Federal justice minister must act now

Justice Robert Kilpatrick, who as senior judge serves as the Nunavut court’s administrative head, had no choice but to send an urgent plea for help last month to Rob Nicholson, the federal justice minister.

“Nunavut’s judiciary is moved to seek additional assistance by a sense of urgency, and a perception of impending crisis,” Kilpatrick said.

As many of you may have already read, Kilpatrick asked Nicholson to head off this impending crisis by hiring two more judges for the Nunavut court. Given the grim but rather obvious facts that Kilpatrick used to support his proposal, this is the least that Ottawa can do.

Before April 1, 1999, the Government of the Northwest Territories used six judges to serve the three Nunavut regions.

But between 1999 and 2001, the Nunavut court used only two judges to serve the same area. And eleven years after 1999, the court still uses only four judges to serve an even larger population in which the rate of crime, especially violent crime, escalates each year at a chilling pace. This is why Nunavut will fly in about 40 short-term deputy judges this year to keep the court system from falling apart. Most, though not all, of these deputy judges are unfamiliar with Nunavut’s history, culture and languages.

The staggering Nunavut crime numbers that produce this need aren’t news anymore. Statistics Canada has published them every summer since the territory’s birth. But when you consider the human suffering that lies behind it all, those numbers never cease to astonish.

In the three years between 1999 and 2001, when the per capita crime rate stood lower than today’s, the tiny Nunavut court handled 17,489 Criminal Code charges. This included eight homicides and 4,868 assault charges, among them 642 sexual assaults, 20 aggravated assaults and 383 “level two,” or more serious forms of assault.

In the seven years between 2002 and 2009, Nunavut residents killed, beat and sexually molested each other at a even greater per capita rate. In those years, the court handled 30 more homicides, 50 more attempted murders, 166 aggravated assaults, 2,059 sexual assaults, 2,340 level-two assaults and an astonishing 23,343 common assaults.

This originates, all of it, within a population of only 32,000 people. And yet it’s not unusual for many Nunavut residents, including far too many leaders, to claim that crime in Nunavut is no worse than in any other part of Canada.

This is a hallucinogenic delusion, held by people who watch way too much television. In the rest of Canada, crime is in decline. The safest environments in the country are to be found on the streets of big cities and their suburbs. The most dangerous environments are to be found inside the family home, and nowhere is the family home more dangerous than in Nunavut, one of the few jurisdictions in Canada where crime still rises.

For example, the Nunavut rate of domestic violence against female victims is 13 times greater than the national average. The Nunavut rate of sexual assault is 10 times the national average.

All this mayhem has led to a crisis that extends far beyond the territory’s grossly overburdened judiciary. All justice-related agencies in the territory are stretched to their limits, perhaps even beyond what their overworked employees are able to bear.

Justice Canada’s prosecution service in Nunavut is supposed to employ 15 Crown lawyers. Right now, only nine of those jobs are filled, partly because Justice Canada pays its prosecutors less than what most provincial governments pay theirs. Nunavut’s legal aid service suffers perpetual turnover, as streams of underpaid recruits move in to replace older streams of burned-out lawyers who can’t escape Nunavut’s insanity fast enough.

As for the RCMP, last month Chief Superintendent Steve McVarnock told Nunatsiaq News his division operates in a constant state of “crisis management.” This is no exaggeration. Nunavut’s firmly-entrenched culture of mindless binge drinking produces more work than the RCMP can handle.

In Gjoa Haven, a so-called dry community with a population of only 1,300, the two-member detachment responded to 1,455 complaints in 2009. In late July, the phone at the Cape Dorset detachment started ringing only two hours after a slew of booze orders landed. The detachment’s three members worked 24 hours without sleep. A similar eruption took place a few days before that in Pangnirtung, another so-called dry community.

All this is compounded by the lack of any viable social infrastructure. Many social work and counselling jobs lie empty for many months and the territory doesn’t even have a substance abuse treatment centre. As we all know now, Nunavut’s biggest correctional centre has degenerated into an over-crowded hell-hole.

As long as the majority of Nunavut leaders maintain their willful state of denial about all this, there’s no point in hoping for future improvements. So stop hoping. Help is not on the way.

In the meantime, the federal government, which is responsible for appointing Nunavut judges, should at least take steps to prevent the collapse of the territory’s judiciary.

Canada can afford to hire two more judges for Nunavut, The federal justice minister should act now to grant Justice Kilpatrick’s modest request. JB