Inuk victim of decentralization wants redress

When Nunavut was born, Norman Koonoo believed all the promises – but now he says his territorial government lied and cheated to deprive him of his rights and his job.

“I am Inuit and I am not the same as a southerner. The Government did not care about this, and fired me from my job, then lied and said that I had resigned, so that they could make it look good, and so they could cheat me out of my rights,” Koonoo says in a complaint filed this past June with the Nunavut Human Rights Tribunal.

Documents that Nunatsiaq News obtained last week, from a source who wishes to remain anonymous, show that Koonoo was booted off the GN’s payroll and evicted from his staff housing unit last year – with no severance pay – after his decentralized position was decentralized for a second time.

A GN bureaucrat by the name of Tom Critelli, then the acting deputy minister of Community Government and Services, sent Koonoo a registered letter in August of 2004, saying, “you will be removed from the Government of Nunavut’s payroll and deemed to have resigned.”

But Kunuk says he did not resign and that the GN failed in its obligation to find a “reasonable alternative job offer” – an option that he chose under the GN’s decentralization program.

Koonoo, a married father of five children, has been unemployed since Aug. 31, 2004, with no hope of finding another job soon. He also says he waited 11 months for GN bureaucrats to give him a “record of employment” document, which meant that he couldn’t apply for EI until just recently.

In September of 2004, the Nunavut Employees’ Union filed a grievance on Koonoo’s behalf, saying that in dismissing him with no severance, the GN violated the Public Service Act, the GN’s collective agreement with the NEU, and GN promises made under the decentralization program.

The grievance will be dealt with at an arbitration hearing to be held in Iqaluit between Sept. 14 and Sept. 16.

This past June, the NEU also filed Koonoo’s complaint, which Koonoo wrote himself in Inuktitut and English, with the Nunavut Human Rights Tribunal.

Koonoo’s travails began in February of 2001, when he started work as a property management officer with the former Department of Public Works. He was a part of a regional work unit that the GN had decentralized from Iqaluit to Pond Inlet.

In an interview last week, Koonoo says he was happy to be working in his home community.

But all that changed in May of 2002.

The GN told Koonoo that his job was to be decentralized for a second time, from Pond Inlet to Cape Dorset.

That’s because the GN rejigged its old Department of Public Works, moving its regional staff housing management function under the wing of the Nunavut Housing Corp, to a decentralized office located in Cape Dorset. The remnants of the old DPW were then renamed “the Department of Community Government and Services.”

Koonoo responded by telling his employer that he did not want to move to Cape Dorset.

“I am an Inuit man with strong ties to the community of Pond Inlet. I am not like a non-Inuit person who has no ties to their community. I did not wish to leave Pond Inlet,” Koonoo says in his human rights complaint.

Like all other GN employees faced with an order to relocate, Koonoo was handed a copy of the GN’s Decentralization Information Handbook.

The handbook gives decentralized employees three choices:

* accept the new job and move to the new community at the GN’s expense;
* request a reasonable alternative job offer – “Every attempt will be made to find the employee a reasonable job offer,” the GN’s handbook says. The handbook also says any employee who refuses a reasonable offer will be “eligible for severance pay.”
* resign from the GN and apply for “separation pay.”

Koonoo chose the second option, known as “Option B,” and ticked off his choice in a form sent May 16, 2002 to Tom Thompson, the assistant deputy minister of human resources at that time.

Then he waited.

But instead of getting a “reasonable alternative job offer,” Koonoo spent the next two years in a bureaucratic twilight zone.

Koonoo says he received little or no written communication of any kind from the GN during most of that period. He remained on the GN’s payroll, continued to report for work, even though there was no actual work to do, he did “cleaning and odd jobs.”

Somebody phoned him once to talk about a mentorship program. He said he was interested in it, but the voice on the phone never got back to him. And after a year and a half, he was told that that the GN needed his office space.

Then, in a letter dated Aug. 12, 2004 the GN told Koonoo that “he is deemed to have resigned.”

They also gave him until Sept. 14, 2004 to move his family out of their staff housing unit.

Koonoo refused to move, since he had nowhere else to go. He stayed in his staff unit for another seven months, until a housing association unit was ready for Koonoo and his family.

“I thought the Nunavut government was created to be more representative of the people they serve… and they conned me out of my job,” Koonoo said in an interview.