I speak to you today as a former hamlet councillor in a community, as a mayor, a former member of the legislative assembly, a territorial minister, a former candidate for federal office, and a former member of Parliament.
When it comes to our electoral system, our concerns are twofold: promoting participation and supporting candidates and voters, and ensuring our interests are properly represented and promoted in Ottawa.
As to promoting participation and supporting candidates and voters, as you may have heard, the cost of living up here is very high. I encourage the committee members to visit the Northmart and Arctic Ventures to get a sense of how high the cost of living is and to see the prices of our groceries. A person considering running for office here has to consider forgoing income for the duration of the campaign. While this is true in many ridings, we have high costs for food, housing, electricity, heating fuel, and child care. For us, choosing to run for office usually means living off our savings in the most expensive riding in the country.
Finding ways to support more candidates to consider running for office has to be part of any discussion on electoral reform in Nunavut. I don't know what form this could take, but I know that it has discouraged many good-quality candidates from running for office. They can't afford to take anywhere from a few weeks to 78 days off from work.
It also means travelling throughout the campaign. We're a huge territory. While our territory is measured in millions of square kilometres, many ridings in southern Canada, southern cities, are just a few square kilometres in size. Just for the record, when I was running in 1993 for re-election, I happened to go down to Ottawa and drove around six ridings in a matter of a couple of hours. Here there are 26 communities spread across about 900,000 square miles. It has to all be by air. There are no roads connecting.
You can understand our situation when running for office up here in Nunavut.
It means strategically choosing which communities we have time to visit and which communities we can afford to visit. Candidates here spend thousands and thousands of dollars in airfare just to be able to meet voters. Can you imagine doing that in your riding? For a candidate, it means having limited opportunities to meet with voters across the territory. For voters, it may mean to only have a single opportunity to meet a candidate in your community, if they can afford to visit your community at all.
Electoral reform for us is more than changing the voting system. It means encouraging our system to be one that encourages candidates and voters to participate in a democratic process.
Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, is the easternmost community in Nunavut. We are almost due north of Ottawa. Kugluktuk is our westernmost community, almost due north of Edmonton or Calgary. On top of being very spread out, our communities have large variations in geography, culture, language, economic opportunity, and priorities. Can each of you imagine representing a riding that has as much variation between communities as Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Calgary, and everyone in between with all those differences?
Although our population is small, an MP in Nunavut has to contend with these variations in community dynamics and priorities. We have to try to represent everyone despite having limited communication with each community in a cohesive way in Ottawa. Suffice it to say it's very difficult to do so effectively, no matter how hard you work as a member of Parliament.
Electoral reform for us has to recognize that not only our population but our size has to be a consideration in the way we elect MPs and the number of people we elect to represent us.
I'll revert back to Inuktitut.
I sincerely hope that regardless of which voting system you adopt, you consider granting an extra seat in the House of Commons to reflect Nunavut’s unique needs and challenges and to ensure that our hopes, aspirations, priorities, and politics are accurately reflected in the House of Commons in Ottawa.
I thank you for this opportunity to address you and I hope that your visit is very worthwhile.
Qujannamiik . Thank you.