Ottawa must spend on training to comply with land claim, NTI says

Officials with Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI) say that unless the federal government spends far more money on Inuit training than it does now, governments will never be able to comply with Article 23 of the Nunavut land claims agreement, and many Nunavut Inuit will never benefit from government jobs.

But it remains to be seen how Ottawa will respond to an NTI proposal that would see Nunavut benefit from a massive infusion of new training money.

NTI and the governments of Canada and Nunavut are now in the midst of negotiations aimed at creating a new implementation contract for the land claims agreement.

The implementation contract is a legally binding agreement that sets out rules for how and when the land claims agreement will be carried out, and who should pay for what. The current 10-year implementation deal, signed on May 25, 1993, expires this spring.

John Lamb, NTI’s executive director, says the organization wants the new 10-year contract to deal with the most urgent implementation failures of the first 10 years.

One of the most serious of those, Lamb says, is government’s lack of compliance with the Inuit employment provisions of Article 23. The worst offender is the federal government, where Inuit staffing levels in Nunavut now stand at only 33 per cent and are in rapid decline.

At the Government of Nunavut, Inuit staffing levels are stuck at 41 per cent, and are declining more slowly.

“In the GN, it’s static and slightly declining, and for the federal one it’s gone down quite significantly,” says John Bainbridge, who works on implementation issues at NTI.

To fix that, NTI is proposing that Ottawa commit itself to paying for a major training initiative — within the implementation contract — over the next 10 years.

To back up the position that they’ve taken into the implementation talks, NTI and the Government of Nunavut asked consultant PriceWaterhouseCoopers to calculate the economic costs of government’s Article 23 compliance failures.

Although that study isn’t finished yet, NTI is already talking publicly about some of its findings, such as:

• DIAND’s Inuit staffing rate on April 1, 1999, was 61 per cent, and now sits at only 27 per cent.

• The Nunavut economy loses at least $140 million a year in lost wages and benefits because of jobs that must be filled by migrant workers from the South.

• The federal government’s Inuit staffing rate in Nunavut is only 33 per cent, and is in rapid decline.

• Government spends more than $30 million a year on social support for the unemployed and on special recruitment and retention costs because of its inability to find qualified Inuit staff.

• Most Inuit workers are employed at the lower echelons of government; higher positions are dominated by non-Inuit.

• Training opportunities are drying up, because support for Arctic College is shrinking.

• A whopping 38 per cent of working-age people in Nunavut are either looking for work and can’t find a job, or have given up looking for work altogether.

NTI’s position is that the biggest reason for this is the lack of post-secondary education and vocational training for Nunavut Inuit.

“The vast majority of the jobs that would have to be filled by Inuit in the GN and the federal government in order to bring up the representative levels require some form of post-secondary educational training,” Bainbridge said.

“What they’ve found right now is that the labour force is exhausted of skilled and trained people, so they have to import from the South. So what we’re saying is, we have to train people locally and that will create significant demand for college training here, and there will be multiplied benefits from that.”

Bainbridge says that the PriceWaterhouseCoopers study will show that the cost of a 10-year Inuit training program is actually less than the cost of not having one.

But federal officials have yet to provide a clear response to NTI’s proposal, though they did participate with the GN and NTI in the PriceWaterhouseCoopers study.