Congratulations to Maliiganik Tukisiiniakvik

The people who work at the Maliiganik Tukisiiniakvik legal aid organization had much to celebrate last week, when they marked the organization’s 30th birthday.

They’ve helped sustain one of Nunavut’s most useful and durable organizations. Since the fall of 1974, they’ve played a vital and influential role in the development of Nunavut’s justice system. As “the place to understand the law,” Maliiganik’s hardworking but underpaid lawyers and courtworkers have helped more people than most other Nunavut organizations have ever helped.

Their core function, of course, is to ensure that accused persons have competent lawyers or courtworkers standing beside them when they come to court. Without defence lawyers, accused persons cannot get fair trials, and the court system cannot work.

We hear a lot of complaints about the justice system these days. It’s clear that most Nunavummiut have little faith in it right now – and for good reason. But those who make such complaints should remember this: there is no greater miscarriage of justice than a wrongful conviction. No other event can bring more disrepute to the system.

Although there is some evidence suggesting that some people in Nunavut have sometimes pleaded guilty to relatively minor crimes they didn’t commit, simply to get the process over with, Nunavut has never seen a scandal that even comes close to what happened to Donald Marshall in the 1970s. A Micmac living in Nova Scotia, Marshall was convicted in 1971 of a murder that he did not commit and spent 11 years in prison, giving rise to a national scandal.

Maliiganik’s work has gone a long way towards ensuring that such an enormity never occurred in Nunavut. Their work has ensured that when people in Nunavut are convicted and sentenced in court, it’s done in a fair and lawful manner. But that’s not the only valuable service that Maliiganik performed over the past 30 years.

Their other contributions include:

numerous legal education activities aimed at helping people understand Canadian law;
the widespread use of Inuit paralegal courtworkers, who not only help accused persons understand the system, but often represent accused persons in JP court;
lobbying for administrative and legislative changes aimed at making the court system work better for Inuit;
lobbying for the passage in 1989 of a law that allows unilingual speakers of an aboriginal language to serve on juries;
lobbying for the use of legal interpreters, the creation of training courses for them, and recognition of legal interpreters as essential members of Nunavut’s court system;
the creation of a legal aid model that is now used in the Kitikmeot and Kivalliq regions, and administered by the Nunavut Legal Services Board.
And the future? It’s obvious that if the territorial and federal justice departments don’t act soon, Nunavut’s court and corrections system will continue to deteriorate, and public dissatisfaction will grow.

A 2002 study paid for by Justice Canada, and led by Dennis Patterson, Maliiganik’s first lawyer, reveals the wide extent of this deterioration. Much of the report, called the “Nunavut Legal Services Study,” is a discussion of what they call “unmet needs” within Nunavut’s court and corrections system.

Those problems include:

the location of the legal services board’s head office in Gjoa Haven, forced on them by the GN’s decentralization policy, creating extra travel and administrative costs;
a serious shortage of criminal defence lawyers in Nunavut – many practicing lawyers left after 1999, and legal aid suffers serious recruitment and retention problems;
crushing workloads borne by those defence lawyers who do still work in Nunavut – some lawyers often walk into court with 40 to 60 case files in their briefcases;
numerous scheduling problems within the travelling court circuit, causing needless delays in the processing of criminal and civil cases, and needless suffering for victims and accused persons alike;
the lack of an adequate remand centre at the Baffin Correctional Centre;
lack of access to the civil law among Nunavut residents, and the low priority given to civil cases within the court system, a situation that causes particular hardships for women;
misguided attempts by non-aboriginal people in the justice system to show “sensitivity” to Inuit culture, with the result that family violence is condoned and perpetuated.
The new justice building that the GN will build in Iqaluit over the next two years is badly needed. But it will house a system that is now in an advanced state of disrepair. Nunavut’s high rate of violent crime is becoming more lethal, and there are many signs that those who commit property crimes are now better organized and more professional than they once were.

All this will produce more work for Nunavut’s already overworked legal aid lawyers, as it will for everyone else in the system: judges, Crown lawyers, corrections workers and the RCMP. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that territorial and federal justice officials are even thinking about it.