Recycled puppy food

Have you ever seen how a female dog or wolf will sometimes put food into her stomach and then vomit the partially digested stuff back out for her pups to eat?

That’s what the government of Nunavut did for us this week in its speech from the throne, read before the Regurgitative Assembly of Nunavut in Iqaluit this past Tuesday. It’s a pre-digested mish-mash of vague items ingested from the past government’s agenda, then spewed back out to the public.

Throne speeches are supposed to outline the government’s plans and priorities for the coming year. One hopes, normally, that a new government might manage to produce some new plans and new ideas, especially a government that’s been in office for seven months.

But the recycled contents of this throne speech reveal that this government has no new plans and no new ideas. Except for two or three minor announcements, there is virtually nothing in this speech that we haven’t heard many, many times before.

Take language and culture, for example. The throne speech says “your government is working on new language legislation.” We already knew that. Indeed, we’ve been waiting for an amended Official Languages Act since 1999. And we’ve been waiting almost as long to see if the government will also introduce an Inuktitut protection act.

The same goes for their promise to start planning for a new territorial museum, or heritage centre. Again, this project — which must be carried out to comply with the Nunavut land claims agreement — has been “worked on” since at least 1999. No news there, especially when you consider that the GN has not said that they will actually build it.

The economic development section of the speech is equally vacuous — and hypocritical. The speech brags, for example, that the Nunavut fishery is “on the threshold of expansion” and that its “outlook is strong.”

But just two weeks ago, MPs on the House of Commons fisheries committee began a major probe of the GN-sponsored Baffin Fisheries Coalition and its turbot quota. Around the same time, Jose Kusugak, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, issued a stern condemnation of the trawling methods used by most of the BFC’s boats.

Where is the GN’s political strategy for handling these criticisms? You won’t find it in the throne speech. But if the GN can’t find one, the BFC, along with the GN’s hopes for the fishery, could end up being destroyed. This is an issue that could get very ugly, very quickly, but there’s no sign the GN is even aware of what’s going on.

In other areas, such as health care, education, justice, and housing, there are long lists of things that the government either announced long ago, or which the public knows about already through other means.

To be fair, there’s the odd new announcement scattered here and there among the sludge: one 24-hour care centre for elders per year, a new law to help victims of family violence, one more correctional healing facility, and an energy conservation campaign.

The Nunavut government used the mouth of the commissioner, Peter Irniq, to fill the air with words for an hour. It’s too bad they had so little to say. JB