The dumbing down of Nunavut?

The Government of Nunavut has endorsed a bold new way of evading reality.

On March 13, Peter Kilabuk, the minister of human resources, told MLAs that his department has hired two staff members to “review” and rewrite about 800 GN job descriptions.

The purpose is to make it easier for Inuit beneficiaries to get government jobs by removing what Kilabuk calls “artificial barriers in job descriptions.” In plain words, the government wants to change its job descriptions by dumbing them down.

This dumbing-down scheme is aimed at helping the GN comply with Article 23 of the land claims agreement. That’s the section that says the territorial and federal governments must help Inuit get government jobs.

This is an immensely popular idea. Most of the public will support it, and so will most, if not all, MLAs. Many people have demanded it for years, and there’s no doubt that Kilabuk is expressing the will of the majority.

It’s also the wrong thing to do.

First, it removes yet another reason for young people to stay in school long enough to graduate, and to make the difficult move into either post-secondary vocational training or higher education.

Some of the “artificial barriers” Kilabuk referred to include various degrees, certificates and diplomas that you can get only by going to a training school, college or university. “Many of the current job descriptions being used within GN demand education and experience qualifications more suited to areas outside our system,” he said in his minister’s statement last week.

Kilabuk is also the minister of education. He and his department’s employees routinely urge young people to stay in school until they graduate. Granted, schooling isn’t everything. The world is full of morons with master’s degrees and geniuses who never graduated from high school. And though Nunavut’s school system may indeed be the weakest in Canada, on balance, young people are still better off staying in it than dropping out.

But why bother? Most of the best-paid and perk-laden jobs in Nunavut are those offered by the territorial government. The GN now says that, in the future, you won’t need any schooling to get them.

So go ahead. Drop out. In the future, your government will reward your weakness of character by hiring you over all those boring drudges who worked and struggled to get the degrees and certificates the government says you don’t need any more.

Another reason this is the wrong thing to do is it doesn’t guarantee that the proportion of Inuit in the workforce will increase anyway.

After the government finishes dumbing down its job descriptions, many non-Inuit will also be able to take advantage of the government’s lower standards. Within the old Government of the Northwest Territories, more than a few non-aboriginal officials, possessing little more than high school diplomas, were able to rise to the commanding heights of the territorial civil service. They did this by taking advantage of in-service training and the application of “equivalencies” to formal education.

The same thing is likely to happen in Nunavut. When the bars are lowered, previously unqualified non-Inuit will be able to leap over them too, and the ethnic balance of the workforce will not change.

A third reason is this measure threatens to weaken the quality of public services in Nunavut. The GN’s services are only as good as the people who provide them. Lower employment standards mean lower job performance — at the end of the day, that means poor service for you.

In the health-care debates of last month, Premier Paul Okalik berated the federal government for failing to recognize the people of Nunavut deserve services equal to those enjoyed by other Canadians. He’s right, of course.

But that principle applies also to the GN. The GN has an obligation to provide its residents with services equal to those enjoyed by residents of every other territory and province. Can they do that by dumbing down their entrance requirements?

At the same time, there’s no doubt the proportion of Inuit within the territorial public service is falling, and governments must do something about it. Even if the legal requirements contained in Article 23 did not exist, governments would still have a strong obligation to help more Inuit get government jobs.

As of Dec. 31, 2002, there were 2,861 jobs within the GN’s departments and boards. Only 950 were held by beneficiaries, about 40 per cent of the total. That’s down from the 42 per cent recorded in March 2001. Non-beneficiaries held 1,401 jobs, while 510 positions lay vacant.

This means even in the extremely unlikely event that every remaining vacant job were to be filled by a beneficiary, the number of Inuit working for the Nunavut government would rise to only 1,460 — slightly more than 50 per cent of the total.

In Iqaluit, where a venomous stream of racial resentment bubbles just below the surface of everyday life, only 28 per cent of Nunavut government jobs in the community are held by Inuit beneficiaries, who make up 57 per cent of Iqaluit’s population.

So even the 50 per cent Inuit employment target agreed to by the three parties to the Nunavut accord in 1998 remains a virtually unreachable target. And the long-term goal of a workforce in which 82 per cent of the employees are Inuit remains a utopian fantasy.

But the answer does not lie in a dumbing down of the government’s job descriptions. That policy represents a surrender to the notion that the people of Nunavut will never be equal in ability to people from other parts of the world.

The answer lies in education, training and continuous social reform. Nunavut requires massive investments in basic adult upgrading, vocational training, and higher education, coupled with a reform of the K-12 school system, and backed by renewed efforts to combat substance abuse, youth crime, mental illness, and all the other things that cause Nunavut’s human potential to be consistently wasted.

JB