Sustainable development launches major retrofit

The Government of Nunavut has begun a one-year effort aimed at creating a new look for the department of sustainable development.

The plan, approved by cabinet on March 20, will merge DSD’s 11 divisions into seven, create a new assistant deputy minister’s position and cut the number of jobs within the department from 172 to 163.

Many current employees will report to different supervisors than they do now, and others will see their jobs reclassified.

Alex Campbell, the department’s deputy minister, admits the plan will upset employees who feel comfortable with DSD’s current structure.

“Part of my battles here have been trying to convince people to do things differently,” Campbell said in an interview this week.

But he said the changes are aimed at providing better communication among DSD employees whose work sometimes produces conflicting advice to the government on policy issues, and better service to the public.

“I was more concerned about how we serve the public as opposed to how happy we are as a bureaucracy,” Campbell said. “My main concern is how we serve Nunavummiut better. How we’re structured and what titles we have is secondary to that.”

One part of the plan will take two groups of employees who have not always seen eye-to-eye and merge them into a single division under one boss.

Staff now working in parks, conservation and environmental protection will form a new unit with people who work in the minerals, oil and gas division. The new entity will be called the Environment and Integrated Resource Management Division.

Campbell says he expects that “environmentally driven” organizations are likely to criticize that move on the grounds that environment and parks employees will be drowned out by those whose work involves the promotion of mines and oil.

But he says this conflict goes to the heart of what the words “sustainable development” really mean – economic development that respects the environment.

“This is where the concept of sustainable development comes into play. It has to be done in a balance,” Campbell said.

And to achieve that balance, staff whose work involves competing priorities need to work more closely together.

“The structure forces the units to work together under one directorship,” Campbell said. “What I envision coming out of that unit is more holistic recommendations on some of the developments and some of the environmental issues that we’ve been dealing with.”

He pointed out that although the department’s mandate includes conservation, environmental protection and the development of territorial parks, DSD also has a mandate to help create jobs, new businesses and more wealth for Nunavummiut.

Campbell said the department’s 11 divisions are the same now as they were in 1996, when the Government of the Northwest Territories created a new department through a merger of the old departments of renewable resources and economic development.

After the creation of Nunavut in 1999, the department’s name changed to sustainable development, but the structure inherited from the GNWT remained more or less the same.

“The reason I was hired to head this department as a deputy minister was to revisit the department itself, its mandate, its programs and services,” Campbell said.

Another reason for DSD’s restructuring is to better serve people living in Nunavut’s 25 communities.

Simon Awa, the assistant deputy minister of justice, will move over to DSD by April 18 to fill a newly created job – assistant deputy minister of community operations.

He’ll oversee three regional directors of community operations. Those regional directors will work with community-based staff who directly serve the public – wildlife officers, community development advisors, economic development officers, and people who develop parks, visitors centres and arts and crafts.

Campbell says the department now has at least one employee in every Nunavut community, having added wildlife officers in Sanikiluaq, Chesterfield Inlet and Whale Cove.

“That will give us a full complement of wildlife officers in every community,” he said.

“We’ll be setting up that program to be more focused this time around,” Campbell said. “What I’ve been hearing in my travels is that the CEDOs were not working, and were doing everything but economic development planning for the community.”

The CEDOs, or community economic development officers, are paid with money supplied by DSD – now up to $90,000 a year. But they normally work under the direction of municipal councils.

Campbell says that there will now be more strings attached to the money that hamlets get to hire economic development officers, but that the department will provide them with more training.