Nunavut turns four

Canada’s newest colony, Nunavut, turned four this week, an event marked by a resounding chorus of indifference.

If you blinked, you might have missed it. Or you may have been too busy doing something useful, such as pulling fun April Fool’s jokes on your friends.

It’s understandable that no one in what passes for officialdom in Nunavut bothered to even mention it, though. Because the Nunavut they’re now forced to defend sits many painful steps below the Nunavut everyone thought they were getting.

Of course, we’re not supposed to “celebrate” Nunavut on April 1. That happens every July 9. That’s the day in 1993 when an obscure Tory cabinet minister by the name of Pauline Browes flew to Kugluktuk to proclaim the Nunavut land claims agreement, a legal document that should more accurately be called “the Nunavut land surrender agreement.”

That’s what it is: a surrender of land in exchange for money, certain prescribed rights, the retention of some tracts of land, and the ill-kept promise to create Nunavut contained in Article 4.

July 9 will mark the 10th anniversary of that event, and chastened Nunavut Tunngavik leaders will have the unenviable task of explaining why so little of the money earned by the investment of land claim compensation money is ever likely to be spent on socially useful purposes.

It also marks the expiry date of the implementation contract that’s attached to the land claims agreement. But it’s unlikely that this July 9 will mark the signing of a new implementation contract. NTI, the GN and a federal government that’s rapidly losing interest in Nunavut are still said to be far from reaching consensus. NTI, an organization now able to inspire voter turnouts of only 40 per cent, may have to hire a professional magician to conjure some illusion of success to celebrate on that day.

Meanwhile, the Nunavut government that was created by the words in Article 4 has learned how to walk, but only just — the sickly toddler of Confederation. Its so-called “partner,” the federal government, is, more often than not, a ball and chain permanently attached to its ankle.

Four years after the creation of Nunavut, and 10 years after the proclamation of a land claims agreement once touted as a major instrument of Nunavut’s social and economic development, the social and economic development tools that really matter — education, health care, housing, and access to modern transportation and communications — hardly function in Nunavut.

That’s what real politics are about: education, health care, and housing. Without strength in those things, no group of people anywhere can develop their society to its full potential. Nunavut is no exception. And yet the provision of services in all those areas is still demonstrably weaker now than under the Government of the Northwest Territories.

Even the extra health care money the three territorial premiers negotiated with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has yet to flow. The GN did not include it as projected revenue in its 2003-04 main estimates — and we still don’t know if it’s enough to pay the cost of future demand.

Within the Nunavut Housing Corporation there lies a ticking time bomb — the declining funding agreement between Nunavut and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Right now, Nunavut gets between $50 million and $60 million a year to pay for the operation and maintenance of its social housing stock. In 2020, the year when everyone in Nunavut will be living in Utopia, according to the Bathurst Mandate, that funding will stand at half it’s current level. After 2037, Nunavut will get zero dollars a year to operate and build social housing.

In education, whether it’s the K-12 system, adult vocational training or college and university, there’s no evidence that anyone’s even trying to make a serious difference. But at least the recent mercy killing of the GN’s botched education bill may help to re-focus public attention on real education issues. Nunavut’s biggest education problem isn’t the lack of a made-in-Nunavut education act — it’s the lack of a made-in-Nunavut curriculum, and the lack of any perceptible standards of excellence.

It’s no wonder, then, that no one wants to look when Nunavut’s birthday rolls around.

JB