Decentralization a dysfunctional black hole

Last week’s Web posting, “Nunavut bureaucrats would rather quit than move” motivates me to write this letter.

The GN should be honest and upfront about what the decentralization impacts and fallout have been for government departments, including the department of sustainable development.

More than 15 wildlife jobs in DSD were moved to Igloolik, contrary to expert advice, to suit the political agenda. Most remain unfilled because of the technical qualifications required. Things like lower job qualifications, the creative use of equivalencies, upgrading and mentoring, and IQ, will only go so far toward filling the gaps.

The supreme insult to DSD staff, those who are gone and those who remain, is from the current deputy minister, when he states that departed staff simply chose to take the compensation package and move elsewhere.

The real question is, what drove these long-term dedicated staff to abandon careers for a paltry severance package of only 15 to 30 weeks pay?

Is the intent to make these once-dedicated people sound like white carpetbaggers robbing the new territory’s coffers? The fact is that they were squeezed out, and, sure, they took their little severance cheques with them. But let’s be honest about cause-and-effect.

The premier told the people of Pangnirtung, at a community feast, that their new imported positions (many of which were not covered in Footprints, but exist as a result of pork-barrel jockeying and negotiation to get those elusive decentralization numbers up) would “bring” new salary dollars of $1.5 million to the community.

Does this not imply that the decentralized jobs would all be filled by local people?

Why would the premier, in spite of the dismal local-hire experiences to date, want to create this false expectation?

And when a senior decentralization official says that only one of the designated DSD staff members is not moving to Pangnirtung with the corresponding decentralized position, this is not only unfounded, but would appear to be out of whack with the premier’s offering of local jobs.

We are told that technical jobs are hard to fill anywhere. Sure, but why make it harder by putting them in places where local people rarely qualify, and where it will be even harder to bring in fresh new imports to replace the more experienced departed ones, many of whom were once solid supporters of Nunavut?

The EIA jobs slated for Pangnirtung and those Power Corp. jobs going to Baker Lake will have minimal local benefit, at least until more high school and post-secondary graduates are forthcoming. This is the real problem: supply and demand in the local labour pool.

Sadly, the new government did the easy thing and gave in to the false expectations out there about the new Nunavut, that there would be almost overnight change.

Some Inuit politicians were indeed alarmed at some extreme public views envisioning a massive airlift out of all the white folks at Nunavut’s inception, but many gave in to at least a fast-tracked decentralization model that would yield acceptable numbers by the next election.

To finance the new black hole of decentralization, the GN is in a position where it needs the very job vacancies (and unspent salary dollars) that its lack of foresight has created to balance the books.

But in the end, jobs are not just paycheques and social engineering, but functions and services. Nobody is currently doing the work. Capacity, morale, and the reputation of the broken DSD are at dysfunctional levels.

The human capital, networking, teamwork, covering-off and backing-up that came with years of a close-knit public service community are gone, cast to the winds. Something most people don’t know is that the whole environmental division of DSD (three people) recently left their jobs in disgust, even without those jobs being decentralized.

In the long-term, the GN needs more Nunavut implementation money from the federal government, in part to offset its huge mistakes in human resource management, and to finance the huge costs of fast-tracked decentralization (meaning over one election-term rather than a more reasonable few, which might have allowed for the more orderly redistribution of jobs through attrition and increasing education levels).

The Nunavut government has given us long-term pain for short-term gain, and they’re hoping someone else will pick up the tab. They’re hoping that the critical mass of bureaucratic collapse won’t come till after the next election.

(Name held by request)
Iqaluit