Caribou in summer: On the horns of a dilemma

The North, and perhaps the south too, is awash in consultants.

It has become fashionable for retired civil servants to advertise themselves as consultants, often continuing to do the very work they did in their days as government employees, but at a higher rate and often while collecting a pension for having done that work and sometimes even a severance bonus.

Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

It’s not limited to former government workers, of course. The same is true of industry. And one needn’t be retired. Many consultants are young, some just entering the job market. For some, it’s the only type of work they’ve ever known.

Years ago, I tried my hand at consulting.

My experience in government, though, was limited. Other than my years teaching, the only government work I ever had was an extremely miserable one year and six days working for the Government of the Northwest Territories as a municipal affairs officer.

I was a fish out of water.

In one memorable exchange with my boss — I would never refer to him as my superior — he shouted at me, “Just remember, you work for me!”

My response was immediate and loud.

“No,” I countered, “You remember! I work in spite of you!”

I didn’t stay long after that.

Sometime later, I ended up working as a consultant on a project at the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs in Ottawa. Officially, it was known as the Lancaster Sound Regional Study. But it was usually called The Green Paper.

Wikipedia defines a “green paper” as “a preliminary report by the government to stimulate discussion and propose ideas on specific policy areas.”

Lancaster Sound in the High Arctic was and is an area of considerable interest to industry — mining, shipping, oil and gas, and tourism — and to the Inuit who live in the four closest communities of Pond Inlet, Arctic Bay, Resolute and Grise Fiord.

At the time, there were industry proposals on the table for exploiting the various resources of the area, and there was concern and objection by many Inuit to some or all of these proposals.

The federal government had a regulatory role to play in determining if any of the proposals should go ahead.

And so the government did what governments do — it conducted and commissioned all sorts of studies.

That’s where I came in. My task was to periodically go to the four communities, with various studies in hand, and meet with the hamlet councils and the hunters and trappers organizations to deliver and explain the reports.

One of the other consultants engaged by the government was James Dobbin & Associates. They advertised themselves as “coastal and ocean planners.”

They took the work of other consultants and compiled it into a data atlas. It was pretty slick work. Onto a base map, one could superimpose an overlay showing, for example, areas where narwhal were known to be in significant numbers, or walrus, or beluga whales, and so on.

These areas of abundance were coloured. If two or more overlays were used at the same time, you would see areas where the various colours overlapped — meaning lots of animals of more than one species — and these were then deemed to be areas of critical importance.

One of my tasks was to take the draft data atlas and go to the communities, meet with local Inuit and review the findings, and come back to Ottawa with comments, corrections and suggested revisions.

Fun work! I got to go back to the High Arctic, where I had lived for over a decade, and travel on the government’s dime.

One meeting stands out. I was meeting with the hunters and trappers organization in Resolute.

The hunters were very interested in the data atlas and spent a lot of time poring over it. They seemed to be focusing on one map that was labelled “Distribution of Caribou in Summer,” and talking among themselves about it. There seemed to be some concern over the accuracy of the information.

Finally, the group was ready to talk about it. They pointed out various areas on the map and provided me comments like, “This map seems accurate as far as it goes, but it’s lacking some information.”

They went on to point to a number of areas while commenting that those areas also had significant numbers of caribou in summer. Why weren’t they marked as such, they wanted to know.

After pointing out a number of such areas, one wise elder summed up their concerns succinctly:

“This is a good map,” he said. “But it has the wrong title. It shouldn’t be called ‘Distribution of Caribou in Summer.’ It should be called ‘Distribution of Biologists in Summer.’”

I was humbled and amused and took great delight in making my report to Ottawa.

Taissumani is an occasional column that recalls events of historical interest. Kenn Harper is a historian and writer who lived in the Arctic for over 50 years. He is the author of Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs: Knud Rasmussen and the Fifth Thule Expedition, and Thou Shalt Do No Murder, among other books. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.