Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Nov. 24th, 2009

[Brian Zawadski]

Yes, I'm just about there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

If you could finish up, that would be great. Maybe you could summarize.

[Brian Zawadski]

There are electricity alternatives out there that need to be investigated, like wind and solar.

Nunavut has not necessarily benefited from equitable application of federal programs such as small craft harbours and road construction. Another example is the DFO aboriginal fisheries strategy. Aboriginal groups across the country have benefited significantly from this program, but DFO does not support applications from Nunavut, even though the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement specifically states in section 2.7.3 that nothing in the agreement will limit the ability of Inuit to participate in and benefit from government programs for Inuit or aboriginal people.

Despite the challenges, the Nunavut economy continues to expand, driven by sectors such as fishing and mining. Economic spinoffs associated with the growth of these sectors will be significant. However, if Nunavut is to take full advantage of the long-term economic potential associated with these sectors, it will require targeted investments from all levels of government in areas such as roads, port facilities, job training, and alternative energy.

It is through addressing these core areas that are critical for sustainable economic development that we will see positive social and economic returns for Nunavut.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you, Mr. Zawadski and all of our witnesses.

At this point, we will go to questions from members. We follow an order that's pre-determined, allowing members from each of the four parties a balance of time more or less in proportion to their allocation of seats in the House.

When we go to questions, it's five minutes for both the question from the member and your response. So the more we can keep those questions and answers succinct, the more we can cover. You'll see how quickly it goes.

We will be having some of the questions in French, so you may want to put your headsets on and turn to channel 1 for English or channel 2 for French.

We'll begin with a question from Mr. Bagnell.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Nakurmiik, Mr. Chair.

It's great to be back as the critic for the Arctic in Parliament and to be back up here as the member of Parliament for the great riding of Yukon.

The first question is for the Nunavut Development Corporation. We've heard lots of requests for infrastructure. These are huge megaprojects, so we have to start somewhere. It may be hard, but have you prioritized, for instance, the Bathurst Inlet Port and Road, the Iqaluit harbour, the road up Baffin Island, or the small ports harbours? What is the order of ranking? I know we'd like to do everything.

[Brian Zawadski]

They're all important, and our focus is on the companies that I identified. Advancements in any of those infrastructure projects would benefit the communities and our companies, but we don't have necessarily a direct involvement in any of them.

There is the new harbour going into the community of Pangnirtung, and we will see a benefit there. In the next couple of years we will see the development of an inshore fishery for 45- to 55-foot boats. They will be used to undertake a long-line fishery and maybe a gillnet turbot fishery just a three- to four-hour sail away from the community. It will make a big difference.

As for the ones you listed, there are real benefits to them, but we're such a small player, with so few investment dollars, that we can't play a major role in any of those.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Patrick, is your bandwidth wide enough to do telehealth effectively? They send those complex pictures from the small rural communities at a cost of so many billions of dollars for Medevac. Do you have the necessary equipment in those small rural communities? Is the bandwidth enough to get the detail in the picture?

Second, in 2012 you run out of funding. If you didn't get more, would some of the communities in Nunavut lose their access to the broadband Internet? Would private fees be enough to cover the operations?

[Patrick Doyle]

On the first question, there is sufficient bandwidth currently offered to the infrastructure to upgrade when the network capacity will be caught up to where the actual number of users are.

There is another part to that with the rollout of the large-file transfer application. It's a time-deferred application, so if you're sending some sort of geoscience mapping files or images, X-rays, or what have you, they would be deferred to transfer at night, when the network is less congested and also cheaper. So it would address that with the combination of the two things, plus we have applied for the Broadband Canada pot of money, in which case that would be a full T1 in all the communities, if we were successful. So it would essentially be like being in Toronto if you were in Arctic Bay. That's for the first question.

On your question about after 2012, up until now there have been a couple of phases of funding through different projects—the national satellite initiative, Infrastructure Canada, and then possibly Broadband Canada, and we're looking at P3 Canada. But in theory, in 2012, it would come to a crashing halt and just end, in the sense that the rates would have to go up to full, unsubsidized commercial rates, which would basically be triple or more. So at that point, many people just couldn't afford it, so it would be catastrophic at that point, unless there were some....

What it needs is a program—actually, I hate to bring it up—similar to something in the order of food mail, where you have a regular A-based-budget type model, but in this case adequate instead of going back for supplementary estimates all the time, where it would actually be part of a someone's regular program, budgeted. This was great to get it off the ground, but it's not adequate. Something that's now become core infrastructure of critical importance can't be a project; it has to be a regular program, funded. So someone would have to take it on—INAC, Health Canada, or what have you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you, Mr. Bagnell and witnesses.

I'll also say, just for the benefit of our guests who have joined us this afternoon, that there are interpretation audio devices. If you want to get one, it will help you to understand some of the questions that may be coming from committee members. There are some on the desks, I believe, and if you need one, I think our staff up behind us here will help you out with that also.

I will now give the floor over to Mr. Lévesque.

[Yvon Lévesque, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I represent the riding of Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou. In terms of housing, it is usually Nunavik that calculates its needs in terms of the number of houses required. Right now in Nunavik, there are 14 people per housing unit, which is a lot. We would need 1,000 housing units immediately.

There are two levels of administration involved. Nunavik asks the federal government for the number of units it needs, and the federal government works with the province on a joint program, including transportation and home building.

It seems that things work differently here. Could you explain how it works here? In my riding, once Ottawa makes the decision, the Kativik Regional Government deals with building and distributing homes. Here, it would seem that the regional government, through your agency, is the one that makes the requests. Do you ask for an amount or a specific number of homes when you submit your request?

[Patsy Owlijoot]

As I said, we have five offices. Our directorate office is here in Iqaluit, where policy...and the president works. I'm from Arviat, on the Hudson Bay coast. That's where the headquarters are. My position is Vice-President, and since there is no president right now I came here on Friday to act as president.

We currently have 1,537 families on our waiting list all across Nunavut.

We have three district offices that represent each district, because there are three districts in Nunavut. As I told you, we have 25 LHOs. Kivalliq has seven communities, Kitikmeot has five communities, and here in Baffin there are 13 communities. Each of them report to the district office for the three districts. The district offices give us their report at the headquarters in Arviat and we put the data together from there. The district office gets the information from the local housing organizations. They are the community delivery partners that we have in all 25 communities.

We know how many families are on the waiting list currently because that is the information they gave us. I will be able to give you that. You told me you have 14 people per house in Nunavik. I will get you the person per house information, but I don't want to give you false information. I know the national average in Canada is much, much lower than the average of Nunavut. I will give you the figures, but I don't want to give you the wrong information. I'm surprised about Nunavik, with 14 people per unit.

Does that answer your question?

[Yvon Lévesque, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

In part, but I would like to know whether you submit your requests to the federal government directly. Do you ask for the number of homes you need or a dollar amount based on a calculation of how much each home will cost?

[Patsy Owlijoot]

I will let the chief financial officer answer that for me because she looks after all the money for us.

[Lori Kimball, Chief Financial Officer, Nunavut Housing Corporation]

Basically we use the statistics to go after the money from the federal government. Usually it does come down to a bucket of dollars that they're willing to give us. Once we know how much money they're giving us, then we usually commit to delivering a fixed number of houses.

When we tell the government we need 1,500 homes, we're not getting 1,500 homes in one sitting. Usually it's some number, a dollar amount, that we get as an offer and we go from there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Lévesque. Unfortunately, you are out of time.

[Yvon Lévesque, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

The last one?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

No, your time is up.

It is now over to Mrs. Hughes.

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Feel free to answer the questions even though they may not be directed at you in particular. I know a lot of it does intertwine.

You talked about the amount of dollars you actually need for housing, and I'm just wondering if you have a percentage of that that is actually being eaten away with respect to transportation, because when you get the dollars for housing it doesn't actually just go to the housing. You have to take into account how much it costs to bring here. I understand the challenges this brings, because from what I can gather--and it's my first time here--you're not only having the transportation done here up to a certain point, but you actually have to send the barge out. I'm assuming there's another cost involved in having people from the community who actually go out to the barge to get the supplies and bring them back to shore and carry them. So it's quite challenging in that respect. Maybe you could speak to that.

You also mentioned homelessness. I'm just wondering, because when you mention homelessness you are also dealing with poverty as well and you're dealing with health care problems. So I'm curious on that note. Do you have statistics with regard to how many people actually die because of homelessness? What are your percentages on that?

Maybe I'll leave it there, and if I have time, I'll talk on another issue, the broadband one.

[Patsy Owlijoot]

We do not have the statistics for how many people have died because of homelessness. Right now, we are in the midst of doing a Nunavut-wide housing needs survey; the Nunavut Bureau of Statistics and Statistics Canada are working with us. That way, we'll find out exactly the situation of our homes and the conditions, the number of homeless people and where they sleep. In the north, you cannot be homeless; you'll freeze to death in a matter of seconds or minutes.

When that survey is done, we'll know a lot more of those details, and we hope to have that completed by sometime in the spring of 2010.

You were talking about the barges. Barges come from Montreal for certain communities...from Montreal it goes to all the communities. They don't just stop in Iqaluit. They stop in Iqaluit and in Kimmirut, and in all the different communities across Nunavut. There is also another barge company called NTCL. They come from Churchill, Manitoba. They go to the Kivalliq communities, but it depends on which barge you have a contract with.

Transportation is very expensive because it puts extra cost on the materials we purchase on top of the price for the materials.

Does that answer your question?

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Yes. It's hard.

What percentage of the housing money you get from the federal government goes to transportation for those houses?

I understand that people would freeze to death. An elder from Nunavut came to Ottawa about three or four weeks ago and talked about the fact that they're looking at probably six or more people living in a home, three or four families sometimes. One person was knocking on doors, saying they needed a place to stay that night. Given the fact that we live in a very wealthy country, it's very troublesome that we still hear of that and the difficulties you have.

With regard to the broadband, I know this creates problems when you're trying to do economic development, and especially now with students needing access to the broadband to do their homework. One of my colleagues mentioned health care. What are some of the solutions that need to happen? How much money should the government be looking at investing? We understand you're unique up here and there has to be a unique solution.

On the economic development itself, you have a mine coming up here and there were mines before. How do you create new businesses when you don't have the technology?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We're over time here, so if you can compress that response, that would be great. Then we'll move on.

[Patrick Doyle]

It's a good question. There are a couple of things.

One thing I forgot to mention is we're a public-private partnership, and Nunavut Broadband is the conduit to the private sector to build this, so every dollar put in by the government is matched by the private sector. Our model as such is that every dollar is put in first by the private sector, so it's no risk to Canada. This current infrastructure upgrade is about $21 million from Canada collectively and exactly $21 million from the private sector. That's split into infrastructure upgrades, actual equipment, but most of it is for the purchase of bandwidth for the network itself.

You're right. There's an expectation to develop the north, to get people to live here. They're going to come with an expectation of this connectivity that's world class. I think it's a very small investment for the money. Our budget is relatively small compared to some of the other investments. I'm initiating an economic development study to try to put some dollar values around what dollar investment means.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you, Mr. Doyle, and thank you, Mrs. Hughes.

We'll now go to the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Mr. Duncan, go ahead.

[John Duncan, Conservative, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Thank you very much.

I have a question on Nunavut housing. You spoke of the Northern Housing Trust, which had $300 million of federal money put into it. There was $150 million for urgent housing needs in Nunavut. How much of that has been allocated at this time, and how much of the allocation would be handled by your corporation? Would it be all of it or just a portion?

[Lori Kimball]

Of the $300 million in funding, which was, I believe, for all three territories, the Nunavut portion was $200 million. That was to build 725 units. We've built 500 units, and an additional 200 units will be built. The delivery cycle is such that we just got the last shipment of materials this past summer. I think in September or October we got the last shipment of materials to finish the remaining 200 units. They should be completed in this coming fiscal year of 2010-11. The labour will begin once the thaw occurs.