The key to Nunavut’s success

Many Nunavut residents will remember the vote in November 1992, the one that ratified the Nunavut land claims agreement and made the creation of Nunavut possible – especially the result.

About 69 per cent of eligible Inuit beneficiaries voted Yes, allowing the Nunavut land claims agreement to go forward. That, in turn, meant that the Nunavut Political Accord, which set the ground-rules for division of the Northwest Territories and the subsequent creation of a Nunavut territory, could also go forward.

Nearly one of every three eligible beneficiaries voted No, or didn’t vote. Because of how the vote was calculated, the 1,843 people who didn’t vote had the same effect on the result as those who voted No.

The pressure to vote Yes was enormous. Every Nunavut MLA sitting in the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories signed a declaration urging their Inuit constituents to accept the deal, and had it published in newspapers. Almost every other elected leader in Nunavut threw their support behind the deal too.

At the same time, a two separate groups of officials from the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut – Nunavut Tunngavik’s predecessor – toured Nunavut, holding public meetings, radio call-in shows, and meetings with local hamlet councils, elders, and other groups in every community.

Members of an ad hoc committee set up to conduct the vote and explain the voting procedure travelled with the TFN officials, and even sat at the head table with them at community meetings.

In contrast, the “No” side, which consisted of a few scattered individuals and informal groups of people, had no money to campaign with and no organization to back them. They used phone-in shows, public meetings, and letters to the editor to express their views, but were overwhelmed by the powerful resources available to the political establishment.

So more than 10 years later, it’s impossible to say if the Inuit of Nunavut ever really gave their informed consent, in the true sense of that term, to the Nunavut project, and to the surrender of their land for all time to the Canadian state.

In any event, that’s now an irrelevant question. The Nunavut territory and Nunavut the land claims agreement are now living legal entities, and at least one of them, the land claims agreement, is protected by the constitution.

But the issues raised by those who opposed the agreement are still with us. One of those issues was raised by Jack Anawak, who at that time was the MP for the federal riding of Nunatsiaq.

Anawak opposed the Nunavut land claims agreement for two reasons. One was that the surrender of Inuit land was too high a price to pay for what the federal government offered through the agreement. The second was that not enough people in Nunavut had the education needed to benefit from the creation of Nunavut. He and his friend Peter Irniq both campaigned against the agreement for those reasons.

As we all know, each of them accepted the deal as soon as it was ratified, and each, in their way, has worked to the best of his ability to make Nunavut work.

But on the second point, time has proven them right.

In its own analysis of why Inuit employment within the government of Nunavut stands at only 41 per cent, and stands at even lower levels within federal government workplaces in Nunavut, NTI has concluded that Nunavut’s stock of qualified Inuit workers has been exhausted.

NTI came to that conclusion in a study it conducted in partnership with the GN, a study that shows that the Inuit employment provisions in Article 23 of the Nunavut land claims agreement aren’t working.

To remedy that appalling situation, which amounts to a major breach of the agreement, NTI and the GN are proposing that the federal government spend between $10 million and $20 million a year, over the next 10 years, on the training and education of Nunavut Inuit.

Federal officials have dug in their heels on this issue – which is why there was no new land claims implementation contract to celebrate on July 9 this year, the date when a new contract was supposed to take effect. NTI and GN officials want Ottawa to spend the money under the terms of a new implementation contract – and Ottawa, so far, is balking.

This, however, is a clever move by NTI and GN officials, because it could force the federal government to restore the money that Ottawa effectively withdrew from territorial government budgets in Paul Martin’s funding cuts of 1995 and 1996. Those cuts are one of the reasons that Nunavut entered Confederation as a crippled, hollow entity on April 1, 1999 – and is still hobbling along with unnecessarily diminished capacities.

We urge all other Nunavut leaders, and all Nunavut residents to support NTI and the GN in their efforts to pry this training money out of the federal government. The key to success for Nunavut always was, and always will be, the development of Nunavut’s people through training and education, coupled with better health care and housing. JB