Government should withdraw Education Act

It’s time for the government of Nunavut to admit the obvious.

Bill 1, which if passed would become Nunavut’s new Education Act, is badly flawed. And it’s so badly flawed that its appears unlikely that departmental officials and MLAs will have enough time to fix it before Nunavut’s next territorial election, which almost certainly will be held about a year from now.

Nunavut’s commissioner of official languages, Eva Aariak, pointed out recently that the bill doesn’t provide any clear legal requirement for Inuktitut and Inuinaqtun to be taught in Nunavut’s schools. That, on its own, ought to make the education bill unacceptable to an overwhelming majority of Nunavut residents.

At the same time, Dyan Adam, Canada’s commissioner of official languages, along with lawyers representing Nunavut francophones, has said the bill may be illegal — because it violates education rights guaranteed to francophone minorities in the Charter of Rights.

On top of that, the bill contains governance provisions that appear to take various small powers and responsibilities away from Nunavut district education authorities — the current name for Nunavut’s elected school advisory committees — and give them to the minister of education.

For example, right now the Education Act allows district education authorities some leeway in deciding at what age children should start school. But the new bill would make school attendance mandatory for all children aged five to 18, no matter where they live.

So, at the lower end of the age scale, district education authorities lose a little bit of power. And at the other end of the age scale, the government may end up enshrining a well-intentioned unenforceable school attendance rule.

Like many of the issues that Bill 1 raises, the age-range at which children should be compelled to go to school is a legitimate political issue, and reasonable people may hold a variety of different opinions about it. Similarly, reasonable people can be expected to hold different opinions about whether local school committees should exercise more or less power, or if they even should exist at all.

But the Nunavut government’s long, confused process for developing the education bill has made little room for that kind of discussion. The government has been either unable or unwilling to communicate what’s in the bill, what makes it different than the current education law or why we need a new law in the first place.

And where the new bill differs from the current law, the government has done nothing to explain why those changes are in the bill, or even what purposes they’re intended to serve. The department of education has attempted to change a major piece of legislation without the benefit of a communications strategy, and without the benefit of a political strategy to win the support of the public — or the support of those MLAs whose votes will be needed to turn the bill into law.

When asked why Nunavut needs a new Education Act, the government usually responds with a shallow slogan — that we need a “made-in-Nunavut” act.

But why do we need a “made-in-Nunavut” Education Act? Right now, the government can’t answer that question — which probably explains why Bill 1 is such a weak and incoherent piece of legislation.

Until it can answer that question, it should withdraw the bill from consideration in the legislature, and not re-introduce it until after the next territorial election.

In the meantime, the education department should try to figure out what it wants the school system to do, then communicate that vision to the public and ensure that it’s reflected within a new Education Act. This is particularly important for Inuktitut-language education and literacy issues. Thoughtful Nunavut residents are getting tired of endless preaching about the sanctity of the Inuit language from a government that seems unable to find a way to either teach it or support it in new legislation.

JB