Against the evidence

In the appalling rant he gave this past May 31 in the Nunavut legislature, Tagak Curley, the health and social services minister, opened his remarks by claiming that the press “continue to try and undermine the integrity of the Inuit leadership.”

Unfortunately, Curley’s words undermine him to a far greater degree than any purported press conspiracy could possibly achieve.

But they are still useful — because they illustrate the leadership vacuum that contributes to the Nunavut project’s continuing failures.

The object of his complaint, a long article headlined “The trials of Nunavut,” which the Globe and Mail published this past April 1, suggested that many people in Nunavut, including at least some elected leaders, are in a state of denial about the territory’s escalating rate of violent crime.

“I am angry. I get angry when I read a national newspaper that tries to portray Nunavut as hopeless, that there is no hope and the leaders have their face under the snow and they’re not willing to admit it,” Curley said.

Somebody should sit down with Curley and explain the events that actually lay at the centre of the Globe and Mail’s story: a terrifying series of shooting rampages and homicides in Cape Dorset that disrupted the community for more than six months.

These included six potentially deadly armed standoffs and two homicides. At one point in mid-October, Cape Dorset hosted 17 police officers sent there to investigate the homicides and provide relief to members of the community’s over-stressed RCMP detachment.

Violent acts of this nature occur throughout the territory. And the evidence shows it’s getting worse. In 2010, Nunavut suffered six homicides and 29 suicides. Between 2002 and 2009, the Nunavut court processed 30 homicides, 50 attempted murders, 166 aggravated assaults, 2,059 sexual assaults, 2,340 level-two assaults and 23,343 common assaults.

Since 1999, the rate of sexual assault has stood somewhere between 10 and 12 times that of Canada. People in Nunavut are victimized by domestic violence at a rate that’s 10 times higher than that of Canada. Since 1999, the overall crime rate has risen dramatically in Nunavut. In the rest of the country, the crime rate is falling.

The heart-rending violence continues. A 19-year-old boy from Pond Inlet, following a dangerous confrontation with police, appeared in court this week in Iqaluit to face a charge of kidnapping with a firearm. A 26-year-old man in Pangnirtung was arrested after an armed standoff with police. And in Iqaluit, residents are coping this week with an unspeakable tragedy in which two adults and two children now lie dead.

Then there’s suicide, which since 1999 has claimed more than 320 lives in Nunavut.

But in the face of this overwhelming mountain of evidence, Curley chose instead to allege that a Globe and Mail reporter did not accurately report his position. “Suicide isn’t such a big problem any more,” Curley is quoted as saying in the story. He now says his position is far more nuanced than those words would suggest, and he maintains that he said much more than that to the Globe and Mail.

Fair enough. People interviewed by a news organization ought to be able to clarify what they may or may not have said in an interview. But there are better ways of doing that than the means that Curley chose last week — a letter to the editor, for example.

Besides, in the face of all this tragedy the wounded ego of a gaffe-prone politician doesn’t matter much to anybody. JB