Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI), a private corporation formed to oversee implementation of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, has called on the Canadian federal government to dramatically increase training programs for Inuit in the four-year-old territory.
According to Article 23 of the Land Claims Agreement, the government and NTI must together make efforts to “increase Inuit participation in government employment in the Nunavut Settlement Area to a representative level.” According to the 2001 census, aboriginal people make up 85.2% of Nunavut’s population. Yet only 33% of federal employees working in Nunavut and 41% of local government employees are Inuit. Also of concern is the fact that the percentages of Inuit in higher-level positions are far lower. Even more disturbingly, these numbers are all going down, not up. The federal government’s percentage is dropping quite rapidly. Meanwhile, 38% of working-age Nunavummiut are either seeking work or have given up looking.
NTI and the federal government signed a ten-year, legally binding plan in 1993 to implement the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, which included the creation of Nunavut in 1999 through division of the Northwest Territories. Now the ten years are up, and NTI hopes to address the serious challenges facing Nunavut in the next ten-year contract. Among these issues, under-representation in government is extremely important, John Bainbridge of NTI has said.
The Agreement mandates that “pre-employment training” be offered to Inuit by the government to increase the pool of qualified applicants. Training opportunities, however, are decreasing, with support for Nunavut’s Arctic College waning. NTI believes a lack of education and training is the chief problem leading to under-representation in government employment and that addressing these problems will improve Nunavut in many other, far-reaching ways.
NTI and the Government of Nunavut (GN) have hired PriceWaterhouseCoopers to study the economic impact of under-representation in government. Preliminary results suggest that Nunavut’s economy loses about $140 million (Cdn.) each year to migrant workers from the south, who fill jobs while many Nunavummiut remain unemployed. Thirty million dollars are spent on unemployment benefits and extra costs associated with recruiting and retaining Inuit in the face of a dearth of qualified applicants. According to NTI, the cost of a large training program would actually be less than the cost of not having one.
Whether or not the government is actually in breach of the Agreement is unclear, since Article 23 does not set explicit target dates for when the employment goals must be achieved. Instead, the Article simply details many strategies that must be pursued to increase Inuit government employment, including an avoidance of “artificially inflated education requirements”, a “variety of testing procedures to avoid cultural biases”, recruitment posters in Inuktitut, and requirements that government employees be familiar with Nunavut, Inuit culture, and northern life.
The federal government has not yet commented on NTI’s proposals, but as talks to create a new ten-year plan for Nunavut accelerate, much debate is expected before the spring deadline, when the current plan expires. NTI and the GN clearly hope to make education a top priority for Nunavut in the next decade, but it remains to be seen whether the federal government will commit the necessary resources to make this happen.
