Big city — small minds

It was amusing, but painful, to watch most Iqaluit city councilors display how little they know about their own community last week.

We’re referring, of course, to the wide-ranging discussion they conducted last week on the need to protect Iqaluit from “undesirables.” That means people from other places who have exercised their freedom of choice and have decided to stay in Iqaluit rather than somewhere else.

To be fair, the issue was put before city council in the form of a resolution composed by the Niksiit committee, a kind of sub-committee of council that deals with social and health matters. This helps to show, at the very least, that city councilors aren’t alone in their petty bigotry and small-minded intolerance. Those attitudes likely run deep in the community, especially among longer-term residents.

But it’s curious that anyone should feel that way anymore, because it ignores an obvious reality: Nunavut is a dynamic, mobile society. Nunavummiut are still nomadic, as it were, but in a modern sense, moving from one place to another more than most other Canadians do.

Recent census figures show that 245 people moved into Iqaluit from other Nunavut communities between 1996 and 2001, and that 555 people moved here from other provinces and territories within the same period.

Across Nunavut, 915 people moved from one place to another in that period, and 1,215 came from other provinces and territories. In Rankin Inlet, at least 85 people moved there from other places in Nunavut, while Pangnirtung had 70 new arrivals and Pond Inlet had 60.

Nunavummiut are moving from one place to another in large numbers, within Nunavut and between Nunavut and the rest of Canada. Census numbers released this week, for instance, show that one out of every 10 Inuit live outside the Arctic.

There are people who move to find work, a better education, or training. There are people who move to be reunited with families, and there are people who move simply because they’re bored with where they once were. There are people who move to escape unspeakable abuse.

Whatever the reason, people have the right to live where they choose. And it’s natural that many will choose to live in their region’s largest centre. For the Baffin region, that’s Iqaluit. It’s still a small town by Canadian standards, but in Nunavut, full of opportunities, amenities and amusements not available in smaller places.

Iqaluit has attracted, and will attract, growing numbers of migrants from other Nunavut communities, other Canadian provinces and territories, and other countries. This is inevitable. There is nothing that anyone, least of Iqaluit city council, can do to stop it. Nor is there any good reason why they should stop it.

A mature city council would welcome in-migration from other places, because new people and a growing population create new demands for services and therefore new opportunities for economic and social development. A mature city council would respond to this reality by doing what they can to build Iqaluit’s stock of private or government-leased housing. A mature city council would facilitate the development of new economic and social enterprises aimed at filling new needs created by the arrival of new people.

Instead, council has, in the recent past, responded with brain-dead development policies that have blocked the construction of new housing and office space. Last week, they were on the verge of passing an unenforceable resolution that would have prevented certain “undesirable” groups of people from lingering in Iqaluit.

To be fair, there’s a grain of legitimacy in the issue that’s raised by the release of territorial inmates into the community who have finished serving their time. But of 116 people released from the Baffin Correctional Centre in the last six months of 2002, only four have remained here. Of those, two moved to southern Canada, and two stayed here to work in construction.

Besides, a cursory glance at the court docket on any given week will show that Iqaluit has done an excellent job of producing its own large crop of home-grown criminals.

It’s also natural, though, that Iqaluit residents would object to the presence of a repeat sex offender that another community wants to banish. But if anything, this simply illustrates the futility of using banishment to deal with repeat offenders — because it simply transfers one community’s problem into another.

If the Iqaluit city council believes that newcomers are straining the city’s resources, then they ought to know what to do. Document the problem, and lobby higher levels of government for more help.

JB