June 19, 2009
Dial “V” for violence
Back in 1995, one of those big bad researchers who just about everyone in Nunavut loves to hate put out one of those big bad studies that just about everyone in Nunavut says we have too many of.
Called Crime, Law and Justice Among Inuit in the Baffin Region, the study was done by Curt Griffiths, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University.
Between 1992 and 1994, he and members of his research team dug up information from the Baffin's 13 communities that few before them had ever bothered to seek.
They managed to produce, for example, the first publically available crime statistics for a Nunavut region.
But they did more than simply record bleak rows of inert numbers and turn them into rates and percentages. They talked to real people all over the region: social workers, family violence counsellors, community leaders, police officers, nurses, teachers, and lawyers.
What they found was shocking and disturbing.
"What we're seeing is increased violence, increased people going to jail, more charges before the courts, and a mushrooming population that comes with a swelling population of young people who have no hope for what's going to happen to them tomorrow," an anonymous RCMP member said in one of those interviews.
This was 1992, nearly 17 years ago - a period of time that almost spans a generation. Even then, the Baffin region, home to more than half of Nunavut's population, contained some of the most violent communities in Canada.
Did any elected officials pay attention? Of course not. Did anyone in any Inuit association pay attention? Nope. Did any of the bodies responsible for planning the new territory take this information into account? Ditto.
Most of the time they were too absorbed with obscure processes far removed from the real lives of regular people: the irrelevant intricacies of the land claim agreement and futile debates over issues such as where to put Nunavut's capital or how to elect members of the Nunavut legislative assembly.
The SFU researchers predicted then that rates of crime would continue to increase. And they did. The rate of violent crime then was about four times the Canadian average. Now it's seven times the Canadian average. And every year, at least one in five Nunavut residents are victimized by a crime and at least one in five residents is charged with a crime.
You can't say Nunavut didn't get fair warning. The information was there for authorities to absorb and act upon.
Federal, territorial and Inuit officials should have used it to plan for increasing numbers of violent offenders. They could have used it to work on evidence-based policies aimed at identifying and attacking the root causes of violent crime. And they could have used it to find better ways of helping traumatized victims.
But they didn't. And Nunavut's justice, corrections, legal aid and social service systems are now swamped by a tidal wave of violent crime that was entirely predictable.
We saw an example earlier this month. A Pangnirtung man spent five days rotting inside the notorious RCMP lockup in Iqaluit, whose conditions do not meet even minimal international standards for the detention of prisoners.
This happened because Nunavut's only secure prison, the Baffin Correctional Centre, was already stuffed to its rafters with inmates, many of them either accused or convicted of violent offences. On the day that the Pangnirtung man arrived in Iqaluit, 95 men were jammed into an aging hell-hole that's intended to hold only 66.
To be fair, the Government of Nunavut is not unaware of this issue. As many readers know, the GN plans to start building a new 32-bed prison in Rankin Inlet this year. But simple arithmetic should tell you this won't be enough. And current plans by the federal government to prohibit the use of house arrest for a wide range of offences will put even more pressure on Nunavut's overloaded correctional system.
In Iqaluit alone, complaints to the RCMP for the first five months of this year are 51 per cent higher than over the same period last year. In only five months this year they held 1,408 people in their holding cells - in a community of only 6,500.
And while rates of violent crime are leveling off, there are ominous signs that it's growing more lethal, a trend that's been painfully visible throughout the Eastern Arctic.
In Pond Inlet, a man tried to shoot an RCMP officer. In Iqaluit, a man was gang-raped and a woman was found dead in highly suspicious circumstances.
In Salluit, a man started a gun fight with police officers, then hid on a nearby hill, where he was arrested. In Nunavik, incidentally, the situation is even more pathetic than Nunavut's. Many leaders there wallow in an even greater state of ignorance and denial.
And everyone remembers the 2007 triple-homicide in Cambridge Bay and the killing of Cst. Douglas Scott in Kimmirut later that year along with a long, dreary list of beatings, stabbings, rapes and mindless orgies of booze-fueled gun violence.
All this creates endless labour for over-worked cops, lawyers, judges and jail guards, all struggling within a system designed by people who couldn't, or wouldn't, acknowledge simple facts that lay under their noses.
So the next time some big bad researcher gives you information you don't want to hear, pay attention. JB
May 22, 2009
Aariak gives merit a fresh new start
In a quiet announcement May 14, just before the Victoria Day weekend, Premier Eva Aariak signalled that she's not afraid to distance herself from her predecessor's legacy.
As of June 22, Bob Long will leave his job as general manager of the Baffin Business Development Centre to become deputy minister of the deeply-troubled Department of Economic Development and Transportation.
He'll replace Rosemary Keenainak, who will leave the Government of Nunavut after serving as deputy minister of the EDT department for about two years. Before that she served for many years as a senior official in the Finance and Community Government departments. In a statement, she says she will "take a new direction in my life, and will be pursuing educational opportunities in the fall."
This is the kind of human resource euphemism that gives unwanted employees a chance to preserve some dignity, to which, in this case, Keenainak is entitled. She's obviously an intelligent woman who struggled with a brutal job at a time when the Nunavut civil service was beset by insoluble problems and squalid scandals. We hope she'll come back one day to serve Nunavut in a way that's fulfilling to her and useful to the territory.
Most recently, Keenainak was involved in a minor spat that lasted for about a day before everyone forgot about it. In a recent legislative assembly session, Iqaluit West MLA Paul Okalik huffed and puffed about a private email she composed last year on a government computer. The email speculated who would win which seats in last fall's territorial election. It did not include Okalik's name on her list of predicted winners, which in his mind seemed to make it a public issue.
Thousands of people engage in this kind of time-wasting entertainment every day. It's imprudent to do it at work, but harmless. And we hope it played no role in Keenainak's departure.
As for her replacement, Bob Long is hardly a household name in Nunavut, but he enjoys much respect in the business community, having served as president of the Baffin Regional Chamber of Commerce and chair of the Nunavut Trade Show and Conference.
What's more, Long ran a business loan agency for 10 years, the BBDC, without driving it into either bankruptcy or administrative dysfunction. In Nunavut, that verges on the miraculous.
It's obvious that he brings badly needed expertise to a government that is still struggling to rebuild the Nunavut Business Credit Corp., which the EDT department is responsible for. At the same time, EDT is perceived as offering substandard service to those who want government help in starting small businesses.
Remember when the Okalik government said back in 1999 that every single GN job would be regarded as a "training position?" Well, Long is no entry-level trainee. He's a mature, seasoned professional with 40 years of experience in business and economic development.
And his appointment also shows that Aariak is likely backing away from a policy that Paul Okalik announced during the assembly's June 2006 mid-term leadership review: that all GN senior managers become "fluent" in the Inuit language before 2008. Though he may possess many competencies, it's unlikely that Long was hired for his linguistic abilities.
This then, is a senior civil service appointment made on the basis of other merit. Given the GN's recent history, this is no routine personnel shuffle. It's a statement. JB
May 1, 2009
An opportunity for Leona
During her 2008 campaign for Nunavut's House of Commons seat, Leona Aglukkaq had a lot to say about the brutal cost of living in Nunavut.
Now, a highly-critical report on the federal government's food mail program has given her a chance to do something about it.
Aglukkaq, as most readers know, now serves as the Conservative government's regional minister for the three northern territories and as minister of national health and welfare.
These two positions give her an opportunity to exert a degree of influence over the federal policy that no previous Nunavut MP has ever enjoyed. She should use this influence now to get the dysfunctional food mail program fixed.
In December 2006, Jim Prentice, then the northern affairs minister, ordered a review of the program. Various INAC gnomes have beavered away at this task ever since, issuing their results in a bland report made public April 22.
The report that really matters, though, is the one produced by Graeme Dargo, who Northern Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl hired last summer to provide a second opinion.
This was a brilliant move. The Dargo report, also released April 22, gives the federal government the leverage it will need to overcome any resistance to change that may reside within INAC or Canada Post.
Dargo's findings demonstrate clearly that it's time to kill the current food mail program and replace it with something that works effectively, minus the involvement of Canada Post.
But the federal government should be careful to ensure that any new northern food subsidy program maintains subsidies at their current levels.
Most northern residents believe that their grocery bills are too high. But without the current food mail subsidy, its obvious that prices would reach absurdly unaffordable heights. In his report, Dargo cites the cost of a 10-pound bag of potatoes in Pond Inlet: $18.49. Minus the food mail subsidy, that price would jump to $64.49. That's because regular air cargo rates range above $4 a kilo.
At the same time, there's evidence that tens of millions of dollars worth of food mail subsidy money are wasted every year.
A study done by INAC in three communities, the results of which are posted on the department's web site, showed that 62 per cent of the subsidy was passed on customers. What happened to the other 38 per cent? INAC doesn't say.
If this is the case right across the North, then it's possible that up to $20 million worth of subsidy money, or more, is disappearing into unknown pockets.
The most absurd aspect of the program is the name: "food mail." In reality, it has nothing to with mail, and far too often, nothing to do with food. That, however, doesn't stop INAC from referring to its subsidized air cargo rates as "postal rates." If you want to find out for yourself how ridiculous that is, just put a dozen steaks into a cardboard box, run it down to the post office and try to buy postage for it.
At the same time, retailers are now able to get cut-rate air cargo rates on items like socks, jeans and designer sleepwear and other nutritious foods.
Like an old dinosaur bone long buried in permafrost, this program is clearly a relic left over from a bygone era of unaccountable bureaucracy, political patronage, and fog-bound thinking.
We understand that as minister of national health and welfare, Aglukkaq will be preoccupied with the recent swine flu epidemic.
But when she's able to give some time to her duties as regional minister for the North, she should use her influence with Strahl to get the food mail program replaced with a new system that actually focuses on the timely delivery of healthy, affordable food.
One of the more intriguing recommendations of the Dargo report suggests the program should be transferred to Health Canada. Given the growing prevalence of diabetes, obesity and malnutrition in Nunavut and Nunavik, a clear public health mandate may supply an ideal recipe for a new northern food price subsidy system. JB
