Grim warning in LIA vote: Final deal may fail

JULIE GREEN
Special to Nunatsiaq News

HAPPY VALLEY-GOOSE BAY — There’s grim warning contained in last week’s vote for the Labrador Inuit Association’s land claim agreement-in-principle: unless the LIA gets more of its members to vote, the final agreement won’t pass.

Those Labrador Inuit beneficiaries who voted last week endorsed their agreement-in-principle by a healthy margin.

About 80 per cent of those who turned out voted Yes. But if ratification had required a majority of all eligible voters — as the final agreement will — then the answer would have been No.

The numer of No votes added to number of non-votes equalled 51 per cent of the total number of members eligible to vote last week.

“If everything were the same, essentially we wouldn’t have an agreement, period,” said Mike Whittington, a former federal negotiator for the LIA claim who spent six years working on land claims in the Yukon.

“There would be no land claim, so self-government agreement, nothing, we would be back to square one,” he said.

Even though 62 per cent of the LIA membership voted Yes on Tuesday, it wasn’t enough.

More than half of the LIA members in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, the community with the largest number of LIA members, decided not to vote.

“We fully realise we have gone to a vote in the summer during people’s holidays, and if there’s any one factor, that would be the factor,” LIA President William Barbour said.

“We now know where we have to work and get members to realize their votes really do count and get them to come out in a bigger way,” he said.

The federal government’s chief negotiator for the LIA claim doesn’t share Barbour’s concerns about the low turnout.

“I think the voter turnout was quite magnificent everywhere, and I don’t have any concerns whatsoever,” said Jim McKenzie. “If this is an indication of support for the AIP, it’s only going to be a larger support at the end, because it’s a good agreement and more people will be familiar with it,” he said.

But Whittington says the LIA worried during AIP negotiations about their ability to get the vote out for the final agreement. “If they’d had their druthers, they wouldn’t be running with this kind of ratification,” he said.

“The LIA would quite clearly prefer a ratification requirement that’s simply 50 per cent of the people who show up,” he said. It’s the federal government that insists of having a majority of eligible voters endorse the final agreement.

“These agreements are effectively causing a surrender of all aboriginal rights, titles and interests and what the federal government doesn’t want to see is someone coming back and taking them to court, and saying ‘no one told me.’ ”

Barbour says he understands that. “For their own peace of mind, governments would be looking in a final agreement for eligible voters getting out there, and that’s what we have to work towards,” he said.

“We would have to work harder and longer than two months in preparation for the final vote,” Barbour said.

Whittington agrees. “They’ll have to spend a lot of money to stimulate public interest in this vote, because they have to demonstrate there was enough information out there that nobody can come back and say ‘I didn’t know.’ ”

If the next vote produces a result like last week’s, the whole land claims process could be thrown into turmoil.

“You could end up with a lame duck agreement when most of the people weren’t opposed to it, but apathetic, then what you have to conclude is that people don’t care,” Whittington said.

Barbour says he’s not sure what would happen if the final agreement didn’t pass.

“We would be in unknown territory,” he said.