Qujannamiik.
Thank you.
As I said earlier, as I was walking in there was nothing written in Inuktituk to tell me where I was supposed to go. If I didn’t speak English or French, I would not know where to go because there are no directions in Inuktituk. You are in Nunavut, and there are three official languages in Nunavut—English, French, and Inuktituk.
Thank you for coming to Nunavut, and I am grateful for the opportunity to address the committee and to speak to the concerns of Nunavummiut regarding electoral reform and democracy.
I will go back to English.
We have 26 communities spread across an area the size of western Europe. There are more than 400 million people in western Europe. There are 37,000 of us in Nunavut. We make up one-tenth of one per cent of the population of Canada, yet our land comprises one-fifth of Canada.
In a way, Nunavut is a microcosm of Canada, a vast land, sparsely populated by international standards. We joke about how Americans see us, see Canada—not just us, but Canada. They think it's all igloos and dog teams and lumberjacks, yet this is how many southern Canadians see Nunavut. For the record, we don't have any lumberjacks up here.