Nunavik leaders press for corrections centre

KANGIRSUK — The inauguration of Nunavik’s first half-way house for returning convicts was mixed affair, one that gave the region’s leadership a reason to celebrate — and a chance to air long-standing frustrations with the Quebec government.

On Tuesday, as Quebec’s minister of public security, Serge Ménard, and Lolly Annahatak, a blind social worker originally from Kangirsuk, cut a seal skin ribbon to mark the official opening of the Makitautik half-way house, a shivering crowd burst into warm applause.

But when it was Makivik Corporation President Pita Aatami’s turn to speak at the ceremony, he criticized the Quebec government, condemning its 25-year delay on fufilling the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement’s promise to build a full-fledged correctional facility in Nunavik.

“We’re thankful we be here, and we were long in coming, [But] we’ve gone half the way,” Aatami said. “It’s just the beginning.”

Former Makivik president and Kangirsuq resident Zebedee Nungak also seized the opportunity to chastise provincial government officials and politicians for not acting more quickly.

Nungak pointed out that the recommendations made by Makivik’s 1993 Inuit justice task force report called for half-way houses in Nunavik, as well as a jail for the region.

“We have a hard time believing pleas of poverty, because we don’t see them in tattered clothing,” said Nungak, brandishing a copy of the report in the direction of the well-dressed Ménard.

Ménard, clad from head to foot in an otter fur coat and hat, did arrive at the opening with a $148,000 cheque for Makitautik, the first installment of its annual contract with the government.

Ménard defended his government’s record, saying it had honoured the James Bay agreement by supplying Nunavimmiut with health and education services.

He also urged Inuit not to be swayed by the American standard of over-incarceration.

According to Ménard, a half-way house is the “proper way to go.” He counselled them to reject the concept jails, which he said represented the worst of the “white man’s” culture.

“We’re worried that you want not only the best, but the worst,” Ménard said.

After a sumptious country foods feast served at Makitautik, Ménard and his assistants again had to spar with regional authorities when they met Makivik’s executive and the Kativik Regional Government’s regional council.

KRG chairman Johnny Adams and Makivik’s Aatami continued to blast the government’s sluggishness in fulfilling the JBNQA.

“You know my philosophy. You know where I stand. I’m not for the building of jails or cells across the Quebec region, no matter where it is,” Ménard told delegates at the meeting.

Ménard later told Nunatsiaq News that health care is eating up Quebec’s budget, but he insisted that lack of money isn’t the reason he doesn’t want to build another jail in Nunavik.

According to Ménard, incarceration rates in southern Quebec are down and he’d like to empty up even more space.

With a prisoner’s average stay in a provincial jail now at 45 days, Ménard doesn’t think another jail would be a good investment of the Quebec government’s limited funds. He said there’s no lack of cells for prisoners who need to be in jail.

“Even if I had 25 million dollars, I’d rather invest in [corrections] personnel than in concrete,” Ménard said.

After some prodding by the gathering on other outstanding issues, Ménard agreed to pay for a third community rehabilitation officer in Nunavik to help reintegrate prisoners who regularly circulate back to the region from correctional insitutions.

He also agreed in principle to lease three jail cells from the new $485,000 police station that the KRG plans to build this summer in Puvirnituq.

The KRG and Makivik agreed to disagree with Ménard on the issue of whether Nunavik needs a detention centre and participate in a so-called “sentence management working group” proposed by Ménard’s department to study alternatives to the construction of another jail.

KRG chairman Adams said the group should look at all “innovative” solutions to keeping Nunavimmiut locked up in the South.

“I’m looking forward to the day when we won’t have to send people down South to be incarcerated,” Adams said.