I'm not sure of exactly the legal aspects, but there's a sort of general approach that was taken towards the interpretation of the Nunavut Agreement early on. When the Auditor General reviewed DIAND's implementation of it in 2003, he observed that the department tended to look not at the objectives of the agreement, but at the obligations, and in a rather narrow sense.
People focused on, let's say, 14(1)(c)(iii), and interpreted that in relation to their existing government policies and what they were free to do as a result of those policies in carrying out 14(1)(c)(iii), for example. I'm making up the numbers. The problem is that the objectives that are laid out in various places, both in the front piece, in the preamble of the agreement, and then in some of the chapters where there are objectives, tended to get glossed over.
The objective of securing greater Inuit self-reliance, for example, kind of got.... If you're working in a department where you're doing contracting, you don't think about that. I think a lack of oversight was one of the reasons. I think a lack of the ability to go to arbitration, as was pointed out, is another reason. Inuvialuit have or had arbitration; I believe they may have the only modern treaty, before we got it in 2015, to have a provision that allows them to go to arbitration whether or not the government agrees.
From what I'm told, this made the government very careful about doing what they have to do, because they do not want to face arbitration. There was a lack of incentive. If something is put off, it can take a few years, and then it gets put off again, and a person changes and the policy changes, and there's a lack of oversight and direction within the government.
Presumably that has changed a bit with the establishment of the deputy ministers' oversight committee, but this is a long-term problem, and until there's a.... This is a complicated agreement, and there are 30 of them. I don't think there's much government-wide understanding of them.