Quotes of the year

So James Arvaluk, the disgraced ex-MLA for Nanulik, after a judge sentenced him to nine months in jail for beating up his ex-girlfriend: “I’m not the one who wanted to get into a fight. It was me who was trying to prevent it.”

* Brian Jones, the chief of the Kativik Regional Police Force, on Nunavik’s huge illegal drug market: “The more we look for, the more we find.”
* Prime Minister Paul Martin, at a press conference in Iqaluit this summer: “I think that a northern vision is an essential part of the Canadian vision.”
* Keith Peterson, Cambridge Bay’s newly-elected MLA, commenting on the premiership contest just one day after the Feb. 16 territorial election: “The jockeying has already begun.”
* Terry Ryan, a long-time advisor to the Cape Dorset co-op, on the proliferation of junk carvings of inuksuks and polar bears, and the GN’s neglect of Inuit art: “It would be a real shame if Inuit art would have to be rediscovered 50 years from now.”
* Candace Ikey, a Kuujjuaq resident who talked to Nunatsiaq News last year about the damage done by her town’s two community-owned bars: “I’m not kidding. It’s an open bar in this town. You’re not going to see nothing but drinking. You cannot walk down this town without walking into drunks. It’s sad. It’s pathetic.”
* Gerry Ward, the embattled CEO of the Baffin Fisheries’ Coalition, on internal squabbles that are threatening to blow the organization apart: “I’ve been married for 20 years and, hey, I have a fight occasionally. But I also make-up as many times as I have a fight, you know?”
* Ian Fremantle, the City of Iqaluit’s CAO, on Iqaluit’s money-losing recycling program, the only one of its kind in the eastern Arctic: “I don’t have the money to continue with recycling. Some other service is going to have to be reduced to continue this.”
* Lucie Idlout, Nunavut’s award-winning rock singer: “I want to be able to write and be putting out albums until the day I die.”
* Harbir Boparai, a former territorial government worker of South Asian descent who alleges that senior GN officials fired him on racist grounds: “Nunavut is the most racist place I’ve been to.”
* Mikaela Engel, Greenland’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, commenting on how the cancellation of scheduled airline flights forces people to travel though Europe and southern Canada to get between Nunavut and Greenland: “You can’t uphold the thought that Nunavut is our neighbour, because in effect it’s two continents away even if it’s only an hour away. It’s extremely silly that we don’t have that connection.”
* Yvon Lévesque, the newly-elected Bloc Québécois MP for Abitibi-Nunavik: “I’m not surprised people in Nunavik didn’t vote for me because they have never met me, and I can understand that. Now that I’m elected, I will go and meet them.”
* Charlie Adams, the popular Nunavik singer, describing how he was run over by a car while sleeping in an alley in Montreal: “I was lying there sleeping. The first wheel passed over me and I started yelling to the guy because I’m in pain and all that, and the second wheel stopped right on top of my stomach.”
* Pam Ruzzo, the girlfriend of missing Rhode Island hunter James Rambone, explaining why she believes he’s still alive: “Jim could have amnesia caused by a severe seizure and may be with someone and they don’t know who he is and nothing reported of him missing.”