and Nunavut Premier Paul Okalik met in mid-May to agree on it, will likely produce a preliminary report in about 90 days. But it will likely take him much longer than that to produce final recommendations.

As a lawyer representing the Nisga’a people of British Columbia, Berger was responsible for persuading the Supreme Court of Canada to acknowledge the existence of aboriginal title held by aboriginal people in Canada who have never signed a treaty.

The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision on the Nisga’a aboriginal title claim revolutionized federal land claim policy, and persuaded Ottawa to begin land claim negotiations with the Inuit, Dene and many other aboriginal groups.

The last implementation contract for the Nunavut land claim agreement, negotiated early in 1993, expired July 9, 2003.

Talks on a new deal started in May of 2001, but ground to a halt in November of 2004, when a senior DIAND official wrote to NTI to say that their negotiator, Blair Carlson, had “exhausted his mandate.”

That confirmed the federal government’s rejection of two key demands from the GN and NTI: a multi-million dollar training plan for Inuit, and beefed-up budgets for Nunavut’s family of environmental management boards, such as the Nunavut Water Board and the Nunavut Impact Review Board.

Since then, NTI has accused Ottawa of negotiating in bad faith, saying that the federal government is ignoring the spirit and intent of the land claim agreement.

To back their demand for a massive Inuit training program, aimed at carrying out the provisions on Inuit employment in government set out in Article 23, the GN and NTI hired accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers to produce a report called “Annaumaniq.”

That report, released in 2003, showed that low Inuit employment levels in government cost Inuit $123 million in lost wages and benefits for the 2002-03 fiscal year, producing $65 million in extra social costs for governments.

But until now, DIAND negotiators have been sticking to a take-it-or-leave it position that would have created a new contract that’s virtually unchanged from the first one.

In the 1993-2003 deal, the federal government spent only $160,000 to implement Article 23.