Thank you, and thank you for permitting us to speak with you today.
The focus of our written submission to the committee is that successive federal governments have failed to live up to the spirit and the intent of their statutory responsibilities under sections 4 and 5 of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Act since it became law some 40 years ago.
In the first instance, the federal responsibility is to manage northern resources for the benefit of the north and to support northern political and economic development. It has not happened. The federal government retains control of the most significant source of northerners' wealth, namely their non-renewable natural resources, and takes for itself all the public wealth derived from them. At the same time, it has downloaded responsibilities for costly services--including health, social services, and education--onto northern governments and then underfunded them.
This federally created structural dependency, with its resulting poverty, is not being addressed. Instead the size of the per capita grants to northern governments is offered as definitive evidence that the federal government is spending generously on the north, but the federal government does not identify the proportion of those grants that are used to cope with the effects of the long-term endemic poverty.
For example, last year the government in Nunavut spent $47 million, about $1,600 per capita, on air transportation to fly sick people to southern hospitals. Many were children with respiratory illnesses resulting from overcrowded, poorly ventilated, and sometimes mould-infested housing.
The everyday problems of people living in poverty in the cold climate with no affordable means of transportation do not come into the committee rooms of Parliament, nor do they come onto the floor of territorial legislatures, but they do confront local governments in their communities every day.
The once common practice of central governments taking the resource wealth and leaving the people and communities of resource-rich regions in perpetual poverty is slowly disappearing in such third world countries as Sudan and Nigeria, but it remains firmly entrenched in northern Canada.
The people in the communities of Nunavut cannot afford to have their economic future foreclosed by either the federal or territorial governments in this way. The wealth from such mines as Polaris and Nanisivik has been taken, leaving no lasting benefit for the local people. But mineral exploration is at an all-time high, and it is important that resource revenue sharing agreements be in place before significant production begins again.
Nunavut Association of Municipalities recommends, first, that as an interim measure, any resource revenue royalties be held in escrow pending completion of the resource revenue sharing agreements with the territories. Without such a measure, the federal government, as the recipient of the revenues, has a strong disincentive to negotiate a fair revenue sharing agreement.
Second, it recommends that a forum be struck in accordance with the O'Brien equalization and territorial formula financing report recommendation that the Government of Nunavut, the Government of Canada, Inuit leaders, and a wide range of organizations, groups, and agencies come together to address the interrelated critical deficits in Nunavut that, if not addressed, will prevent the majority of people in Nunavut from participating in their economy.
Third and lastly, it recommends that resource revenues be shared with local governments in accordance with the Minister of Finance's principles defined in the 2006 federal budget.
Thank you very much.