Thank you very much. I'll try to stick to seven minutes. As you all know, politicians have a hard time with that.
I'd like to say good afternoon and thank the committee for allowing me the opportunity to share my experiences and observations of women in politics, especially Inuit women in Nunavut.
My political beginnings start with my volunteerism, when I lived here in Ottawa and volunteered with the Inuit community centre, Tungasuvvingat Inuit, and Kagita Mikam, an indigenous employment training board. I helped set up the Inuit family resource centre, the Wabano health centre and the Inuit Head Start here.
I can tell you that when you work with an NGO, especially an indigenous NGO, it is political.
When I moved back to my home community just before the creation of Nunavut, I did so because I wanted to be part of the fascinating opportunity of creating a new territory and a new territorial government. I wanted my daughter, in particular, to be part of that. When you live in the north, your communities are small. Everything is political.
In those early days, there was an awful lot of work that needed to be done in setting up our territorial government and implementing our land claim agreement.
One of the interesting things that I want to share with the committee is that we had a referendum, as you are probably aware. There was an opportunity for our region to have gender parity. I attended those community consultations. You had people on both sides of the spectrum—those who supported, and those who did not. Interestingly enough, sometimes women did not support gender parity on the basis that we could compete equally despite the fact that there is significant under-representation of women in politics.
The ultimate vote on the referendum was that we would not proceed with gender parity. Not surprisingly, in our first legislative assembly, we had one woman out of 18 MLAs. It was actually a woman who had spoken out against gender parity, interestingly enough.
In the second assembly, there were two out of 18. We had increased by 100%. In the third assembly, we started off with two and then it was reduced to one. In the fourth assembly, we bumped up to three. In our most recent election of last fall, we had a bumper number of women: six out of 22. We jumped up from approximately 5% to 27%. Almost on par with Inuit representation in most of the municipalities or provincial or federal governments.
That is definitely far less than the one half of what we represent in our population.
I would remiss if I did not mention that in Nunavut, politics go well beyond our territorial MLAs. We have our Inuit land claims organizations, including Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated, which represents the rights and interests of all Inuit across the territory. We also have our three regional Inuit associations, representing Baffin, Kivalliq and Kitikmeot. Women's representation there is very small, so much so that they actually have often a designated Inuit position on their board of directors. The position is ex officio—non-voting— just the same as our youth. Yet those organizations have millions of dollars of operating budget and are responsible for overseeing millions of our own land claim money that is invested in businesses or in partnerships, and they negotiate the impact benefit agreements whether it's for a major development or a park.
The accountability of those Inuit organizations or corporations is often challenging, if not problematic. For those of you in the room who are lawyers, I would call them sui generis. They are creatures of their own. They're creatures created by the land claim agreement. In government, as you well know, there are certain ways by which elected officials can be held accountable. We can all be subject to ATIP, or, if you are a shareholder, you have shareholders' rights.
In my region, they're quasi-public, quasi-corporate, but we don't enjoy the rights of transparency or accountability to the same standards. It was one of the issues that our former Nunavut minister Leona Aglukkaq spoke to in the legislative assembly back in 2008.
In 2010, Pauktuutit, with the Qulliit Status of Women in Nunavut, organized a women's leadership summit. I want to share Sheila Watt-Cloutier's words, which I think resonate quite well.
Leadership is for all of us, not just for the elected positions, but comes from the grassroots level, whether you are a mother, a grandmother, a manager, an administrator, a teacher, elder, or youth. All of us are leaders in our own right and we all have a role to play in helping to lead on so many issues.
The problem is that those are nice words and there's a lot of truth in them, but when we have the majority of our community organizations that are not represented by Inuit and there's an under-representation of Inuit women, it means that those decisions do not reflect the views, perspectives or priorities of all our community.
Our land claim agreement is a perfect example. If you took a look at it, virtually nothing in there speaks to education, health, language, culture, child care. It's a very male-centric agreement. Why? Because it was negotiated by men and men.
I also want to maybe share with you some personal observations as an elected person myself.