Editorials

September 28, 2001

Everyone is entitled to workplace safety

When Doug Workman, the president of the Nunavut Employees Union, criticizes the Nunavut government for hiring too many police officers and too few front-line social service workers, he appears to be expressing concerns shared by many Nunavummiut.

But when he suggests that the government compromise the safety of one group of working people so that the ranks of another group can be expanded, he’s making an argument few reasonable people would agree with.

It’s certainly true that crime in Nunavut is at least partly rooted in poverty, cultural dislocation, substance abuse, powerlessness and unemployment. It is also valid to suggest that at least some crime in Nunavut might be eliminated if there were more social workers and substance abuse counsellors working in the territory.

But valuable though they may be, social workers and counsellors simply don’t provide the vital, life-and-death public services that police officers provide. You can’t subsititute one for the other — it’s not a simplistic, zero-sum proposition.

Above all, Workman should remember that RCMP officers are working people too, just like the territorial and municipal workers he so ably represents, and are entitled to a reasonable degree of workplace safety.

Unlike members of the Nunavut Employees Union, Nunavut’s police officers don’t have a union to advocate on their behalf, and must rely on division commanders — their equivalent of "management" — to do that for them. They’re expected to enter unsafe situations from which most government workers would flee. There aren’t many NEU members whose job descriptions include tasks such as drawing fire from distraught gunmen barricaded inside buildings.

After Const. Jurgen Seewald died of a gun-shot wound he recieved while working alone in Cape Dorset earlier this year, RCMP commanders raised grave concerns about the dangers faced by members who work alone.

At the same time, municipal leaders in several Nunavut communities, especially those not served by permanent RCMP detachments, have been lobbying the government to hire more police officers for their communities. Repulse Bay, for example, has been asking for an RCMP detachment for years.

Justice Minister Paul Okalik found $3.5 million to hire more RCMP officers for two reasons: Nunavut residents asked him to, and because the RCMP raised it as a life-and-death issue of workplace safety. Isn’t workplace safety an issue a labour leader ought to understand?

We hope that Workman and other NEU officials continue to expose the government’s failings and continue to make criticisms that others are too meek or inarticulate to express. But suggesting that a basic public service such as policing be weakened is not the way to do that.

JB

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September 21, 2001

Nunavut: Sheltered no more

Until the cataclysmic events of last week shook us all to the core, the complacent residents of affluent North America have often looked like the spoiled brats of planet Earth.

Except for those who have emigrated from elsewhere, few Americans or Canadians understand how it feels to be bombed, starved, tortured or falsely imprisoned. Few North Americans know the smell of an overcrowded refugee camp or the sound of a fighter jet when it’s strafing your village. Above all, few North Americans know the blinding rage of those who feel that they have been oppressed by the West.

The Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon changed all that. The ideological fanatics who murdered between five and 6,000 innocent people in the United States last week have also murdered what’ s left of our innocence. As North Americans and as world citizens, Nunavut residents can no longer afford to be complacent.

Our national government now has no choice but to join the United States in what promises be a wide-ranging campaign of retaliation and deterrence aimed at those responsible for last week’s attack, and aimed also at any other groups and individuals who might be inspired to commit further acts of mass murder. This will include at least some use of military force in which civilians may die.

There are those who argue that Canada should not support this kind of response. But they are mistaken, well-meaning though they may be. Canada must stand with the United States in its efforts to punish the sponsors of last week’s hijackings and to deter any others. Canada must do this not only because the United States is our closest ally and not only because it is an obligation imposed by our membership in NATO. Canada must do this because the United States should not be allowed to act alone.

If the United States and its allies react with too much haste or with too much violence, or if they direct their efforts at the wrong targets, they will succeed only in jeopardizing more American lives in the future. There are millions of hungry followers of Islam in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia who already blame the U.S. for propping up the corrupt, murderous regimes under which they now suffer.

Canada and other like-minded nations, therefore, should remind the U.S. that those to whom evil is done will one day do evil in return. That is the kind of advice that only a true friend can give.

Nunavut residents learned last week that even the most remote communities of the Arctic have been become integrated into an interdependent but dangerous world.

unavummiut can no longer avoid the realities of that world.

JB

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September 14, 2001

Why a zoning bylaw?

It’s taken a lot of work and a lot of money to develop Iqaluit’s current general plan and zoning bylaw — the city’ s most important instrument for deciding which pieces of land will be used for what purpose.

Since the early 1980s, the municipality of Iqaluit has, at regular intervals, updated this plan as the community grew. This usually involved earnest public-consultation exercises coupled with the issuance of expensive consulting contracts to Southern firms with expertise in municipal zoning.

This work represents the core function of all Canadian municipalities: the management, distribution and taxation of land within municipal boundaries, and the provision of basic services to those who use that land.

But despite all this work, Iqaluit municipal officials have usually acted as if their zoning bylaw is a mere bureaucratic inconvenience, especially when major private developers stride into council chambers asking to be exempted from the rules. One visible sign of this is all the inappropriate residential housing scattered around the north end of Lower Base on lots initially zoned for industrial use.

But the rules are different if you build badly-needed social housing for low-income people. Just last year, Iqaluit turned down a variance request from the Nunavut Housing Corporation that would have permitted the construction of six low-cost social housing units in Apex.

Indeed, the housing corporation appears to be the only developer that gets the cold shoulder on a regular basis. Eventually, the corporation was forced to trade those lots for others in Iqaluit, and was finally able to build Iqaluit’s share of the 100 social housing units to have been built in Nunavut last year. It seems the tap at the municipality of Iqaluit that controls the milk of human kindness was turned off a long time ago.

So you can’t really blame Auyuittuq Development Inc. for expecting that council would rubber stamp their request for permission to locate two trailers in Apex. It certainly wouldn’t be the worst exemption they ever issued. And given that the proposal comes from a solid Baffin company, the majority of whose shareholders are Inuit, it’s politically attractive.

Although city council voted to reject this request, an unelected committee called the Development Appeal Board overturned council’s decision. After that, some Apex residents have complained to city council about flaws in the process that led to this apparently irrevocable decision.

However, there appears to be no reason why these flaws can’t be corrected.

First, the city should make sure legal notices informing the public about zoning and development proposals are written in language that normal human beings can understand, clearly stating what is being proposed and where the affected lots are located.

Second, the city should review the rules allowing an unelected committee to overturn decisions made by elected councillors.

Third, the city should create more lots designated for trailers, perhaps in a second trailer park area, and look at other ways of encouraging low-cost housing in Iqaluit.

JB

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September 7, 2001

A circumpolar loss

It was early August, 1983, a warm summer evening. A long list of performers from Alaska, Canada and Greenland danced, sang and played before a standing-room-only crowd of curious Iqalungmiut clustered inside the airless heat of Iqaluit's Nakasuk School gymnasium.

Nearly 300 people from places like the Aleutian Islands, Kotzebue, Barrow, Nuuk, Qanaq, and Sisimiut were in Iqaluit for the Inuit Circumpolar Conference's general assembly, an event that always becomes a celebration of circumpolar unity.

At the end of the night, Hans Pavia-Rosing, a Greenlandic politician who was then the president of the ICC, provoked a thunderous round of applause when he urged Inuit to create a "nation" stretching from Greenland to Alaska.

How long ago that was.

Just last week, the Inuit-owned airline First Air announced the severing of a transportation link that partly owed its existence to that idealistic dream: the weekly jet service between Iqaluit and Kangerlussuaq that it shared with Greenlandair.
The reason? There's nothing Canada produces that Greenland wants to buy, and nothing Greenland produces that Canada wants to buy. There is little cargo for airlines to carry between the two countries.

And despite last year's Nunavut-Greenland protocol agreement, and the Iqaluit-Sisimiut and Kuujjuaq-Aasiat twinning agreements, few ordinary people in Canada have ever actually been interested in traveling to Greenland. Some Greenlandic travelers have used the service as an easy route to North America, but not enough of them, apparently, to make the route pay.

Assuming that First Air's financial analysis is correct - and there are those who suggest that it may not be - it's likely that First Air and Greenlandair have no choice but to drop the route. It's likely that the Makivik Corporation beneficiaries who own First Air have a greater interest in the company's profitability nowadays than in its symbolic devotion to circumpolar unity.

But though the First Air-Greenlandair decision may be financially prudent, and perhaps necessary, it's a development that diminishes us all. The people of Nunavut, Nunavik and Greenland eat the same food, speak the same language, share the same culture, enjoy the same climate and face the same social and economic challenges.

The biggest differences between the Canadian Arctic and Greenland are those that are attributable to colonization. The Canadian Arctic was colonized by people with roots in Great Britain and France, while Greenland was colonized by Danes. As a result, the regions have different political traditions, different writing systems, and different branches of the Christian religion. Nunavummiut watch television programs made in the United States and southern Canada, while Greenlanders watch television made in Europe. Nunavummiut play ice hockey, while Greenlanders play soccer.

The people of Nunavut and Nunavik, however, still have more in common with the people of Sisimiut and Nuuk and Qanaq than with the people of non-Arctic communities like Yellowknife, Montreal or Ottawa.

But will that be the case in the future? In 2002, the ICC will gather in Kuujjuaq, while the Arctic Winter Games will be held in Nuuk and Iqaluit.

The loss of the Nunavut-Greenland jet service won't help either of those circumpolar events or the cause of circumpolar unity.

JB

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