Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Nov. 19th, 2009

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Yes.

[Andrew Robinson]

No, we would say that, as a fuel, if you're trying to count what your emissions are, if you're burning pellets, you would basically count that as not an emission.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

But if you use it for an industry or something like that, if they're using that fuel, could that be compensated for as a carbon credit? Would you be able to sell that to another company?

[Andrew Robinson]

In theory you could. You need a regulatory system that's going to make sure the checks and balances are there to be allowed to trade that emission. In Canada, there's no such system. So it would be very difficult or impossible to sell it right now.

However, we do buy carbon offsets or credits for our own operations. We buy them using an international system that is set up. We buy offsets that way. You can't sell them in Canada right now.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

What's one of the farthest distances you buy your pellets from?

[Andrew Robinson]

The farthest is Prince George, surprisingly. Most of it comes from La Crête, which is in northern Alberta, but we also get some from Prince George.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Okay. Thank you, Mr. Clarke and Mr. Dreeshen.

Thank you very much, gentlemen, for coming this afternoon. This has been extremely helpful. As promised, we will take the documents you have submitted and those that need to be translated will be translated and will be submitted to committee members. We appreciate your time and input this afternoon. You can be sure it is going to help our report and recommendations.

Committee members, we will now suspend until 6 p.m. We will take an early dinner break.

The meeting is suspended until 6 p.m. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We'll resume our third installment of the 38th meeting of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.

We are delighted to be here in Yellowknife. This is the second of three stops that the committee is making in the three territories. Unfortunately, we only have time to go to the territorial capitals, but we've had a comprehensive set of hearings. On Tuesday we did the same thing—we had three sessions of three hours in Whitehorse. Next week we'll be heading to Iqaluit to hear from a similar cross-section of witnesses.

These are people and organizations that have a stake in advancing economic development in their region. The study itself is about identifying barriers and considering solutions, and we're hoping to hear your ideas on those topics, with a view to developing a report and recommendations about what the government can do—whether it's programs, new regulations, or legislative changes—to advance economic development in the north.This is more than economic development for development's sake. It's about advancing outcomes and the quality of life for people who live and make their living in the north.

We're delighted this evening to have with us four different organizations. We'll begin with presentations and then we'll go to questions from members. We will be doing simultaneous interpretation. To get a good speaking pace, think of normal conversational speed and then take it down a notch or two. It might seem a little uncomfortable, but it will be a good pace for our interpreters.

We'll begin with Mr. Boris Atamanenko, the manager of the Northwest Territories Arts Council.

[Boris Atamanenko, Manager, Community Programs, Northwest Territories Arts Council]

Thank you.

Greetings, everyone.

I must say that it's a privilege to be here. In our daily work with the arts council, economic development isn't top of mind. It's rather the creative industry. I am the manager of community programs, which is part of the culture and heritage division of the Department of Education, Culture, and Employment in the Government of the Northwest Territories. It is a multifaceted role and the administration of the arts council is one part of that portfolio. I've been administering for the arts council since 1995.

Before I address the workings of the NWT Arts Council, I thought it would be good to provide some context. The arts council functions as a partner in the NWT arts strategy. In 2004, after extensive consultation with NWT communities, the Government of the Northwest Territories developed a strategy to guide programs, services, and marketing efforts on behalf of the arts and cultural industries in the Northwest Territories.

There were two departments to lead this: the Department of Education, Culture, and Employment, which I represent; and the the Department of Industry, Tourism, and Investment. In this framework, the NWT operates with a mandate to promote the arts, and the NWT Arts Council operates with a mandate to promote the arts in the NWT.

I have some speaking notes that say a little more about the vision and goals of the NWT arts strategy, but I won't go into that at this point. I just wanted to give you a frame of reference so that you could see how we operate as colleagues with a sister department.

I hope I'm not going too quickly for anyone.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

That seems to be fine, Mr. Atamanenko, but thanks for checking.

[Boris Atamanenko]

Thank you.

Specifically, the NWT Arts Council was established in 1985 as an advisory board to the Government of the Northwest Territories, and 2010 will be its 25th anniversary. This gives us pause for some reflection as well.

The mandate, as I said, is to promote the arts in the Northwest Territories, and the means to do this is by providing recommendations to the Government of the Northwest Territories' Minister of Education. The recommendations can be on creative projects in the visual, literary, media, and performing arts and funding for those projects, and on issues and policies associated with art and artists in the Northwest Territories.

There are five members who also act as jurors. They are political appointments. They are appointed to the arts council for terms of two years by the executive council of the government. The members are chosen for their expertise in an art form or their background in the community in fostering the arts, and from all five regions of our territories.

In terms of the demographics of service, as you are probably aware there is a population of a little over 40,000 in the Northwest Territories in 33 communities, and nine distinct aboriginal language groups, as well as English and French. The NWT Arts Council also recognizes that there is increasing growth of new Canadian residents from East Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe in a number of our communities. Most communities in the territories are very small with populations of fewer than 1,000.

My office administers the funding program for the arts council. We have an annual review, and the budget for this program is $500,000. That is in direct contributions for arts projects. It is project-based funding and not core, sustaining support to organizations, however.

For assessment of artistic projects the arts council members meet and make their decisions based on artistic merit and also on community benefit. They are very strong about seeing the relationship of an artist or of an arts organization in each community and how those ripples swing outward in terms of promoting and engaging people in doing arts practices.

There are funding priorities set by the arts council. I will leave you to see those in my speaking notes. I'll carry on to describe some of the disciplines we serve, and maybe where the role in support to the cultural industry and the economic development portions would be.

The arts council supports audio recording of voice and music, performing arts in all categories of dance, music, storytelling, and theatre. Storytelling is a particularly evocative tradition that is natural to some of the cultural context of our territories, and the arts council recognizes this and supports it in a large way. Writing and publishing, visual arts, crafts, and film and media arts are also supported.

The arts council reviews applications from individuals or organizations through three different stages tied to the arts and learning mandate of our Department of Education. The first is creative development. That is to say, people need to acquire the skills to do their art form and they can achieve that through some forms of training, workshops, or self-study. Learning from others and mentoring are large in our smaller communities as well, as generations pass skills on to the next.

Creation and production are actually doing the work, creating the works, once you have acquired those skills. The purpose of arts council funding is to support the creation of those works and then to think about how they might be disseminated or achieve public access.

That brings the third tier, public presentation. Through travel support, arts council will support someone to present their art work or storytelling or to mount an exhibit of their work in another community in the NWT.

One of the barriers right now is that we don't support our artists outside of the territories, so touring is really not a program of support through the council. This is for budgetary reasons primarily. I think there could be a day where we will be able to help to sponsor our artists abroad.

I will close by saying that the arts council office and my office provide a lot of assistance in coaching through proposal writing and in helping organizations determine their strategic planning, all in the context of what project support might come through arts council, bearing in mind there are other funding agencies as well. This is where we cooperate with our sister department in the GNWT, with Canada Council for the Arts, with Heritage Canada, and with other agencies. We provide sample budget sheets and proposal templates and offer those alternate sources of support where they might be applicable.

I thank you very much for your interest in us, and I'm certainly interested in the conversation that will follow.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you very much, Mr. Atamanenko.

We will now go to Ms. Cherwaty. Ms. Cherwaty, by the way, is the president of the Northern Territories Federation of Labour. I understand that your voice might be under some stress tonight, so if you grab hold of that microphone stand and bring it a little closer, you won't have to speak up too loudly. The microphones are quite sensitive and will pick up quite well, even a normal speaking voice.

Please go ahead with your presentation, and we look forward to it.

Thank you.

[Mary Lou Cherwaty, President, Northern Territories Federation of Labour]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

My voice is a little bit rough today, so I appreciate your bearing with me.

I'd like to thank you for the opportunity for the Federation of Labour to present our views on aboriginal affairs and northern development. As well, to the committee members, thank you for taking the time to travel to each of the three northern territories to hear from northerners about the concerns that we have.

I understand that my colleague Alex Furlong spoke to you in Iqaluit yesterday. Our Federation of Labour actually covers both the NWT and Nunavut, so I will be speaking primarily on those two territories.

No study of northern economic development would be complete without taking into account the socio-economic indicators that drive our northern reality. Building bridges, pipelines, roads, and mines won't improve the lives of northerners without a serious investment in social infrastructure.

While there are many aspects of northern living that require attention, today I will talk about three fundamental areas that need to be addressed immediately: unemployment, lack of housing, and the high cost of living.

I am hopeful that other presenters in your visits across the territories will outline the importance of settling outstanding land claims; the serious impacts of family violence, specifically the high rates of violence against women; escalating rates of suicide; the need for effective pay equity legislation; and implementing measures to reduce the wage gap between the rich and the rest of us.

On the issue of unemployment, from July 2008 to July 2009 the employment rate in the NWT fell to 66.3%. According to our bureau of statistics, this is the largest change in unemployment rate in any jurisdiction in Canada. Out of our potential working population of 31,500 persons, 1,500 are unemployed and 9,000 are not in the labour force, and they're not in the labour force largely because they've given up looking for work. This means that 33% of NWT residents are actually unemployed. And if you take into account that the NWT is actually the only jurisdiction in Canada that's losing population, this is a relatively conservative number.

The situation in Nunavut is much worse. According to the Nunavut Bureau of Statistics, the total potential working population in September 2009 was 18,600. Of those, 1,700 were unemployed and 7,100 were not in the labour force. This equates to 47% of Nunavummiuts are not working. And if you only take into account the Inuit population, this rises to over 56%.

The Northwest Territories and Nunavut, with the highest percentages of unemployment, are also the only jurisdictions in the country without our own EI board of referees. What happens when a resident of either territory wants to appeal an EI decision? They have to go to the board in Edmonton, Alberta. Workers and employers in the NWT and Nunavut do pay huge amounts of money into a federal EI system that is largely inaccessible to us. If a worker is laid off and lucky enough to access EI, the level of benefits are insufficient to live in the north, so they end up moving south, adding to the out-migration I spoke of earlier. There needs to be some form of indexing EI benefits to adjust for regional costs of living.

The other really important issue that relates to unemployment is education. Sadly, the number of students who graduate from high school is less than 70% in the NWT, and as low as 42.6% in Nunavut. Statistics Canada figures show that rates of graduation from post-secondary institutions are just as bad.

I know that education is technically a territorial responsibility, but the federal government does need to recognize that children cannot learn effectively when they are crammed into over-crowded houses, lack basic health and dental services, and have no access to affordable, nutritious foods. So funding in all these areas needs to be increased.

On the issue of the lack of housing, in 2004 the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson stated:

...the conditions in far too many aboriginal communities can only be described as shameful. This offends our values. It is in our collective interest to turn the corner. And we must start now.

Unfortunately, almost six years later, northern aboriginal and Inuit communities are no better off.

According to the Yellowknife Homelessness Coalition, in October 2008 Yellowknife had a vacancy rate of 0.7%, and 34% of households were spending more than 30% of their income on shelter.

My brief has a lot of other statistics about the serious rates of housing. I'd like to highlight in this area that in Nunavut there are situations where people aren't classed as homeless because they have shelter, but they're sharing shelter. They're living in shifts in one house. So if it's someone's time to go to work, they go to work, and when they come home they kick somebody else out of the house so they can have a space to sleep. There's just not enough room in the houses for them to even sleep.

One of the most disastrous outcomes of this lack of housing is poor health. Nationally, eight out of ten Canadians had contact with a medical doctor in 2008. In NWT it was one half of that, and in Nunavut only one out of ten residents had access to a doctor. In both of the territories the infant mortality rates are far greater and the life expectancy of those who do live is much less than the national averages. Northerners, especially our aboriginal and Inuit peoples, are plagued with health problems that put them on a par with some of the poorest parts of the world. In a country as wealthy as Canada, this is unconscionable.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

If you could, please begin to sum up.

[Mary Lou Cherwaty]

Wrap it up? Okay.

I'm just going to say that we've addressed the housing and unemployment, and the other area is the cost of living. One area in the cost of living that we did talk to the finance committee about was increasing the northern residents tax deduction. This is more for the working population in our territories, but because of the high cost of living we pay more in GST, and that's actually being clawed back from what we do gain in the northern residents tax deduction.

In conclusion, there needs to be a greater focus on reducing unemployment, increasing adequate housing, and addressing the high cost of living, and thereby creating healthier and more stable communities that can withstand the pressures associated with economic development. It's also critically important that whatever measures are taken to improve the lives of northerners, we need to respect the culture and the values of our aboriginal and Inuit populations.

Thank you very much for your time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you very much, Ms. Cherwaty.

Now we'll go to Mr. Charles Pokiak. Do you pronounce the k on the end?

[Charles Pokiak, Director, Tuktoyaktuk Hunters and Trappers Committee]

Yes, Pokiak.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you very much, Charles.

Mr. Pokiak is a director of the Tuktoyaktuk Hunters and Trappers Committee.

Welcome to our committee, and please go ahead with your presentation for about five minutes.

[Charles Pokiak]

I'm glad to be here. It was kind of short notice for me. I just got off the plane a little while ago, so I'm a bit jet-lagged, but I'm used to it.

Mary hit the nose right on the button about the cost of living and the shortage of housing. I find 20 people in one house, sometimes. It's a fact up there in Nunavut and in the Northwest Territories, right in our backyard.

The jobs that do come up there are few and far between. We're used to no work, sometimes, and then when the jobs come up with oil companies, it's all labour. They hire us as labourers because our education is limited. We don't want to move away from home. We want to be with family. Grandparents look after the children.

The cost just to go out on the land.... For instance, when I used to trap, it was a lot cheaper to go out, to charter a plane, to go 150 miles or so to where the marten are, southeast of our community. Just to charter a plane was $400. Now to go over there it's over $3,000, because we have to get a plane now just to go from Norman Wells to Inuvik and to Tuk and fly out from there.

We have two avid trappers out there still: Billy Jacobson and George Unalize. They've trapped all their lives and they're out there 24/7. Just as an example, just to go out there, it cost them $3,000 one way. They try to make ends meet by doing a little bit of trapping. These guys are in their seventies, and they're trying to make a living at it. Just to break even, they get a little bit of fur, which costs the price of gas to fly out. There used to be a trap funding for that. We have that, but it's about $3,000, and it goes out to those guys to try to help them with the cost of chartering a plane. You can see that they want to come home for Christmas and sometimes they can't. It's hard for them to get the marten sometimes because of the weather and global warming, as they say, the climate change. It's hard just to go out because the lakes are not thick enough sometimes. There's too much overflow.

That's about all I have to say.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Charles, you used the term “overflow”.

[Charles Pokiak]

Overflow is when you get too much snow before it really freezes. You have a thin layer of ice; you get too heavy packed powder. The weight of the snow will break up the water, so you're going over the land most of the time. When I used to trap, even before Christmas I wasn't allowed to go on the lakes, because it's up to your knees in some places.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Okay.

Thank you for coming and joining us this evening.

Now we'll go to our fourth presentation, and that will be from Ms. Hilary Jones, general manager for the Mine Training Society, and also Mr. Ted Blondin, who is a director with the Mine Training Society.

Mr. Blondin is going to present for us. Go ahead, please.

[Ted Blondin, Director, Mine Training Society]

Thank you very much. It's a great honour to be making a presentation to the committee.

I'm on the board of directors with the Mine Training Society, as you indicated, but I also bring experience as vice-chairman of the Aurora College. I'm also on several study groups here.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We're going to be there tomorrow morning, actually.

[Ted Blondin]

Right on.

In my presentation I'll bring a lot of the experience I have, partly as a negotiator on the Tlicho land claim agreement, so I might bring some self-government elements to it.

With regard to taking opportunities and dealing with the barriers to economic development in some of our smaller communities, the northern communities are no different from any other aboriginal community across Canada. We all have social problems. We're dealing with alcohol and drugs and gambling. That leads to a lot of other problems with younger people being left home alone and not having the advice they need to further their education.

Of course they'll have to go through a fairly large healing process, and that is usually very expensive. I'm from one of the Tlicho communities, so when we run into these problems we approach the territorial government for counsellors to come to our communities. But there's no money for it. So because of the opportunities and benefits that flowed from BHP, for instance, we trained 30 alcohol and drug counsellors and we now have 30 alcohol and drug counsellors in our four communities. So we've had to take our own initiative to try to deal with some of the healing in our communities.

All the social problems we encounter in our communities follow the education problems we have. It's true we have growing numbers of graduates every year. Fifteen years ago we only had three people in post-secondary education. We now have over 100, and that's because since the settlement of land claims we've been able to set up a scholarship committee and subsidize students to go to post-education institutions.

Over 85% of those students graduating are young ladies, and just about 100% of them want to come back and either work for Tlicho government or one of our businesses. So I think that's money very well invested.

We're also finding that even though students are graduating, there's still a low literacy rate. They're not quite meeting the Alberta standards in English, for instance. Therefore, as the vice-chairman of Aurora College, I'm also dealing with that, in terms of students having adequate training to take on some of the courses.

Also, with the opportunities available to us, particularly with the diamond mining companies and the tourism business in our area, there seems to be a lack of opportunity for career exploration and counselling. Right now a lot of students become secretaries, bookkeepers, teachers, and social workers. There's nothing wrong with all of that, but a lot of the careers in the mining companies, like engineering and higher positions in the mining companies, or even business, require the matriculation courses: English and math 10, 20, and 30. A lot of them take some of the weaker courses, and therefore they can't take the courses that are required to take on the jobs that really do pay well.

That also has an effect on the training. There really is a lack of business training--upgrading is required--literacy, and life skills; therefore, we have a long way to go before we start putting on some business courses.

But a lot of people are very interested in it. There's no shortage of experience in the communities. A lot of people have worked in various areas because they take whatever jobs become available. We just have to build on that experience.

Running a Tlicho government makes you realize that when you run a government people require a lot of services. To fund these services, every activity costs money. Therefore you have to put some thought to the economic arm of the government. So dealing with these barriers to economic opportunities is something close to our minds, at the forefront.

As people come forward to the territorial government and the federal government they say they need training for mining, they need more teachers, they need more people trained in the language area. Funding does come, but it usually comes for specific types of programs, and in the communities the solutions are not vertical, they are horizontal. Therefore, none of the courses that are required are stand-alone; they all sort of play a part, flipping over one another.