Better housing, less disease

This past mid-December, when most Arctic residents started shifting their lives around to get ready for the holiday season, the National Aboriginal Health Organization released a big report on what it calls the “ongoing Inuit housing crisis in Canada.”

Chances are few people, inside or outside...

Mr. Curley makes a point, sort of

Imagine you’re the coach of a hockey team. You’re asked to win a cup final. But for the entire 60 minutes of the game, your team’s permitted to ice only four, not six, players per shift.

If you’re in charge of Nunavut’s Department of Health and Social Services, you face the same obstacle. You have...

Just say no

Tununiq MLA Joe Enook, backed by the Hamlet Council of Pond Inlet, wants the Nunavut Housing Corp. to finance an election promise with public money — by letting the MLA jump to the front of a long waiting list and rent a subsidized social housing unit.

This is a simple issue. It’s so simple it...

Tweaking Nutrition North

Nunavut MLAs, meeting together as committee of the whole, continued hearings Oct. 25 that began this past June on the federal government’s Nutrition North Canada program.

Don’t expect much. If MLAs were as serious about this issue as they claim, they would have got involved much earlier.

Ottawa...

Bill C-10: a costly headache for Nunavut?

Bill C-10, the big new criminal justice law the Conservative government placed before the House of Commons Sept. 20, promises to create a costly new headache for the Government of Nunavut’s Department of Justice.

For those of you who may not have heard of it, Bill C-10, marketed to the public as...

A failure to communicate

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper posed in the middle of Frobisher Bay for the world’s most expensive photo-op during the August 2009 version of Operation Nanook, no one at the time had much to say about the potentially dangerous communications meltdown that was about to strike Iqaluit.

“The...

The tourism mirage

Many Nunavut residents know about the phenomenon called the “Arctic mirage,” that visual trick that sunlight creates when it passes through frigid air, making non-existent objects look real to the careless observer.

These optical illusions sometimes fooled explorers like Robert Peary, who duped...