Georgia Straight
for July 1995, Article 2

This is a multiple choice question

How many of you have heard of Nunuvut?

It is

(a) A phrase to be used when your kids talk back to you as in "I'll have etc?

(b) An Inuit hero who built the first two story igloo causing a political panic resulting in a planning department on Baffin Island?

(c) a religious term such as "there is the abbey and Sister Mary was a .... ?

(d) a quasi-province created by the former and unlamented Indian and Northern Affairs Minister Tom Siddon late one Friday afternoon when MPs were hastening to catch their first class flights home?

In June 1993, in answer to overwhelming demand by the citizens of Canada, who might well have rioted across the country had their demands not been met, Mr Siddon announced to a hushed house (I believe there was something in excess of 12 in attendance) that on April 1, 1999 a new "quasi-province" called Nunuvut would be carved out of the Northwest Territories.

To the very few amongst you I'm sure who missed this news, you may like to know just what our government, Tom Siddon minister, did.

Nunuvut will have a seat of government, ie a capital city, even though there is nothing larger than a small village in the entire area. The Federal government, undaunted by the lack of any candidate to be capital, will spend an estimated $334 million on the new government buildings including a legislative building and will spend an estimated $520 billion in startup costs for its first decade. In addition, the area will require and additional $84 million (estimated) a year to administer over and above what it presently costs.

This new political entity - it can't be called a Province because that would require a constitutional amendment and that's too much bother for Ottawa, and it would never pass) - will have the following powers, which you might (correctly) see as very similar to Provincial powers under the Constitution:- administration of justice, maintenance and organization of territorial courts, prisons, jails and lockups, municipal and local institutions, hospitals, property and civil rights, agriculture, solemnization of marriage, and generally, all matters of a merely local or private nature in Nunuvut.

It gets more interesting.

There will be a legislative assembly and a Cabinet, one of whose members will be the leader, called the Premier. Nunuvut will have its own Supreme Court and its own Court of Appeal.

Ah, I hear a question from the back row. How big a place are we talking about here and how many people are there?

Good question. Nunuvut is over 2 million square kilometers which is twice the size of Ontario.

The population spread over that vast area?

22,000. Yes, that's 22,000!

Hearken if you will to tiny Prince Edward Island. We always laugh a bit at PEI when we think of how our Country is governed. There is that small island with only 130,000 people on it a full fledged province with all the trappings. Well PEI is to Nunuvut as Gulliver was to Lilliputians!

What has all this to do with B.C.?

This legislative and administrative nightmare was the dreamchild of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and might reasonably be taken to reflect the thinking of the huge "native industry" which flourishes in this country, sucking up hundreds of millions of dollars each year. It is, I suggest, a "pilot project" which we might well look at when we assess what is happening with native land settlements in B.C. For while it is true that "only" about 40% of the population of Nunuvut is native, it is an initiative towards, and included in, settlement of native claims in the north.

With this example of Nunuvut in front of us, and huge territorial claims by native bands in the north it is wise, I think, to get into the heads of our political masters who are making decisions on such matters.
I have, for some time now, been lamenting the possibility (I should think it is now a probability) of the establishment of large areas in B.C. wherein all the rights are determined by race - a notion all Canadians rightly treated with loathing when they were called "homelands" in South Africa. Is it not reasonable to infer that Nunuvut will be used as the model for self governing entities within our own province where race will determine all rights - very much including property, civil and political rights?

Who knows what our political masters are really saying when they talk in expansive and sentimental terms about solving our native land claims issues.

For me, somehow, the word "Nunuvut" springs to mind.