Nunavut education minister responds to Education Act concerns
“My department offered many opportunities for partners and members of the public to provide feedback and input”
Education Minister David Joanasie consults his laptop while responding to a question on Thursday, Nov. 28, the final day of the Bill 25 hearing. (Photo by Dustin Patar)
Nunavut’s education minister, David Joanasie, found himself in the hot seat last week during the fourth and final day of legislative hearings on Bill 25, an Act to Amend the Education Act and the Inuit Language Protection Act.
For three days, the standing committee on legislation listened to over a half-dozen witnesses speak and answer questions about the bill.
Topics ranged from school schedules and a lack of consultation to the phased implementation approach and the positioning of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit in the bill itself.
While Joanasie was given the opportunity to respond to some questions during the first three days, standing committee members were asked to reserve their questions to the minister for the final day, on Thursday, Nov. 28.
A lack of proper consultation
Even before the hearings started, several Nunavut groups, such as Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. and the Coalition of Nunavut District Education Authorities, expressed their disappointment with the bill, particularly around consultation.
On the final day of the hearing, Joanasie wasted little time offering his department’s response.
“My department offered many opportunities for partners and members of the public to provide feedback and input on the proposed amendment.”
After the bill was introduced during the legislative assembly’s spring sitting in June, the public was invited to make submissions to the committee.
“As a department, it was our expectation that our partners would openly tell us what they wanted to see in the bill when we consulted with them. Instead, we received many requests to either delay consultations or to participate in the drafting of the bill,” said Joanasie.
On the first day of the hearing, Aluki Kotierk, president of NTI, expressed her concern that they weren’t involved enough in the legislation.
“We had wanted to help in the laying out of the foundation…. We had been asked only after the foundation had been laid out. We were welcomed to participate in the public engagements.”
As a result, in its written response submitted before the hearings, NTI called for the government to withdraw Bill 25, proposing a new draft bill called the Nunavut Inuit Education Fundamental Reform Act.
According to Thomas Ahlfors, the legislative counsel for the Government of Nunavut, who also spoke to the standing committee on the final day of the hearings, there are two key reasons why NTI and other non-governmental organizations weren’t involved in drafting the legislation, the first being timeliness.
“I would assume this bill would have been delayed by at least a year if we had done that,” said Ahlfors.
The second reason centred on the specialized nature of legislative drafting within law.
“It takes about seven years to train a lawyer to become a fully-fledged drafter,” said Ahlfors.
And from a perspective of drafting clarity, Ahlfors said that the submissions were “not even close” to being appropriate. He highlighted the use of the word “ambitious” in the NTI bill, which he said does not have a legal meaning.
“I actually verified it does not exist in a single piece of legislation in this entire country.”
The consequences of phased implementation
Bill 25 calls for a phased implementation of Inuit-language instruction over a maximum period of 20 years, an approach that some found unacceptable.
NTI’s proposed solution to the phased implementation was stated in their draft bill: “The Minister shall, in partnership with Nunavut Tunngavik Inc, develop and implement a new timetable for phasing in Inuktut Language of Instruction from kindergarten to Grade 12.”
Similar concerns were also echoed on day three of the hearings by the Office of the Languages Commissioner of Nunavut.
“The provisions of Bill 25 that aim to delay the full and comprehensive implementation of Inuit language instruction go against the very foundations of the inherent Indigenous language rights of the Inuit,” said Karliin Aariak, acting languages commissioner in her opening comments.
Responding to these concerns, Joanasie clarified, “This does not mean that the department will delay Inuit language instruction until 2039.”
He added: “It also does not mean the department will stop the Inuit language instruction that is currently being delivered in Nunavut classrooms.”
He also noted that according to section four of the bill’s schedule, the Department of Education “is required to produce the curricula and all its associated resources as soon as possible, not just by the end of the deadlines listed.”
Towards the end of the session, John Main, MLA for Arviat North–Whale Cove and the chairman of the hearing, acknowledged that work on the act has gone on for years, “before I was an MLA, before the current minister was a minister,” he said.
Main then read the last paragraph of a 2015 review of the Education Act written by a special committee that he described as “our legislative ancestors.”
“This special committee wishes to emphasize that the delivery of an education system is too important to be driven primarily by political idealism.”
To which Main asked Joanasie, “Is the department, is the minister, trying to correct the education system to make it based more around practical, realistic and attainable goals?”
Joanasie replied, “Yes, to the extent possible we are wanting to have a practical, realistic and attainable legislative framework to work with.”
Throughout the final day of the hearing, Joanasie also answered a number of questions stemming from conversations earlier in the week, including concerns raised by Pat Angnakak, MLA for Iqaluit-Niaqunnguu, about increases to principals’ and teachers’ workloads.
According to Joanasie, the reporting requirement for principals wouldn’t increase.
Concerns have been raised about how the act recommends that principals file inclusive education reports to the local DEAs every quarter. But these reports would be made in place of some monthly reports already being filed to DEAs, said Joanasie.
At the same time, the minister acknowledged that the Department of Education does need to consider concerns raised by the Nunavut Teachers’ Association about increased teachers’ workloads. The bill calls for homeroom teachers to be responsible for developing and evaluating individual student support plans, rather than this work being shared by multiple education staff.
“I think this is something we need to work out better,” said Joanasie.
As the proceedings wrapped up, Main acknowledged that the standing committee’s work isn’t over.
The committee will need to submit a report with its findings and recommendations to the legislature before the bill can be further considered by the committee of the whole.
This whole process was disappointing to watch, both the GN’s bill which took the safest, most conservative route possible to implement k-12 inukitut education, and its detractors who shamelessly spread falsehoods about the bill and the government as a whole. Lots of internet propaganda and NTI and DEA staff stuffing the written submission box.
Yes, your comment pretty much nails it.
The GN: total lack of imagination, no ability to communicate to the public about what they are doing, no co-ordination with NTEP or Arctic College or with parents and employers and teachers.
NTI and DEA coalition: Falsehoods, misinformation, childish fantasizing and sickening hypocrisy.
They’ve all been droning away on this for getting on twenty years and not one single new idea from anybody.
The two biggest problems are, 1) no co-ordination with NTEP or NAC to train more teachers, 2) NTI’s total reliance on white people in southern Canada and Europe who have never lived in Nunavut or ever taught a class in Nunavut, resulting in completely ridiculous unworkable ideas.
Inuktitut has become the language of second class citizenship. Here’s why.
There would have been some hope of language preservation if Inuit had been enabled for anything approaching an all-Inuit workforce in their own lands, for professionals like engineers, accountants, doctors, dentists, and geologists. With that not having happened there’s no reasonable near-term expectation of more than 20 percent Inuit employment in the mines, and then only for jobs requiring lesser skills.
Given that Inuit have owned First Air since 1989, why doesn’t have anything close to an all-Inuit workforce, including all the pilots, mechanics and accountants?
To put it bluntly then, Inuktitut is now the language of holders of second class jobs and welfare recipients, and for that reason the language of second class citizenship.
Many countries have languages of the home and English as the language of business and commerce. They include multilingual, multi-ethnic India and multilingual, multi-ethnic Singapore. Factories now run in English in France and Germany.
The difference between those languages and Inuktitut is that Inuktitut isn’t standardized. No one will take the language seriously if there’s no mechanism to use it in a technical setting and be understood by people from all regions.
You can have community dialects, but until people come together and put together some rules for “government speak”, then it’ll always be second place when it comes to business and bureaucracy. The way people speak German or French in an office is very different from the way they speak it at home.
An all Inuit work force is a fantasy and not even desirable, nor does it reflect the realities of labour mobility across the globe.
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Nunavut’s #1 export should be its people. Its communities are veritable prisons with little to no hope of economic integration into the global.or national economy. It is.this hopelessness that underpins a large measure of its suicide crisis, let alone its social dysfunction.
Looks like NU is doing well
Look into improving Academic programs in school’s and colleges including employments. Hire teachers with Qualifications and Experience, and who are welling to teach in classes in Academic programs NOT programs relevant to Students learning i.e. cooking, cultural programs, outdoor activities or games in classes. Today school’s in Nunavut is becoming of a circus without structure’s in place or coordination.
What are basic’s taught in classes and is it related to students learning to succeed in post-secondary programs? What are curriculum programs taught in classes? Can a student read and write and do mathematics in order to apply for post-secondary? These are basics where Education should focus on to identify weaknesses and challenges in Education. Suggestions!?!
I have questions about NTI’s proposal for a rapid transition to Inuktut as Language of Instruction (LOI). Theoretically, if all communities had Inuktut as the LOI, and Inuktut is being spoken at home, then Nunavut residents will have to then take up English as a second language. This puts Inuit at a distinct disadvantage for participating in the larger Canadian and global economies. Has this been thought through? Given the poor school attendance rates, should a return to 100% Inuktut speaking communities be the goal? Is that really what’s best for future generations, or is it based in sentimentality and a fear of losing the language. I wonder if there are more balanced models of language preservation that don’t set up new barriers to young Inuit to thrive in the larger world.
The other big topic I see not discussed is the student attendance problem. From my view, the lack of attendance is not only due to Southern/irrelevant curricula, but also due to traditional culture values that did not esteem formal education. When elders would rather see their grandchildren learn traditional skills, combined with parents who also don’t have any higher education, combined with local job opportunities that also don’t require education… what is the point of staying in school? There are so many forces working against student attendance.
Traditional Inuit values esteem preparing for the future, but on the ground, that looks like food, shelter and clothing. The traditional mindset is extremely different than the Southern mindset of thinking decades in advance, pushing students to build toward post-secondary education, encouraging children to think about what they want to be when they grow up… the cultural differences around education incentives are profoundly important to this challenge.
All of this makes me wonder, what is the goal of the Inuit? Schools and structured education are a European invention. Should success for an Inuit society mean success by Southern standards, of education, employment, career, and home ownership? Which aspects of Southern “success” should Inuit include in their vision for their society? This is a high-level conversation that I have not seen. And without a long-term vision of how a modern Inuit culture looks, debates over how to move forward will always ensue.
Further challenging here is that Inuit, like any group, are not homogeneous in their desires, perspectives and opinions. Some would prioritize economic development with all the comforts and conveniences of the South, while others would prefer a simpler like still focused on traditional values. I don’t believe that NTI or any organization can put forward a plan that “represents all Inuit”, because “all Inuit” would never agree on a single vision.