The real journey begins for Nunavut

Since last spring, Nunavut’s fledgling government has enjoyed an easy jaunt across the gentle summer tundra. Now are they about to set out on a more dangerous trek, a journey that will take them across the black ice-fields represented by the excruciatingly complex social and economic problems that affect — and often afflict — the lives of Nunavut residents. They’ve basked for months in the afterglow of last February’s first election and the sumptuous festivities held on April 1. But as the first days of fall grow shorter and cooler, that afterglow has all but dissipated.

Their first political decisions last May and June were easy to render, and compared to what they will endure in the future, painless in their execution. The elimination of Nunavut’s heath and education boards, for example, was an easy and obvious decision. The idea enjoyed wide public support even before Nunavut’s newly-appointed cabinet confronted the issue last spring, and the trail leading up to it had already been broken by consultants hired by the Office of the Interim Commissioner.

The Nunavut government has also made some useful administrative changes near the top, creating a new secretariat to handle job decentralization, and re-assigning several senior managers to positions that will likely make better use of their talents.

Their first budget, too, given the time constraints under which the government was operating and the financial limitations imposed by Ottawa’s formula financing agreement, was about as much as could be expected. As a political statement, however, the budget document still leaves much to be desired. For example, it’s prefaced with a statement entitled “The Nunavut Vision.” It consists of a feel-good shopping list of vague platitudes and truisms that no one could possibly argue with — or use as a measuring stick to assess the current government’s performance.

Premier Paul Okalik now says, however, that the government will release a five-year “mandate document” shortly after the legislative assembly resumes sitting next month. Even though all Nunavut MLAs already know what is in it, apparently, Okalik will respect parliamentary protocol and wait until after Commissioner Helen Maksagak’s speech from the throne before releasing it to the public.

We have no way of knowing what’s in it, of course. But we can at least urge the government to keep its use of weasel words to a minimum and provide us with a set of clear, concrete and specific statements setting out what they plan to do and how they plan to do it. Okalik has already said that this is what he will do next month, so we hope that he does indeed provide us with an honest, realistic document that tells us what to expect from his government over the next five years.

We already know, or ought to know, that the Nunavut government does not now have the capacity to deliver everything that Nunavut residents need and want. The government’s mandate document will, therefore, inevitably fall short of what most of us would consider to be ideal.

That means that this time around, we would be wise to judge the government not on the basis of what they cannot yet do, but on how well they carry out what they have actually promised. JB