Premier replaces veteran GN mandarins

IQALUIT — Two veteran territorial bureaucrats are quitting their jobs next week in a set of high-level staff changes announced by the Nunavut premier’s office.

Katherine Trumper, Nunavut’s deputy minister of sustainable development, will quit Sept. 7.

She’s held that job since the spring of 1998, when former Interim Commisioner Jack Anawak hired her a year in advance of division.

Alex Campbell, Nunavut Tunngavik’s first executive director, will replace Trumper Sept. 1.

Many Nunavummiut remember Campbell for his time spent as NTI’s top administrator. He became the organization’s executive director in 1993, shortly after NTI replaced the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut in 1993, and served until 1998.

After that, Campbell became Saskatchewan’s deputy minister of northern development, the job that he’s leaving in order to return to Nunavut.

Nunavut’s sustainable development department, created after a forced marriage between the old pre-division departments of Economic Development and Renewable Resources, has been a target of loud and sustained criticism over the past two years.

Hunters and other Inuit beneficiaries have protested the department’s attempts to stop a Coral Harbour man from hunting a polar bear with a spear.

Nunavut Tungavik launched a legal action against the Nunavut government over the issue, alleging that the sustainable development department violated the man’s Inuit hunting rights as set out in the Nunavut land claim agreement.

Ken MacRury, a 30-year veteran, will retire from the public service August 31. MacRury’s most recent job was deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs.

After a stint as executive director of the Baffin Regional Health Board, MacRury was appointed to run Nunavut’s health and social services department in the spring of 1998, but departed from that job after Iqaluit East MLA Ed Picco became minister of the department in 1999.

The government of Nunavut will hold a job competition to fill the position that MacRury left vacant.

Paul McKinstrey, a former federal official who has served as Premier Paul Okalik’s principal secretary for the past year, left his job in July.

Robert Carson, now the director of policy within the Department of Executive and Intergovernmental Affairs, will replace McKinstrey in the powerful principal secretary’s position on Sept. 4.

Carson joined the government of Nunavut in October, 2000. Before that he taught at the School of Legal and Public Administration in Toronto’s Seneca College, and was a special assistant to a member of Parliament.

The president of Nunavut Arctic College, Johnny Kusugak, is quitting his job in October.

Kusugak has said that he is unwilling to move from Rankin Inlet to Arviat, where the new Arctic College head office will be set up.

Arctic College has now begun a search for a new president.