Say what? Mental health, nation-building and a lot of housing

This story is the last in a series about Nunavut’s sixth legislative assembly through an analysis of Hansard, the official record of debate in the legislature

Housing has by far been the most ubiquitous issue that Nunavut MLAs have discussed over the past four years.

The issue was brought up by MLAs more than 7,200 times in the four years of the sixth legislative assembly between 2021 and 2025. Nunavut 3000, the last government’s $2.6-billion plan to build 3,000 homes by 2030, was mentioned 243 times.

“Housing is something that is near and dear to all our hearts,” former housing minister Lorne Kusugak told the legislative assembly in November 2024, while giving an update on the status of the government’s public unit builds.

In 19 out of 25 communities, the need for public housing was classified as “critical” by the housing corporation in its 2023-24 annual report, with Nunavummiut sometimes staying on housing wait-lists for more than 10 years.

The report noted that poor living conditions contribute to other social issues.

“I know I’ve said we will stumble, we will fall, but we will get back up again and we will keep going,” Kusugak said about housing in 2024.

A few months later, the federal auditor general would present its audit of Nunavut housing, highlighting lack of transparency, poor maintenance of existing housing  and “considerable challenges” to Nunavut 3000.

As a new group of MLAs continue working in Iqaluit for the first sitting of the seventh legislative assembly that opened March 5, Nunatsiaq News looked through 145 Hansard documents covering the four years of the previous assembly to find out which issues were most pressing to the last crop of Nunavut legislators.

After housing, mental health was the most talked-about issue. Suicide, which the last government reaffirmed as a “crisis,” was mentioned 749 times.

Child care — another subject of the auditor general’s damning report into the Nunavut government — was mentioned 383 times.

Reconciliation, despite being a major topic of national conversation, got only 91 mentions in Nunavut’s assembly with impacts of the territory’s colonial past mostly mentioned by the former minister of education as an obstacle to high school attendance.

“Ensuring that we’re able to teach not just our school community but also encourage our parents and everyone that attending school and going to school is a safe place,” Pamela Gross said in March 2023, adding there’s “hesitancy because of the colonial impacts from residential schools.”

The attendance rate across Nunavut’s 45 schools was 69 per cent in the 2023-24 school year, according to the Department of Education.

Aging infrastructure was also a big topic of conversation, with water treatment plants getting 308 mentions and power plants receiving 686.

Substance abuse was also among the most-discussed issues with alcohol mentioned 530 times, beer and wine stores 62 times and drugs 141.

“Magic mushrooms” got a single mention, by Baker Lake MLA Craig Simailak, who pointed out this was the “street name” for the psychedelic substance formally referred to as psilocybin.

In the territory where sexual assault rates are nearly six times higher than the national average, in what has been referred to as an “unrelenting plague,” sexual violence was mentioned just over 80 times.

MLAs would also often tap into the national conversation.

Barely used a few years ago, the phrase “nation-building” has become an essential part of Canada’s political lingo, especially since U.S. President Donald Trump started a second term in office in January 2025 and wasted no time before musing on plans to overtake Canada.

Now, nation-building and Nunavut-specific projects were brought up over 200 times in the territory’s sixth legislative assembly.

“We have to seize this moment, and we do see an opportunity for nation-building to happen from coast to coast, and then to the northern coast that has been neglected,” then-premier P.J. Akeeagok told the legislative assembly in February 2025.