Human Resources Committee on June 16th, 2010

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Raymonde Folco]

Thank you very much.

[Alastair Campbell]

Those are just some examples.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Raymonde Folco]

Thank you very much.

I will now move on.

Monsieur Pomerleau, vous avez la parole.

Monsieur Pomerleau is from the Bloc Québécois.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I also want to thank our two witnesses who agreed to testify by teleconference.

Mr. Obed, your are the director of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.'s Department of Social and Cultural Development. Could you please describe this corporation? Is it controlled by the Inuit people or is it a government or government-related agency?

[Natan Obed]

Nunavut Tunngavik is an Inuit representational organization. We represent the beneficiaries of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. All Inuit who are eligible to be beneficiaries of our land claim make up what is sometimes called the “birthright organization”. This department--social and cultural development--is responsible specifically for the implementation of one of our articles, article 32, which deals with social and cultural development.

In general, we are an advocate. We do not deliver programs or services. We're not a part of government. We are an Inuit advocate.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Alright. You said earlier that Inuktitut should normally be taught in school up to grade 12. Until what grade is it presently being taught?

[Natan Obed]

Thank you for the question.

The Inuit language is taught often in kindergarten through to grade 3. In grade 4 the curriculum is changed into English. It's a wholesale change in grade 4. If you can imagine, in grades kindergarten to grade 3 you're functioning, you're thinking, you're learning in Inuktitut, the mother tongue, and then in grade 4 there's an abrupt shift into English as the language of instruction. That language of instruction remains until grade 12.

Inuktitut is relegated to a language art, much as a second language would be taught in southern Canada--i.e., if you're in an English school and you go to French class once a day. That's the same way that Inuktitut is taught in, say, the high schools here at Iqaluit. Since the establishment of the school system in Nunavut, there has not been, I think, a single graduate who you could say was educated in Inuktitut through the school system.

All of the language is an in-kind contribution to the territory. We see it as a huge cultural resource, a link into greater opportunities. The first language is the language of strength in anything a person does. This is what Inuit have been advocating for since the 1970s, really, since our first foray into this area of representation and political mobilization.

One of the first things that was talked about was the right to educate our children in our mother tongue. We're still fighting for that. We see no end to that struggle. Even though the new territorial education act and the Inuit Language Protection Act set out timelines for the implementation of our right to have Inuktitut as our language of instruction, we still do not believe that will happen without a massive investment in new money.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Raymonde Folco]

Monsieur Pomerleau, you have two minutes left.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Yes, I will be brief.

Mr. Obed, you mentioned health care, housing and education as key factors preventing Inuit development. You also said that one solution would obviously be that Inuit people take more control over their own affairs. One of the specific solutions you referred to was that Inuktitut be taught until grade 12.

In your opinion, how would learning Inuktitut until grade 12 help the Inuit take more control over their own affairs when people--I mean Whites living in Nunavut--are increasingly unable to speak this language? How would this improve relationships or give more power to the Inuit people?

[Natan Obed]

Yes. Thank you for the question.

There's emerging evidence that the mother tongue unlocks other opportunities for learning and does so with increased efficiency. So the way that a person learns and how they make the transition between learning and practical use often has quite a bit to do not only with the language that's spoken, but also with the cultural environment in which the education is given. So we see culture and language as being the key factors that we feel should be strengthened in our formal education system to unlock the true potential of our students.

Right now our graduation rate in the territory hovers between 25% and 30% for the people who enter grade 9 and then graduate from grade 12. That is not Inuit specific; the Inuit-specific numbers, we would argue, are much lower.

For people to feel that they're a part of the territory, that they are part of some sort of larger community, there has to be a link back into the community. There's this big disconnect in the education system between the Inuit and what the Inuit want for their children and what southern Canada or the curriculum maybe want for their children.

When children go through the education system—often in their second language—the parents or the communities do not see the relevance of supporting or really pushing their children's education, because they don't have any link back to their own culture or language.

I wouldn't say that this is necessarily the key in the minds of a lot of business people as to how to unlock the potential of Nunavut, but in our eyes it certainly would create a foundation for a graduate who is confident and who takes in every new opportunity or every new educational opportunity from a point of strength, and it's not somebody who's unilingual in Inuktitut, but is bilingual. Because it was never our intent to say that we would only want Inuktitut; we would like to be bilingual.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Raymonde Folco]

I'll now give the floor to Mr. Martin of the New Democratic Party.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thanks for this opportunity.

I want to go back to some of your opening comments. You suggest that if the land claim agreement were being fully implemented in spirit and intent, the problems we currently face would be far less.

Could you expand on that a bit?

[Alastair Campbell]

Yes. I think there are a number of features of the land claims agreement, but I will just give you one example with which we've encountered some difficulties. That is article 24, which relates to government contracting.

Article 24 requires both the territorial government, that is, the Government of Nunavut, and the federal government to develop contracting procedures that would provide an opportunity for Inuit-owned companies to secure government contracts. Now, this has been done by the Government of Nunavut. The way it is set up, Nunavut Tunngavik has a registry of Inuit firms. Inuit firms are defined as those that are over 51% Inuit-owned or are Inuit-owned co-ops. So we have the registry. The way the Government of Nunavut does this is by giving a bid advantage to Inuit firms when awarding contracts, so if there's an Inuit firm it will for sure get a 7% bid advantage. In some circumstances, that could be as high as 21%.

The federal government, regrettably, has never done anything comparable to that. The one exception is perhaps a little surprising.

The one exception is the Department of National Defence, which negotiated an agreement with us relating to the cleanup of DEW Line sites. This indeed provides that when contracts are awarded for the cleanup of a DEW Line site, which is an old radar site with a lot of contaminants usually left behind, there will be a minimum Inuit employment level set for the work on that site, usually at somewhere around 70%, and a minimum dollar value for Inuit contracting, which is usually also at somewhere around 70%.

In the vast majority of cases, those objectives have been reached. One of the regional Inuit leaders told me that he thought negotiating that agreement was one of the best accomplishments of NTI.

In other words, this is an agreement that's consistent with the land claims agreement and provides jobs and opportunities to members of communities. It also has spinoffs and allows the development of Inuit businesses. That's one example I would give of how the land claim agreement is important as a tool in dealing with the issues of economic disparity and poverty in Nunavut.

For various reasons, the federal government seems to have been unwilling to take this approach across the board. Though we've tried since 1993 to get something in place that would be comparable or similar for other government departments, we have not been successful in doing so.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

So that's one example of how you feel the government isn't acting in good faith in terms of what was intended and in terms of the spirit of the agreement.

I note by way of the statistics you've given us here that you have a relatively high unemployment rate of 17.4%, which was for 2001-02. Also, compared to the other territories and Canada, you have a seriously high suicide rate.

The average family income is lower, and I'm led to believe that the cost of living in Nunavut is actually quite high. I'm not sure if it's higher than in the other territories, but certainly your average family income is lower than it is anywhere else, it seems.

Do you feel those statistics could be improved by the government actually acting in better faith and in the spirit of the land claim agreements? Or are there some other things that we could or should be doing to deal with those very troubling statistics?

[Natan Obed]

Generally the implementation of land claims takes on many different permutations because it is so complex. I guess the overarching comment or observation that Inuit have had is that the federal government has seen these land claim agreements more as one-time negotiated agreements that then are done with, rather than living treaties that require constant interaction and work with the other party. For Nunavut Inuit, that really isn't an exception.

With regard to some of the social issues that you mentioned, especially suicide prevention, Nunavut is in the final stages of creating a Nunavut suicide prevention strategy. There is no national suicide prevention strategy, which is unfortunate. There is some focus within Health Canada on aboriginal youth suicide prevention, which is a component of suicide prevention, but we feel that there is a larger role for the federal government to play within suicide prevention and within the area of mental health in general.

There is this concept called “historical trauma”. It's only since the 1950s and 1960s that Inuit have lived in southern-style communities, with houses and a central administrative body run first from the federal government, or even from missionaries or Hudson's Bay. We've only had 50 or 60 years of this new way of living.

People of the first generation who grew up in these communities were exposed to many different things that have had a tremendous impact on all subsequent generations, things that have never been overcome. You've probably heard in the past of the sled dog slaughter, where the dogs that were used for transportation for Inuit were shot within communities, or of the residential schools, with the forced relocations. A number of things are barriers to those people fulfilling all the other things they could be doing in their lives.

We feel that there still is a lot of healing and a lot of mental health work that needs to happen in our communities in order to unlock our true potential, which is why it was so unfortunate that the Aboriginal Healing Foundation funds were cancelled. Especially in Nunavut, we had developed 12 different projects across the territory that were providing healing opportunities so that people could become more productive members of society, so that they could become more stable, so that they could have the mental grounding in order to be successful in life.

So I do believe there is a lot more the federal government could do to help.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Raymonde Folco]

Thank you, Mr. Obed. I'm sorry to cut you off, but we do have one more person who wants to ask a question.

Mr. Casson, please, of the Conservative Party.

[Rick Casson, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Obed, I'm Rick Casson. I'm the member of Parliament from Lethbridge in southern Alberta.

I have two questions, actually. Some of the documentation we have--it's years old--is on the disparity between the cost of goods in your area compared to costs in the rest of Canada. If there were proper port facilities and unloading facilities there, do you think that would be alleviated to some degree?

As well, you mentioned the lack of Inuit participation in policy development. One thing you mentioned intrigued me--the issue of learning your native language until grade 3 or grade 4 and then changing. Where did that come from?

More generally, in terms of participation, how could we better facilitate that and make sure that we have full Inuit participation on policy development? And what would be the end result of that? Do you see that as a pretty major step or is that just a small irritant?

[Alastair Campbell]

I'll answer the first part.

Yes, some of the figures we gave you were a little dated; however, things like the disparity or the great difference in cost of living between Nunavut and other southern regions of Canada are just no less than that. Although we don't have the documented information to back this up, in terms of experience I don't believe it would be any different. It may even be more.

Secondly, I think one of the other members of the committee asked if this was worse than other territories. I think if you were to compare Iqaluit, the capital, to Yellowknife or Whitehorse, yes, you would find it significantly worse. Compared to Iqaluit, Yellowknife is relatively cheap as a place to buy things.

In terms of port facilities and so on and whether those would make a difference, it is our belief that indeed they would, because there's a very short shipping season here and there are very high fluctuations in the tides. I believe Iqaluit has the second highest tides in Canada. The Bay of Fundy has the highest. There is only a certain part of the day during which the barges can operate to take the goods, so something that should take one day takes maybe three days.

So there are a lot of added administrative and transportation costs as a result of the lack of port facilities and, generally, a lack of ability to operate efficiently.

I'm not sure if that really answers your question, but hopefully it answers part of it.

Natan will make some other comments.

[Natan Obed]

To finish off Alastair's point, the sealift companies have to bring in their own heavy equipment and specialized machinery so they can off-load and load cargo within our community. That also displaces the potential for other goods to come up. The prices we pay for goods in our communities, especially for those that are sealifted in, I would say are much higher because of the extra cost associated with the specialized nature of off-loading, since there are no port facilities for off-loading.

I have a house up on the hill overlooking the bay, and it's really interesting over the summer to watch the goods going onto and coming off the ships and seeing the heavy equipment half-submerged in seawater going out, getting stuff, and bringing it in. It's just a different world, and I don't think many people outside of Nunavut have an appreciation for how expensive it is here, but also how difficult it is to get things in and out of our communities.

As far as language goes, I guess that in the 1960s and 1970s when the education system was established in the territory, there was a greater expectancy for non-Inuit to learn Inuktitut or to function in Inuktitut. There was this base level of understanding between students and teachers that has eroded over the years, so that now there really isn't an expectation that any non-Inuk who comes into any one of the communities will ever learn anything about Inuktitut or Inuit language, which is really too bad. It's a shift in mindset.

As far as the curriculum and the language of instruction go, I suppose there were more Inuit who could become certified as K through grade 3 teachers in the beginning of the education system and that made it possible for the delivery of that curriculum to be in Inuktitut. In addition to that, up until probably the 1980s, there were very few multilingual kindergartners. So if you were dealing with an entire kindergarten population that didn't speak a word of English, then there was some necessity of speaking Inuktitut as the language of instruction.

But by grade 4, there really weren't the curriculum or the teachers available to deliver the curriculum in Inuktitut, so I think that is why it started out that way, and hasn't necessarily gotten any better over time. Residential school happened until the late 1980s in Nunavut. It wasn't until the early 1990s that each community had its own high school.

So if you think of the education system in Nunavut and its evolution, we're still in the very early stages. I would argue, then, that we have a lot more flexibility or openness in regard to alternative models of education that would be more successful.

The final point on federal participation in policy-making and social programs--

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Raymonde Folco]

Could I ask you to be fairly brief? We are coming to the end of our session.

[Natan Obed]

Yes, I will be very brief.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Raymonde Folco]

Thank you.

[Natan Obed]

This is something that we are very interested in. It isn't just a minor irritant. It is something that we would desperately like to resolve with the Government of Canada--namely, what our article 32 means practically and how Inuit can participate more and fulfill the obligation of our article 32 in the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. It is something that we feel would unlock a greater potential for success of federal programs in the territory.

[Rick Casson, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Raymonde Folco]

Mr. Obed and Mr. Campbell, we've come to the end of this part of the session. On behalf of all the members of this committee, from all parties, I would like to thank you very much for having participated in this. I think we all have now, if we didn't have it before, a much clearer concept of the portrait of poverty in Nunavut.

You talked about historical trauma, and this is something I very much believe in. Really, we will do our best to incorporate your comments into our report on poverty. Nunavut is part of Canada, and the kind of poverty that the Inuk people have in Nunavut has to be included when we talk about Canadians.

Once again, Mr. Obed and Mr. Campbell, thank you very much for having participated in this discussion. We wish you all the very best.

Thank you.