DSD minister to call Nunavut-wide meeting on proposed Wildlife Act

Olayuk Akesuk, Nunavut’s minister of sustainable development, has directed his staff to begin work on a Nunavut-wide meeting of all wildlife stakeholders to talk about Bill 35, the government’s proposed new wildlife act.

Akesuk made the decision only two days after Baker Lake MLA Glenn McLean confronted him with a direct challenge: call the meeting or risk seeing Bill 35 go down in flames.

The meeting would bring together all Nunavut hunters and trappers organizations, the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. and members of the legislative assembly’s standing committee on sustainable development.

McLean and the MLAs on his committee asked for the meeting after they found that few HTO members understood the wildlife bill well enough to say whether they support it.

“They need to get the HTOs, who are elected, together in a room, and explain it to them clause by clause. They need two or three days to digest it,” McLean said.

The committee came to that conclusion after holding three regional meetings with hunters and trappers organizations in the Baffin, Kivalliq and Kitikmeot.

Akesuk agrees with the conclusions reached by McLean and his committee.

“I have directed my staff to look into that for me, before the session, if possible, and to have a four- or five-day conference with the HTOs to go clause by clause so that the people will understand what we have done,” Akesuk said in an interview this week.

HTO members told McLean’s committee that government officials have not spent enough time with them to explain the bill.

“It was rushed. I don’t think they went clause by clause, page by page with the HTOs,” he said.

The committee has yet to table a written report summarizing the work it has done on Bill 35.

But if Nunavut’s proposed new wildlife law fails to win the committee’s support, it’s highly unlikely the assembly would pass it into law before the next election.

Bill 35 received first and second reading on March 28. Then it was referred to McLean’s committee for more study. After the legislative assembly resumes on Oct. 21, Nunavut MLAs are to consider the bill for third reading.

“We’re still continuing to talk and improve the act, and we would really like to see it in committee of the whole in October before third reading. We will do our best to make sure that we educate the people who haven’t had a chance to read the whole document,” Akesuk said.

The Oct. 21 session will likely be the last time the current legislative assembly will sit before dissolving in time for the Feb. 16 general election.

Unlike some other pieces of legislation, the government conducted a lengthy consultation exercise before drafting the new law, and officials with the NWMB and NTI even took part in writing it.

“The act itself is one of a kind, I believe,” Akesuk said.

Language – especially dialect differences – is another reason HTO members in Kivalliq and Kitikmeot couldn’t understand the materials they were given to help them understand the wildlife bill.

Those materials were translated into the Inuit language, from English, mostly by translators using Baffin dialects.

“It was a major, major issue in the Kitikmeot. And it was a big issue in the Kivalliq. I don’t want to blame the interpreters, but they said that with the poor translation, it was difficult to get input from unilingual members of HTOs,” said McLean.

Another linguistic problem was created by a set of Inuit language principles contained in an interpretative section at the beginning of the bill, called “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit.”

It’s a list of 13 “guiding principles and concepts” that must be used when applying the new wildlife law – which would make it the first Nunavut-made law to define Inuit cultural values within its text.

“The bill addresses wildlife management in a way that fully takes into account Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. Inuit values and principles must be followed in a way that makes the bill especially relevant to Nunavummiut,” a summary of the act reads.

But McLean said at least some of the Inuktitut words used to represent those 13 principles and concepts are different than Inuktitut words that would be used within the various dialects of the Kivalliq and Kitikmeot regions.

He praised the department of sustainable development, however, for its willingness to hand over any information that his committee requested.

“I’ll tell you one thing. The department was very forthcoming in giving us all the information we asked for. There was reams and reams of community consultation. But when it came down to talking directly to the HTOs, they were rushed.”