Territorial cooperation will take commitment

As many northern newspaper readers and radio listeners already know, the premiers of Canada’s three territories signed an agreement last week called the “Northern Cooperation Accord.” In it, they promise to work together for the next three years in a wide variety of policy areas.

What many of us may not know, however, is that this is their second try.

In 1999, the premiers of Canada’s three territories signed a similar agreement, in Iqaluit. They even gave it the same name — “Northern Cooperation Accord.”

It came to nothing. Not only did it come to nothing — nobody even noticed, which is not surprising. For most ordinary people, these kinds of intergovernmental agreements don’t mean much. For people struggling to eat, pay their bills and keep their children out of trouble, phrases like “devolution,” “social policy” and “formula financing” represent meaningless abstractions, worlds away from the grinding realities of everyday life.

But if the northern premiers mean what they say, and use their co-operation pact to do the things they promised to do last week, the lives of ordinary northern residents, especially Nunavut residents, might end up getting a little better. At least, the quality of life might stop getting worse, which in Nunavut, would be an improvement all by itself.

For example, when the three northern premiers picked a public fight with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien over health-care funding last February, their tactics were reasonably effective.

We all know that they were able to extract greater annual health-care contributions from Ottawa.

But they also accomplished a more important goal. They persuaded Chrétien to admit, in the House of Commons, that pure per capita funding methods – so many dollars per person — don’t work for the thinly populated, high-cost northern territories. It took years to get anyone in the federal government to admit this. There must have been times when hammering this simple fact into the minds of federal officials must have felt like hammering a nail into a piece of granite.

But now, thanks in part to the work that northern premiers have done together, combined with aggressive lobbying by groups such as the Nunavut Association of Municipalities, we are finally seeing some new federal funding programs that depart from the strict per capita rule.

One example of this is a new municipal rural infrastructure fund announced last month. Of the $1 billion that Ottawa will hand out to rural municipalities, Nunavut will only get a tiny amount. But this time, a strict per capita formula will not be used to divide up the money. In this program, Nunavut will get a $15-million base, to which will be added more money calculated on a per capita basis.

This means that over the next year or two there may be a little more money available to Nunavut municipalities to pay for things like water treatment, waste-water recycling and solid waste treatment. Cultural, tourism and recreational infrastructure, and local roads are also eligible for funding under this program.

The benefits of all this will be spread out over so many communities, and over such a long period of time, it’s unlikely that ordinary people will perceive any connection between what they see, and lobbying work done by northern premiers on behalf of territorial residents.

We’re sure that Paul Okalik, Stephen Kakfwi and Dennis Fentie don’t need any help from us in drawing up a to-do list.

They already know that there are numerous financial and constitutional issues that the federal government isn’t even close to acknowledging – all of which directly affect the lives of northern residents.

They include the Non-Insured Health Benefits Program, the vehicle through which the federal government is supposed to fulfill its constitutional obligation to pay for aboriginal health care. The NIHB is failing miserably, mainly because it doesn’t cover the realistic cost of medical travel in northern Canada, especially Nunavut. The NIHB’s weaknesses have done real damage to Nunavut’s health-care system — and to Nunavut residents.

Another is money to pay for capital projects — roads, wharves, airstrips, municipal buildings and services – also known by the fancy word, “infrastructure.” Ottawa’s infrastructure contributions are enough to pay for small projects only – not the large-scale roads and ports that Nunavut needs to develop its economy.

Yet another is a post-secondary education and training. Nunavut is looking at several new mines that could be up and running within the next two or three years. But even at this late date, it’s not clear how Nunavut residents will get the trades training they will need to take advantage of the job opportunities those mines will create.

Ottawa’s cruelest failure is its abandonment of social housing construction, a policy that has inflicted years of needless suffering upon the most vulnerable of Nunavut’s people. The three northern premiers shouldn’t need to be told that this, too, ought to be made a target of their collective efforts.

It’s not clear why the first northern cooperation accord accomplished little. But the three premiers can’t afford to let that happen the second time around. JB