Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm relieved by your introduction. When the previous speaker said the Berger era is over, I thought, well, it had a good run, 30 years or more.
I'm also relieved to know the topic is the general one of economic development in the north. For a moment there I thought it was a reprise of the whole Mackenzie Valley issue, which is now in other hands, and no doubt very competent hands.
Maybe I could just tell you that I did spend three years in the Mackenzie Valley, in the western Arctic, back in the late seventies, and I think I learned something about the north and economic development. I did emphasize in my report the importance of maintaining the traditional economy of hunting, fishing, and trapping, which was then, and I believe is today, an important component of northern culture and putting food on the table. That tends to be overlooked in the enthusiasm for industrial projects. Part of the reason I emphasized it 30 years ago was to ensure that the measures were taken in land claims agreements to secure those hunting, fishing, and trapping rights. That was a precondition to industrial development.
I was in Nunavut in 2005 and 2006 as conciliator between Canada, Nunavut, and the ITC, the Inuit corporation that represents the beneficiaries. Could I just leave you with a few thoughts that I expressed in my report in March 1, 2006, about development in the north, with particular attention to Nunavut so that nobody will think I'm giving any firm opinions about the Mackenzie Valley or development there?
In Nunavut I was of course dealing with the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement of 1993, which established the Government of Nunavut in 1999. The concern was, now you've got the land claims settled, you've got your own government, what about the next steps? Of course, my concern was that there should be measures taken to ensure that the Inuit, in that case--but the principle would apply generally throughout the north to the aboriginal peoples--inhabited their own government, so to speak, and that they had opportunities for employment on development as it occurred in the north. Of course, in Nunavut you're faced with the overlying issue, so to speak, of global warming and the melting of the ice, and the greater access this offers, I think, to industry in Nunavut. It makes mines and minerals and oil and gas that much more accessible. The question is this. How do the Inuit people become participants? How do they become miners, how do they become biologists, and how do they become members of all the trained occupations and professions that are essential if they are to occupy 50% of the jobs in their own government that they don't possess now because they don't have the qualifications? The same will be reproduced in the private sector as it moves into the north and onto the Arctic islands, as they begin searching for minerals and oil and gas under the seabed.
That means that education and employment have to be the concerns that are uppermost in the north for aboriginal people. People who are non-aboriginal will be coming in to fill many of these jobs, and they are already qualified. What concerns me is the qualification of aboriginal people. I made recommendations that had mainly to do with education in Nunavut, because with 75% of Inuit children dropping out of school before they complete high school.... The figures are better in the western Arctic, but they are still figures that should make us distinctly uneasy. We want to make sure that Inuit will be able to get those jobs. Even working for their own corporations, even working in oil or gas, in mining partnerships that their land claims agreements have now made possible for them, how are they to get the jobs for which you need to be qualified?
I don't want to make too much of this, and I'm sure you're aware of that concern. I made the point in my report, which I have here, that you need a true system of bilingual education in Nunavut. Right now they educate in Inuktitut until about grade 4 or 5, and then they switch to English. It means that their education is in two segments, if you will, and they emerge not really literate in either their own language, which is a written language, or in English, which is the primary language of most people--other than Inuktitut.
I urged that the federal government subsidize that program, because it would be expensive. We'd have to train more teachers, mainly Inuit teachers. We would have to have the programs that have worked in other jurisdictions for children to learn their own language after school from older people. This is because 75% of the people of Nunavut still speak Inuktitut as their first language. These kids ought to have the opportunity to become literate in the language that is spoken in their homes and is the aboriginal language in Canada that is spoken by the largest body of aboriginal people. It's not going to go away. If you consider that, and I hope you do, bilingual education.... I urged at the time, in 2006, that we could graduate the first classes in 2020, and those people would be equipped to go on to vocational training. They would be equipped to go on to college or university, and they would be able to take their place in their own government--as people in charge of the wildlife of this vast area, as people who would be able to enter the private sector as geologists or engineers. That has to be our goal, because otherwise, the industrial development of these northern territories may once again occur with aboriginal people being, in many cases, bystanders, or working in the catering division or as janitors and so on. We don't want to see that.
They've had 30 years to consider how to integrate aboriginal people into the Mackenzie gas project. The same possibilities don't currently exist to integrate the Inuit people into projects that are already on the drawing board for Nunavut, and they won't exist unless we establish an appropriate system of education that equips them for the training they will need in the Arctic in the years to come.
I'm grateful to you for giving me 10 minutes, and I'm afraid that's all I've got to say.