Proceedings of the Special
Senate Committee on the Arctic
Issue No. 26 - Evidence - April 18, 2019 (afternoon meeting)
OTTAWA, Monday, April 8, 2019
The Special Senate Committee Committee on the Arctic met this day at 1:01 p.m. to consider the significant and rapid changes to the Arctic, and impacts on original inhabitants.
Senator Patricia Bovey (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Deputy Chair: Good afternoon. My name is Patricia Bovey. I’m a senator representing Manitoba and I’m Deputy Chair of this Special Senate Committee on the Arctic. I’m standing in today for Senator Patterson, the Chair, who is regrettably absent. I would like to ask my colleague to introduce herself.
Senator Anderson: Margaret Dawn Anderson, Northwest Territories.
The Deputy Chair: Some of our committee members are travelling with other Senate committees today. We all felt it was important to continue our study on the significant and rapid changes to the Arctic and impacts on its original inhabitants.
Our first panel this afternoon, from 1:00 to 2:00, I’m pleased to welcome Ken Coates, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation, School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan; and Jessica Shadian, CEO and Founder of Arctic 360.
I want to thank you both for joining us today. I’m sorry that we have a wet winter day here in Ottawa.
Professor Coates, why don’t you proceed with your opening remarks, then we’ll carry on to Ms. Shadian and then we’ll go to questions.
Please know that we’re nearing the end of our testimonies for this committee. We’ll be reporting before the end of this session of Parliament. The kinds of questions you’ll get from us will be wide-ranging. We need you to fill in some of the blanks in addition to your testimony.
Ken Coates, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation, School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan, as an individual: Thank you very much. There are lots of blanks to fill in, in my understanding and I expect in yours. It’s a complicated field.
Let me begin by thanking you for having us here. I’m delighted to speak to you. I read the background materials for the Senate committee and the work you’ve set out to do on the rapidly changing Arctic and the impact on Indigenous people.
You’ve identified a staggering list of challenges. If you go through the list of the challenges, they actually defy explanation and easy solutions.
Today, if you notice, the Coast Guard reported they’re not able to keep up their new duties in the North and we’ll be facing serious problems in the not-too-distant future. The costs needed to solve the problems are way above what Canada is willing to pay. We need to be honest about that. We have to look for new sources of funding. We have to challenge the question of how much Canadians are really investing in the Arctic. I think we’re invested at a social, symbolic, even spiritual level. On a practical level, not so much. Way more people go down to Florida every year than go to Whitehorse or Nunavut. We’re not making the kind of national commitment to the area we should.
We haven’t made the foundational investments. My father went to the Yukon in 1964 to work on the Dempster Highway, which finished and opened up last year. It took from 1964 to 2018 to build a relatively short piece of highway. That’s one road. We have lots of places we don’t have roads and lots of infrastructure that’s not there, particularly in terms of the Internet . We’ll talk about that in minute.
I’m a historian by training. It is interesting, as you know from looking at the past, that Canadians’ interest in the Arctic is fleeting. It picks up at certain times — if the Russians rattle their sabres in the far north, we’ll get interested for a while, and if they drop it, we tend to drop it as well. We have to keep this in mind.
We also have to recognize — and I think your committee does — there’s a lot more being achieved than people realize and recognize on a regular basis. The Government of the Northwest Territories is one of the most innovative public policy units in North America, perhaps in the world, doing amazing things on working with Indigenous communities and collaborating. The Indigenous organizations themselves, the Inuvialuit Regional Council, Nunavut itself, are doing remarkable things and the transitions have been quite pronounced.
The Deputy Chair: Excuse me, Mr. Coates. May I ask you to speak a little more slowly so the translators can catch up with you?
Mr. Coates: My apologies. I was warned that was happening and I forgot.
If you look globally, the Arctic is a model for Indigenous engagement. We’ve done more in the North than almost anywhere else. It exists at several levels, Indigenous to Indigenous engagement, which was led by Canadian Indigenous groups; Indigenous to government relationships, which resulted in the Arctic Council; cooperation across the Arctic’s uneven, the Arctic Council, which people do appropriately talk about in very positive terms, has had limited success to date. It’s trying and working within a small mandate. We’re also seeing non-Arctic states showing more interest, China, Japan, India, Koreas, India, European Union, muscling in on territory that we thought was Arctic and circumpolar territory.
In terms of Arctic affairs, the leadership is tipping away. Canada played prominent roles for a long time. If you watch what’s going on now, it’s Norway and Scandinavia generally. Northern Europe is taking a more prominent role in Arctic affairs than before.
We have good collaboration at a conceptual level. We have extensive academic collaboration, good partnerships that are emerging. The weakest collaborations are on the business side. Very little has been done in that area and that’s unfortunate.
On the Canadian side, we have a lot of respect for Indigenous rights. We’re seeing huge transformations under way. On a practical level, there are major gaps in everything from housing, water supplies, food security and things of that sort. The rights piece is doing all right, but beyond the rights piece, the practical applications aren’t doing so well.
In Scandinavia, there’s less focus on Indigenous rights. It has not entirely disappeared, but it’s less strong. They have had wonderful impacts in terms of social economic outcomes. Some are better off educationally, health-wise, social relations, language, culture than we see in many parts of the Canadian North.
I wanted to finish up talking about the challenges presented by innovation. I describe this as the Arctic fighting for a place in the 21st century. If you look at the Canadian Arctic right now, the economy in the North is actually a 20th-century economy. It’s really 1970s and 1980s economy relying on the energy and mineral resources and things of that sort.
We’re at a time when the world is changing incredibly fast. You’re talking about the fact that the Arctic is changing. New technologies are revolutionizing the world at an incredible pace; mass digitization, robotics, changing the world daily; autonomous technologies, cars and trucks and bulldozers and things of that sort, sensors, drones, big data. In Canada, our Arctic innovation is small, almost to the point of being irrelevant, not because we don’t have people who care. We have lots of people who care. We have individual units that are trying hard. But as a country, we’re not doing anything where we should be a world leader. Canada should be a world leader in northern innovation. We should be a world leader in Arctic innovation. At this point, we’re not. Our innovation capacity is southern and urban in nature. It sticks primarily in the large cities. Even a few places like Saskatoon are outliers in terms of their innovation space.
Scientific interest in the Arctic is focused largely on the natural sciences for good reason; climate change, wildlife management, things of that sort.
The reality is that the infrastructure in the North for dealing with innovation is really weak. There are very poor Internet capabilities in many parts of the North. Many communities don’t have secure access to electricity. I was in Yellowknife a while ago and they said they had 50 blackouts this winter. Most of them were short term, but they still had the power go off 50 times.
We also have serious problems on human preparedness, whether we have the intellectual capacity, IT capacity and skills tradespeople capacity to deal with the innovation economy.
Let’s be clear that technology is not a panacea. I’d be nervous if you went away from here thinking that we’ll have technological solutions. Technology is disruptive. We have the possibility of the world of work changing dramatically. We’re going to lose many jobs that Indigenous communities up North take for granted, because you’re going to have autonomous trucks take over mines, for example. You could have remotely run mines, like they do in Australia. The people running the mine could be in Toronto, not living up North at all.
We’ve already seen this happen with e-commerce. We’re doing a study in Saskatchewan that’s showing that the introduction of e-commerce is undermining local businesses in a serious and systematic way. What we need to do is match up the problems and potential solutions.
We have a massive housing problem in Arctic Canada. Thousands upon thousands of homes are needed. We should be a world leader in exploring whether 3D-printed houses, which is a thing that actually exists now, can be used in the Arctic. I’m not sure, but we should be finding out as to whether that can be done and survive. By the way, a 3D-printed house can cost about $40,000 to build for 1,200-square-foot place. You can build them in 24 to 48 hours. That’s very different from what housing costs now.
Will it work in the North? We don’t know, but we should be trying.
With health care, we have new technologies that allow for digital monitoring of people from remote distances and the capacity for remote surgery. Some of the developments being done in the American armed forces have solutions we could use throughout the Arctic. Emergency battlefield preparedness could help in the Far North.
Regarding food security, we have the capacity to build small food factories, ones you can keep inside a private home. We’re not exploring these in sufficient detail. We also have to try to figure out what the original peoples of the North want in terms of these technologies. Just because you have a technology, that does not mean it should be applied. Technologies can undermine a lot of traditional activities. They can change lives in a whole bunch of different ways.
My own view is that circumpolar collaboration on technological innovation is essential, but only with circumpolar community engagement do you create an economy of scale. The territorial North has under 2 million people, even if you include all the provincial North. You need way more people to build economies of scale to make technology viable and make it an effective solution. You also need to encourage business collaboration. They’re doing lots of this in northern Scandinavia. The Scandinavians are working closely with Russians, but they are not yet doing so with Canadians.
We could do a lot more to support government, business and academic collaboration, the foundations of modern innovation.
You mentioned you’re at the end of your studies. I know you now know a great deal about the challenges, and complexities of those challenges, in the Canadian Arctic. They’re very real and severe. The original peoples pay a price for every year we delay in resolving them — every year we put off solving the Internet problem, dealing with the highway problem, dealing with electricity problems and what have you.
When you get to the frank part of this, how are we doing? We’re not well prepared; the Arctic is not well prepared to capitalize on 21st-century opportunities. We have to do an awful lot more.
The part that worries me the most is that Canada is essentially emerging into a city-state economy. More than 100 per cent of the jobs created in Canada last year were created in the five biggest cities in the country. The rest of the country had a net reduction in the total number of jobs. We are moving in a direction that is moving us away from solving Arctic problems just by the weight of our economic structures and processes.
You know the problems. Clearly, you know the solutions; we know what has to be done in terms of doing things. I don’t think we yet have the national will to make it happen. I hope we can find it. Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Coates.
Dr. Shadian, please go ahead.
Jessica Shadian, CEO and Founder, Arctic 360: Thank you for the invitation and for having me here. I feel like I complement everything we’ve heard from Ken quite nicely.
I will take one second on Arctic 360. Our mission is to educate Bay Street and global financial institutions about the North, with the aim to bring capital for investment in critical infrastructure — to focus, then, on working with various financial institutions, the federal government, territorial governments and Indigenous organizations — mostly development corporations — about how we can create better public-private partnerships adequate for the North that include Indigenous equity in those partnerships.
I’m going to speak to one particular enormous gap that remains in terms of what we need to do in the North.
Our entire board for Arctic 360 lives or works in the North, and almost half are Indigenous.
What I want to say is essentially this one sentence: Canada needs a new narrative about its North. I think it’s one that speaks to emerging global political realities much better than it does now. Essentially, we need our own Polar Silk Route strategy for the North, and frankly, Canada needs its own Belt and Road Initiative. If not, other countries and institutions will continue to define for themselves the role of the Arctic in the world and, thus, Canada’s North.
While there are others that have been discussed throughout this committee’s proceedings, I will touch on three dominant narratives of the Arctic that are relevant to what I’m talking about today. One is the future of the global Arctic narrative, the second is the Band-Aid narrative and the third is the snow globe narrative.
Following those, I want to talk to you about the narrative I think we need, and that’s the narrative of the emerging economy of the North American Arctic.
The future of the global Arctic narrative is that which is being driven by Asia. The scholar Samir Saran argues that certain regions that were once peripheries of the West’s orbit are now becoming their own global hubs. He speaks about the Indo-Pacific, Eurasia and the Arctic as three specific regions that are reconfiguring our mental and physical maps of the world.
When it comes to the Arctic, central to his thesis is China’s Arctic interest, not least the Polar Silk Road strategy it released. When they also released their 365-page guidebook for the Northwest Passage, its spokesperson at that time stated — and I think this summarizes a lot: “Once the route is commonly used, it will directly change global maritime transportation and have a profound influence on international trade, the world economy, capital flow and resource exploitation.”
To make a very long discussion on this very short topic, that is basically the essence of the future of the global Arctic narrative. I’m happy to talk about it more if you have questions.
Narrative two is the Band-Aid narrative, and it’s the one I think most Canadians are most familiar with. It’s the Band-Aid used to cover the despair. When it comes to the North, Bay Street and the tech sector, for instance, don’t question whether the Arctic is a great investment opportunity. Most have never even considered the prospect. Most Canadians view their North solely as an aspect of the federal government’s social obligations; in other words, a cost, rather than being geopolitically significant or an economic opportunity for all of Canada.
Thus, sentiments of the North — a sense of desperation, cyclical patterns of poverty, remoteness, et cetera — prevail. The underlying belief is basically almost one of defeat, but because of history, we have an obligation to always try to help; thus, stick an economic Band-Aid on it. Frankly, I think CanNor’s budget is a good indication of this Band-Aid narrative.
The third is the snow globe narrative, or the narrative of convenience for the global investment community. It begins with the idea of the Arctic as the bellwether for global climate change, the canary in the coal mine and this vast sprawl of frozen tundra with melting iceberg-laden polar bears. The Arctic then becomes a very convenient straw man. Barclays’ new climate and energy statement, for instance, speaks to this well. That new strategy unveils its shift to increase investments in low-carbon projects. Yet it also acknowledges that oil and gas will be the main source of energy for decades to come, and reliance specifically on gas as a transition fuel is expected to increase. Thus, in the short-term future, their investments will actually reflect that reality. After all, citizens need affordable energy to fuel their cars, heat their homes, run their businesses and grow their economies.
Then, in the strategy, it discusses specifically the Arctic; they talk about two special areas: coal and the Arctic. When they talk about the Arctic, they talk about its fragility. Basically, their enhanced due diligence for the Arctic will make it virtually impossible for the bank to ever invest in any oil and gas projects.
The Deputy Chair: Please slow down.
Ms. Shadian: Yes. Sorry about that.
While affordable energy is critical for functioning economies and its citizens around the world, climate change in the Arctic, then, basically supersedes any of the needs or concerns of the citizens living there.
Whether Canada should be developing its Arctic offshore gas is completely beside the point. The point is that we all know the Arctic is melting from CO2 emissions outside the Arctic, so turning the Arctic into a snow globe will not make climate change go away or stop the Arctic from melting, but it can make Barclays look like a good corporate citizen.
Northern leaders are now calling this a form of eco-colonialism but, at the end of the day, financial investment institutions make decisions based on prevailing narratives and growing trends. The trend in the institutional investor space is to demonstrate a focus on the importance of climate change. Putting the Arctic in a snow globe is a very convenient and inexpensive way to show that commitment. I would argue that’s because there is no prevailing trend on Bay Street to say the Arctic is where they should be putting their money.
This leads me to my last narrative, the one which recognizes the North American Arctic — Alaska, Northern Canada and all of Greenland — as the world's newest and safest emerging economy. Most Canadians are unaware of the economic potentials of the North, from its resources to its growing population and massive coastline with a new, blue ocean set to remake global maritime trade. The North also offers unprecedented opportunities for 21st-century smart infrastructure which should be front and centre of initiatives such as the government’s global Ocean and Digital Technology Superclusters to help Canada achieve its goals to be an AI leader.
The irony is that Canadian pension funds are increasing their investments in China, thus boosting investment competition there. China is eyeing what it sees through its investments already there as a newly emerging economy at the top of the world. Single-handedly, China is promoting what the federal government really should be promoting to the Canadian pension funds in that there are major investment opportunities in our own North.
I’ll end with several quick recommendations on which we can expand in question-and-answer. One, Canada needs a bold vision for its North. The North is the world’s newest emerging economy and the key to Canada’s future strength in global affairs. Its vision must include a detailed plan for the Northwest Passage. I’m happy to take questions about a recent workshop we co-sponsored with the Coast Guard and Transport Canada on that issue.
Two, we need a road map for northern investment. That includes making use of the Canada Infrastructure Bank towards building a road map and for being an active investor. That is not what they’re currently doing. They say this is not part of their mandate.
Three, northern investment should not only be informed and driven by innovations in smart transportation technologies, AI, et cetera, but should actually help drive that innovation. I’m happy to also talk about some projects that are already existing along these lines in the Nordic Arctic.
Four, Canada should take a lead in bringing the idea of an Arctic infrastructure bank to the Arctic Council. There is plenty of capital to go around. I’ve had conversations with Global Affairs Canada who are weary of unfettered Chinese foreign direct investment. An infrastructure bank could ensure that non-Arctic state investment is guided by an institutional framework and conditions for investment. Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you both very much for your presentations. Lots of food for thought .
Senator Anderson: Dr. Coates, you mentioned that Canada has a greater focus on Indigenous and modern treaty rights and less on socio-economic outcomes. You spoke briefly about the gaps in housing, water, food security. I’m Inuvialuk; I’m from Tuktoyaktuk. I ask this question because I grew up in the North: I’m wondering if that push is because the Indigenous people have been dealing with these issues for decades with no response from the federal government and no answers to help address these issues. Indigenous people are using their inherent rights to try to gain some self-determining rights to address the long-standing issues that we face.
Mr. Coates: The short answer is you’re right. I was raised in the Yukon, so I went through the same sort of process, watching Indigenous communities live in squalor, in many instances very close to non-Indigenous communities that were actually doing very well. You can look at the whole question of why Indigenous peoples spent so much time and effort fighting for rights? Getting the rights was not the goal. Getting the rights was a tool to use to get to the goal. The goal was essentially autonomy, as you described; financial independence, as you’ve described; and to have the ability to make the investments they need for their own communities.
We’ve had, in the last 15 years, some huge successes. Communities are doing much better; it’s not uncommon. Behchokò, for example, in the Northwest Territories, has dozens of students, young people, going off to university and college from a small community with a great education system. They’ve used their rights not to say, “Okay, we’ve got them; we should celebrate,” but to turn those rights into things they really need. I’m a huge believer in the fact that it was the devolution to the Yukon and Northwest Territories and the creation of Nunavut that gave the North a chance to really make a difference. It started there. It’s the re-empowerment of Indigenous communities so they can take control and make their own decisions. They are making good decisions as they go forward.
I also talked about the good-news stories. The best news story is the growth of Indigenous business. It has been absolutely stunning in scale. It goes back to what Jessica was talking about; the Indigenous people up there want to build their own roads and power systems. They want to invest in new smart-energy systems.
The Indigenous rights are the starting point. The difference in Scandinavia is very simple. The Scandinavian countries made a commitment that, regardless of where you live in the country, you will have the same level of public services. That’s the only difference. It’s not about Indigenous people. The most remote island in Norway has high-powered Internet. In Canada, we refuse to make possible the most obvious commitment. We do it for non-Indigenous people but not for Indigenous people.
Ms. Shadian: May I follow up? Maybe I’ll go backwards. Norway and the Scandinavian countries have a much more centralized state system. It’s difficult to compare the two. As Ken was saying, all Sami have pretty much the highest standard of living in the world because it is the same as that of the Danes, Swedes, Finns, et cetera. Greenland is a different case, so I shouldn’t say Denmark. The Sami have fewer rights to self-determination. They aim for more cultural rights to maintain their culture and subsistence activities — like reindeer herding. It’s an interesting question to bring up.
I’m not an expert. I will say what I think and then I will get into the work I’m doing. The land claims era created a good opportunity to push for a lot of Indigenous people to become lawyers. There’s now a whole host of Indigenous peoples in the North who are well educated and have law degrees, but not many with MBAs and finance backgrounds. I’ve been working with several financial institutions in Toronto to set up a northern professionals internship for mid-to-late-career people who work for either development corporations or in finance at the territorial or municipal level. The internship gives them opportunity to spend time at different kinds of financial institutions, from consulting to banking to alternative lenders or agencies like Moodys — it’s DBRS, actually. They have an opportunity to gain a set of skills but also to create partnerships between the financial institutions and people in finance, development corporations, et cetera, who want their equity to be involved in those projects.
There’s a lot for the financial institutions to learn. The North also needs to learn what is needed to get their business cases together and to build strong partnerships which are really important long-term partnerships, especially for infrastructure.
Senator Anderson: You spoke about the role of Canada to define the narratives for the Arctic. As an Indigenous person who lives in a small northern community and for Indigenous people generally, the narrative is often defined for us. That is a problem, in my opinion. I think it is a problem for most Indigenous people as well. What role do you see for the Indigenous people in defining their own narratives?
Ms. Shadian: We’re working on infrastructure investment analysis.
When I say “we,” it’s all partners I have in the North. Going through Northwest Territories and Nunavut and a little bit over to Nunatsiavut, and together we’re putting this narrative together. The infrastructure investment analysis is trying to create a road map for investment. In order to have a road map for investment obviously it needs to be guided by some sort of overarching narrative.
I am saying that the federal government, at the end of the day, if it’s going to be a major partner in these kinds of projects — if they’re going to promote abroad the potential of the North, then they need to have a narrative and how that is done in collaboration with others. This is the federal government’s prerogative.
The narrative we’re constructing is something we’re doing together, and I’ve been working for years with a lot of these colleagues. They’re pretty much leaders, the development corporations and the territorial and provincial governments, et cetera. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of synergy. The essence of it is everyone thinks the same in that way about the things that need to be done. A lot of the narrative — it’s not my narrative. It’s the narrative I’ve been producing, collecting and generating over years with colleagues I’ve been working with.
Mr. Coates: If I can jump in quickly. I have two advantages. One is I’m old. The second one is I’m a historian. We look at these things in historical terms.
We have to find young people and tell them — I agree with what you’ve said, that the world has changed so much. Think back to 1973 when the land claims process started in Canada. It started in the Yukon. The reaction at the time from the non-Aboriginal population was abject horror. They were really upset at the idea that Aboriginal people weren’t grateful for residential schools, reserves and the Indian agents. Do you think that now? Not a chance.
You now have confident Aboriginal organizations. You have incredibly powerful people. The best Indigenous-non-Indigenous relationships probably in the world outside of Scandanavia are in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Partnerships are real now. They’re based on friendship and collaboration and things of that sort. You are getting these communities are creating one. It used to be short timers, people who came up from Ottawa for three years. They set the narrative. Now it’s the Indigenous communities and their long-term northern partners that are actually doing it.
They are using their resource rights, particularly duty to consult and accommodate, to control the resource sector and determine what projects go and what projects don’t go.
We’re seeing a large part of that emerge. Watching the confidence come back into Indigenous communities and the young people who are not going to take it anymore is absolutely fabulous to watch. The problem — and this is not their problem — is we don’t have an Arctic or northern vision. Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut don’t talk to each other as much as they should. Almost all the conversations around the North, including this one, leave out most of the northern population in Canada. You dip down into parts of northern Quebec and Labrador but you don’t do northern Saskatchewan.
The three poorest parts of Canada are northern Manitoba — not the Inuit areas but even all of northern Manitoba, northern Saskatchewan and northern Ontario. They have huge challenges and formidable differences. Trying to get all those people sharing a common vision of what the North might be. What you’re seeing now is people go to Yellowknife and see how it’s different. They go to Inuvik and see how things are different. The narrative is coming from the people themselves.
The Deputy Chair: Let me pick up on the investment side if I may for a moment.
Who is defining those investment goals, the North or the South? The south with the North or the North with or without the South?
Ms. Shadian: I would say it’s the North who is arguing they need infrastructure. They are the ones that are talking about roads, everything from redoing an existing airport runway to creating new ones, to having — infrastructure is the beginning of a conversation that leads to everything else. You need to have affordable energy. I think Internet broadband also falls into critical infrastructure.
I think it’s coming from the North because they know they can’t have — economies are stagnant, and it’s not just from mining and the standard resources. I was at a — I think it was — Conference Board of Canada conference, and it was on economic reconciliation but someone was talking about the social housing and there’s no main street where everyone has their storefronts. In social housing you can’t have a business. If you live in social housing, you can’t have your business from inside the housing.
There’s nowhere to market their stuff, but also even if you are doing a small start-up thing, you need to be able to have the global community see what you’re trying to offer, but also the products need to physically get there.
The Deputy Chair: I’m going to take you to another layer of the onion, if I may.
I appreciate that in terms of defining the need for infrastructure. I want to go back to your comment about pension funds. Let’s look at mutual funds and the various investment goals. Who is defining the role the North should play in terms of what kind of development from a pension fund perspective?
Ms. Shadian: Probably nobody because there’s now, I think, one pension fund — I think it’s the teachers’ fund — who might be involved with the Kivalliq, the Manitoba electricity project. Other than that there’s not a single pension fund yet that is investing in the North. I have found a champion, pretty much someone who actually takes the North in earnest, believes in economic reconciliation. He is a former CEO of one of the biggest of the medium-sized pension funds, and believes absolutely we need to be doing something as a pension fund. We need to be finding ways to put money in the North.
He is at the early stages of trying to figure out what that could look like and in creating enough capital to be able to put things in the North and so possibly an Indigenous pension fund but just thinking through things and learning more at this point because that’s what is very important and interesting for him.
I think what they would be focusing on would be — him and a colleague of his have met a lot of the people who are on our board and whom we work with. They have been the ones defining to them what’s important in terms of infrastructure.
But what projects first and second and third, this is where the investment analysis comes in. Because for them there are things before they can do anything, actually, that they need. That’s what we’re doing, building these long-term partnerships with the North itself. I think that will help define what projects there are.
They also feel like they need to have assurance that the federal government wants to be their long-term partner as well. They don’t have that assurance at the moment.
Also with this investment analysis it also speaks to — a lot of these projects are too small for the kind of things they normally invest in. It doesn’t become small when you bring it all together and you look at it as maybe even one big project. If we can get this analysis, which we are trying to get funding right now, it’s a way then to create how things could be bundled together, how you can make pipeline projects. There is something bigger there than just . . . .
I was with someone from Nunatsiavut at the recent Coast Guard meeting and this former CEO was there as well. The person from Nunatsiavut was saying that, “Right now we really need to fix our existing runways for planes and our airports.” He said, “Yes. Fixing one airstrip, that’s too small, but let’s put a bunch together and that’s something that we have.”
I think it’s going to become a negotiated and discussed conversation that is in the very early stages and hasn’t quite happened yet.
Mr. Coates: I think we’re in the middle of a tidal change happening right in front of us. You’ve probably seen signs of this. The long-standing pattern in the North is wait for Ottawa to feel guilty and build something, a road, an airfield, something like that. Ottawa always felt a little bit guilty, but not too much because it was a long way away. They didn’t come up often and did a little bit.
The new model is essentially we will do it for ourselves; Northerners, whether it’s the territorial governments — certainly Nunavut has this mindset — Northwest Territories and the Yukon are very much the same.
To do it ourselves also includes the Indigenous organizations. Now we have Indigenous groups who have capital and access to capital for the first time. To use one example, the federal government just announced they are going to repay Indigenous communities $100 million for the cost of negotiating modern treaties. It’s a lot of money. That’s $100 million just for the Yukon First Nations. It’s actually more for the Northwest Territories.
They now have $100 million they weren’t counting on up in Whitehorse where this was announced. They are saying, “Okay, this is our long-term investment opportunity. We’ve got money we hadn’t counted on and hadn’t budgeted for. It’s coming in. What can we do in the long term?”
We’re also seeing the emergence of Indigenous alliances, which are something maybe you’ve heard about already. The First Nations Major Projects Coalition, basically all the communities were too small. Your home community, by itself, can’t take on a $50 million project. It’s just too small.
If 10 communities got together and one of them needed it locally and the other one sought it as an investment opportunity, now you can do it, particularly when you attach the business and construction activities and engineering activities to individual, Indigenous-owned companies.
You’re starting to see a real change in that mindset. No criticism of Ottawa, it’s a great place to visit, but this mindset is still very much driven by what big corporations want to do, which mine wants to open up, and where are we going to put this particular project and things of that sort.
That’s really distorted the infrastructure across the Canadian north a great deal. We have highways that go the wrong way, communities where there was no decent water in an Aboriginal community and 50 miles away there was wonderful water for a mining community of non-Aboriginal people. That kind of absurdity has been there a lot.
Now that’s stopping. We’re getting coordinated planning, but it’s driven by the Indigenous organizations who are playing a huge role in reshaping that agenda.
Nunavut in particular is doing a lot of this and it’s exciting to see.
The Deputy Chair: Is one of those examples the railway to Churchill with the ownership changing last September with the number of Indigenous nations and all the communities along the line buying it with business and with federal government investment? I seem to remember Mayor Spence of Churchill making it clear that this is a new start. I think this is a point well taken.
Mr. Coates: We’re going to see a lot of more of that, partly because of land claims settlements, specific claims settlements, resource revenue sharing. If you open a mine in Nunavut for example, the Baffinland mine will produce $2 billion in assets to the Nunavut Development Corporation. You can take that to the bank. You can go to the bank and borrow against that and borrow the $300 million you need to do a project. That was not even on the table 20 years ago.
That’s not even something you could conceive of. That’s going to create some really interesting changes because when the North drives the agenda on these infrastructure projects, they looked at all aspects of it; it isn’t just a railway, it’s a railway attached to a road, it’s a road attached to fibre optics, it’s fibre optics to get you into new forestry opportunities. They’re looking at these multiple avenues.
You change the dynamic because you have local control. Are we there? Just a little bit. Watch the Yukon do a lot of this kind of stuff. The southern part of Northwest Territories already has projects of that nature. We’re going to see more.
The Deputy Chair: I was intrigued with your prospects of 3-D printed houses and new technologies. Let’s talk about the dire crisis in housing, the unfathomable living conditions as far as many Canadians are concerned, and yet our colleagues in the North are living in those conditions.
Are building codes an issue? Have we over these last decades supplanted southern building codes on northern climate and weather conditions? In Ottawa today, the rain is close to freezing rain and school buses are being cancelled. That’s different.
Let’s go further north. Who should be developing those for the northern regions of this country? Will 3-D printed houses work?
Mr. Coates: Who should do the codes? The codes have to be developed in the right geographical climatic location. You have to have the codes that reflect where you are.
The other part is about building materials. Having a really good wooden building code for Nunavut is going to be a challenge. You have to bring in a lot of wood from a long way away. The North should define these for themselves.
Will 3-D printed houses work? We know you can build them. We know they are building whole suburbs in China. They’re building apartment and office buildings in Abu Dhabi. They are using this as a short-term solution for emergency housing in the developed world in India, Nigeria and places like that.
There’s a problem in Nunavut in that you don’t have enough sand. Right now most of this is based on concrete houses. There are a lot of rocks, but not a lot of sand. But in other parts of the North it could work.
We did a report on 3-D houses. I’m happy to share with you that it might work. What I do know is we’re not trying hard enough to find out if it will work. We should be the world leaders in Arctic innovation. Where is the next Bombardier or snowmobile going to come from? We were really good at developing things for northern, Arctic settings for a long time, but not so much anymore. We’re just receivers of technology rather than innovators in that regard.
I think 3-D printed house will work in parts of the North. I would love us to be doing some tests of this kind of technology. If you jump in and build a thousand of them overnight and they don’t work, you made a huge mistake, but we can build them, test them. They developed some of these in the Ukraine and Russia which have climates similar to ours. So let’s find out. That would be my answer.
The Deputy Chair: Can you send a copy of the report to the clerk?
Mr. Coates: Absolutely. I’d be delighted to.
The Deputy Chair: Going in a slightly different direction, I’m interested in other kinds of collaborations. How do we foster stronger business development between the Arctic nations? How do we develop those opportunities of collaboration with Alaska? That’s a question for both.
One of the sources for this question — I had a conversation a week or so ago with a Canadian academic who works in the United States and has worked with NASA doing a lot of international work. He raised some of these questions. I’m not quite sure what we were talking about as he raised these questions. It was a really interesting philosophical discussion. What can we do technologically and on a business front that perhaps equates what Einstein did — talking about historical roots — in the past? Are we at one of those societal research paradigm shifts where we really need to change the questions in order to be able to come to the solutions that we need for the long term? I’m not sure whether that question makes sense.
Mr. Coates: That’s a great question.
The Deputy Chair: You can see where we may need to lead. We’ve only got a few minutes to lead it.
Mr. Coates: There are some wonderful questions. I think you’re absolutely right for a paradigm shift. We can’t afford climate change though we’re dealing with it. We can’t afford mass urbanization. We want Canada to be seven or eight economies and the rest of the country being holiday locations.
Or do we want to have a country that’s actually occupied and supported for Indigenous peoples? We need a radical change. We need to make sure technology works for us, we don’t work for technology. Maybe we shouldn’t accept robotic trucks and automated vehicles in mining. We should control these kinds of things to keep the jobs in the North. Other countries do that. We have to think really carefully about that.
You asked the question about business cooperation. Recognize first off how different these places are. Alaska has a very different business environment dominated by people living along the coast, who aren’t actually living in Arctic places, and dominated by the U.S. military which provides a huge foundation for the Alaska economy. Even Alaskans don’t talk about it. They don’t have much of an economy without the U.S. Army up there. Compare that to Canada. You’ve seen the Canadian economy, the Canadian Armed Forces in Yellowknife. It’s a tiny little place compared to the Alaskan side.
Normally it’s very different. If you go to Norway and talk to their business community, they’re basically talking about the blue economy. It’s about oceans. We have a little bit of that. Nunatsiavut has more fishing on the eastern side. When you go to their business sessions, they don’t overlap very much.
Our natural partner, believe it or not, is Russia. Russia has very similar circumstances, but they’re a hard country to deal with. Canadian businesses that have tried to collaborate with Russia have stumbled a lot over the years.
It’s not an easy and obvious solution, but here’s the Canadian answer to this: How about we cooperate among Canadians first?
We’ve got a lot of potential here from Labrador all the way to the Yukon, and from northern British Columbia up into Nunavut. Why don’t we actually focus on developing northern solutions that work across Northern Canada, getting our business people seeing a shared economy? The rest of the world will come to us if we ever get that right.
Ms. Shadian: I would say there’s a great deal of opportunity. Actually, there’s interest, and efforts are already being made by Inupiat in Alaska, Inuit in Canada, and Inuit in Greenland. There is a desire for everything from air travel and having direct flights, efforts to figure out how we could collaborate more in terms of business collaboration.
That could be driven by the Inuit themselves, at least in that context, maybe to take that seriously and think about ways to help support that and make that something that can become stronger.
This could go into fishing. I think there’s a discussion on how Greenland’s fish could get over to Nunavut or Northern Canada more. Maybe there’s areas there for coalition, to build business to export fishing together.
There are a lot of opportunities. I think that people in the North do want that opportunity, and they are trying to make those connections. They have, actually, especially with Greenland.
A lot of the work that we do is with Alaska, because we partner with the Wilson Centre. A lot of people in Alaska, generally speaking, but also a lot of the Indigenous corporations there.
There’s plenty of opportunity to build on what we’re working on. We could build that out more and have more workshops, conferences, these kinds of things that bring people together.
At the recent Coast Guard meeting that we had, the thing that I brought up was the United States right now is tabling legislation on trying to create a corporation. For five or six years, several people have been pushing the idea of a St. Lawrence Seaway for the Arctic. It’s a very difficult thing for Canadians to talk about because Canadians believe that the Northwest Passage is Canadian and whether having any kind of collaboration undermines that sovereignty. But I think there’s a real potential for collaboration. I don’t think an Arctic seaway idea is so terrible, actually.
If you look at the St. Lawrence Seaway, there is a lot to it in that there are things that are separate, but it has created a huge opportunity for collaboration. This is where you can have strengthened Coast Guards. The Inupiat up in the North Slope Borough also do a lot of Coast Guard activities.
We’re now trying to create the provisions in these communities. There’s a way to bring those together in a stronger fashion. There’s also a desire within this to create some sort of tariff system that could help to create capital to help build the needed infrastructure. They are very interested in sharing icebreakers and having an icebreaker-sharing service.
I think this Arctic seaway idea offers immense potential for cooperation. I wanted to have this workshop because the Alaskans have been talking about this for a very long time and have their own internal things set up, what they want out of it and how they want things to work.
Canada hasn’t been having those kinds of conversations. I feel if there’s an opportunity to sit at a table with the United States and Alaska, that there needs to be some sort of understanding on paper what Canadians want and expect to get out of it.
That’s very important. I think there’s something there that should be taken seriously, because they’ve said they would like to work with Canada, but would also be open to other international partners and, basically, other Arctic states. There’s a great potential that if Canada doesn’t join the conversation, it will just turn to Finland and the other Arctic nations that don’t think that the Northwest Passage is Canadian.
In terms of business and collaboration, there’s a lot in there.
The Deputy Chair: Taking that one step further, what lessons do you think there are from the Nordic and Russian Arctic economic strategies that we should be acting on now or yesterday, or is it tomorrow?
Ms. Shadian: We absolutely need not just a strategy for all of the North, but we specifically need one for the Northwest Passage.
Russia did a number of feasibility studies. Everything they’re doing now is guided on and predicated by this strategy they put together. That’s why they are making these investments and they know how much. They put in this tariff system for icebreaker escort services to generate additional capital. This was all very strategically planned.
We should be looking at what they’ve done in thinking about the fact we need our own Northwest Passage strategy in terms of a financial strategy that way.
The Nordic countries put together an investment report, but they are at such a different level. A lot of it is focused on strengthening business. They’re already up there, and business is here in the North American Arctic, so they’re refining.
They already have the Internet and very quick broadband. They don’t get stuck in these conversations about, “Well, we have to get off a diesel generator before we can have that conversation.”
What they’ve done is great and important. I just don’t know how much we can glean from it, besides the fact that we should have one, for sure. It’s kind of speaking at different platitudes, I guess.
The Deputy Chair: Would you agree that it’s not just defining strategies, it’s developing an innovation plan to go along with those strategies?
Mr. Coates: I couldn’t agree more. I think we need to be very cautious about innovation, as I mentioned before. Innovation is a great job killer. It sometimes creates additional jobs, but it actually kills a lot of jobs. If we’re not careful in the North, we’re going to see many of the things we take for granted disappear.
We should have a very systemic plan for bringing new technologies to bear in the North in ways that meet northern interests in a big way. Scandinavia does this much better than we do. They have those conversations ahead of time.
Part of the reality, as Jessica said, is the Canadian North is radically different from these other places. We don’t have Russia’s command-and-control economy, where they can ignore environmental rules and regulations with impunity. We don’t have the scale of the American military involvement that I’ve already talked about. We don’t have the social welfare state the way it has evolved in Scandinavia. We have to develop a plan that works in Canada.
I’ll end with a pretty sad note: The thing to remember on economic development is the North almost always disappoints its promoters. If you go right back, the first plans for the oil sands in northern Alberta actually were developed in the 1880s, when people discovered the oil sands there, and they couldn’t figure out how to make it work.
In Tuktoyaktuk, there is a big example of failing the promoters. That’s a good example of a situation where the interference of southern environmentalists essentially undermined the Mackenzie Valley pipeline and destroyed the economic future for a whole string of communities that were counting on that to provide investment capital and jobs into the future.
The North needs to be in control of the agenda for themselves. We don’t need to have southern people telling the North what to do. We need to be aware of the fact that the North is constantly oversold. A practical, realistic, stepwise plan is absolutely essential.
The Deputy Chair: With that, our time has fast come to a conclusion. I want to thank you both for a very stimulating discussion and some very interesting ideas, and look forward to our report, which may put a lot of questions which we can then transfer into that. We all know that while the Arctic is 40 per cent of Canada, for many of us, we also believe it’s our future.
I thank you both very much.
We will now proceed to the second panel of this afternoon’s meeting of the Special Senate Committee on the Arctic. I’m very pleased to welcome, by video conference from Iqaluit, Stephen Williamson Bathory, Executive Advisor of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association. Thank you for joining us today. I know you’ve been travelling and you’re in the middle of a very busy week. We very much appreciate your time.
I’ll ask you to proceed with your opening statement, and then we’ll have a question-and-answer session. The floor is yours.
Stephen Williamson Bathory, Executive Advisor, Qikiqtani Inuit Association: Thank you very much. Yes, I’m joining you from Iqaluit today. Unfortunately, travel schedules being what they are, I was unable to join you in person. I’m very happy to connect this way.
I just want to confirm before I proceed — a simple yes/no from the chair would work: Are you able to hear me all right?
The Deputy Chair: Yes, we can hear you. Can you hear us?
Mr. Williamson Bathory: Yes. There’s a slight delay. I will talk slowly, just in case it’s the same on your end.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you.
Mr. Williamson Bathory: To start things off, I supplied earlier this morning the speaking notes I’ll refer to in my opening, as well as a series of reference documents that potentially will be used through our discussion. I think I see Madam Chair flipping through one of them right now.
I am an Executive Advisor within the Qikiqtani Inuit Association. I thought I would start today by giving a little overview of the role of QIA and the work that we carry out. QIA is referred to as a designated Inuit organization, a DIO, under the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. We are governed by a board of directors that has elected officials in 13 different communities. Our geography representation ranges from Sanikiluaq, the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay, all the way up to Grise Fiord, Canada’s most northern community.
I understand in some of your earlier committee meetings, having reviewed the minutes in preparation, that you heard from the Kivalliq Inuit Association. I believe Mr. Luis Manzo presented. They are another designated Inuit organization — essentially a sister organization. We fall under the umbrella of Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated.
The points I’m going to draw to your attention today should be understood as an extension of those already raised by Ms. Sandra Inutiq. She appeared before the Senate committee on the Arctic Policy Framework on April 1. Some of the source documents that you have speak to that Arctic Policy Framework, as well as some recent representations of QIA in relation to Bill C-55, the oceans act.
As an extension of the last few presenters I was able to overhear, I noticed Jessica Shadian and Mr. Coates speaking to a lot of innovation they see and the potential for Northern-led innovation. For QIA, as a designated Inuit organization, the way in which we approach our method of work and the vision that guides us is really framed through the opening passages of the Nunavut agreement. Specifically, I want to draw light to the fourth recital of that agreement. I’ll read it out painstakingly, line for line, for you, simply so I introduce what guides us as an institution. You can understand better the framework we’re working through.
The fourth recital reads:
AND WHEREAS the Parties have negotiated this land claims Agreement based on and reflecting the following objectives:
to provide for certainty and clarity of rights to ownership and use of lands and resources, and of rights for Inuit to participate in decision-making concerning the use, management and conservation of land, water and resources, including the offshore;
to provide Inuit with wildlife harvesting rights and rights to participate in decision-making concerning wildlife harvesting;
to provide Inuit with financial compensation and means of participating in economic opportunities;
to encourage self-reliance and the cultural and social well-being of Inuit;
Very briefly, I can walk you through a high-level summary, in tangible terms, what those words mean in our current practice as an organization. Again, I think you just heard a rich discussion about the space that Inuit organizations such as us find, where we have an abundance of opportunity. We’re learning to make decisions about how to proceed with those opportunities in a manner consistent with the passages I just read for you.
I’ll give you some historical background. One of the files I presented is a simple two-page summary. It’s a very high-level overview of what QIA is seeking to achieve in the near future on a project called the Qikiqtani Truth Commission. The Qikiqtani Truth Commission was started a decade ago, and it was founded for the purpose of documenting social change in the communities we represent between the 1950s and 1975. We’re now in the latter stages of working with the federal government to formalize an apology for those colonial activities, as well as funding for social programs that will allow QIA to run healing, educational and cultural revitalization programs throughout our region.
In terms of the work that our current President, Mr. PJ Akeeagok, it’s essential that we’re able to do this hard work to unpack the truths of the past for Inuit to be better positioned to realize the opportunities of the future. That’s a very clear and strong theme in all of our work.
To exemplify some of our partnerships with the federal government, in the past decade, in partnership with Archives Canada, we’ve gained access to a historical project titled the Inuit land use and occupancy project. For those who may not be familiar, this study was one of the largest and most comprehensive efforts to document Indigenous land use in the world. It was used to guide the definitions of Inuit land use, the selection of Inuit land use and the boundaries of the Nunavut settlement area during the land claims settlements. What we’ve since done is gone into national archives, digitized that material and we’ve begun creation of a very substantial Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, or IQ as we call it, traditional knowledge database. We’re using that database in active use in the projects we work on.
In the written materials you have before you, I’ll draw attention to the Tallurutiup Imanga National Marine Conservation Area. I think you see a map before you. The boundary of that map was used by QIA to justify areas of cultural traditional use and biological hot spots, whereby QIA, through using traditional knowledge, was able to broaden the boundary to almost twice the original proposal of the federal government. I know we just heard representations of a Northwest Passage seaway, which is a theme I can pick up on to continue to illuminate the interests of the region as we work forward in our discussion.
Furthermore, another document that you see before you is a document summarizing the application of Inuit knowledge in the context of a set of hearings that just closed, led by the Nunavut Impact Review Board. The Nunavut Impact Review Board was running a strategic environmental assessment on the potential for oil and gas development. That was a process through which we collected and applied Inuit traditional knowledge. You’ll see the recommendations we put forward a matter of weeks ago.
With respect to resource development, QIA has a major stake in the Mary River project, the Baffin Island project which was just spoken to which is an iron ore mine located on north Baffin Island in proximity to Pond Inlet. This iron ore deposit is referred to as a tier 1 deposit, or a direct shipping pellet, and is one of the richest known deposits of iron ore in the world. This project is located on Inuit-owned surface and subsurface lands for which QIA has negotiated an Inuit Impact and Benefit Agreement, an IIBA, a commercial production lease, a quarry concession agreement and a water compensation agreement. The IIBA for Mary River was the first IIBA in Nunavut to contain a mineral royalty agreement. We’ve negotiated a net smelter return royalty for the production of that iron ore.
If the Mary River project is built to its full scale, it would be not only the largest mineral development in Nunavut, but one of the largest mines in Canada. The project is presently undergoing an environmental assessment called the phase 2 proposal. This week in Iqaluit technical meetings are being held for three days led by the Nunavut Impact Review Board to consider the application. For additional context, since the mine is on Inuit-owned lands, QIA also negotiates and holds approximately $100 million in financial security should the mine move into a phase of abandonment.
Presently the Mary River project employees approximately 20 per cent of its total employment base by Inuit of the region. To bolster the Inuit participation in the project, in the past two years, QIA has been successful in receiving $9 million from the skills partnership fund run by ESDC Canada. We’ve used that funding to leverage up to $20 million in a total four-year training program.
With respect to advancing Inuit rights within the legal realms, in 2010 QIA was successful in filing an injunction in the Nunavut Court of Justice to stop seismic testing in Baffin Bay and Lancaster Sound. The proponent of this project was the federal government at the time. Moving forward, in 2017, QIA was successful in the first private arbitration of an IIBA, which was a dispute over $7 million of outstanding royalty payments from the Mary River project. In each of these instances, QIA as an Inuit organization is leading the way to help describe and prescribe processes to work in partnership both with our commercial partners and the federal government.
Finally, on the bottom of page 2, if you’re following the speaking notes, although QIA is structured as a non-profit organization, we have been able to acquire and accrue considerable resources to assist with the long-term planning of new revenue streams. QIA has established a legacy fund which receives revenues for the purposes of social programs. QIA spends on an annual basis 4 per cent of the principal of the legacy fund. As of today, QIA has acquired $50 million in the legacy fund over a course of four years. This has resulted in direct programming in perpetuity for Inuit of $2 million per annum. Preliminary assessment of QIA’s revenue management system against international best practices is prescribed by the Natural Resource Governance Institute suggests that QIA is a leader in the area of natural resources revenue management. The programs that QIA is running fulfill needs that do not fall within the direct mandate of government, and that includes day care and early childhood development, cultural skills and Inuit empowerment programs. We’re directing resources towards programs that support Inuit livelihoods.
In the immediate future, and I have spoken to Madam Chair about this last week, QIA is eager to introduce its vision of a conservation economy through the finalization of an Inuit Impact and Benefit Agreement for the Tallurutiup Imanga National Marine Conservation Area — this was spoken to by Sandra Inutiq, QIA’s chief negotiator, on April 1 in relation to the Arctic Policy Framework.
The outcome of this QIA-led work carries international significance both in terms of creating a model for Inuit governance and stewardship but also in terms of the net contribution Inuit are making towards the international Aichi targets as an Indigenous-led conservation area.
While QIA is proud of its accomplishments, social indicators continue to describe the harsh realities of a society still grappling with the crippling effects of colonialism, limited economic opportunities, neglect for land claims rights, critical infrastructure deficits and a chronically underfunded territorial government. It is all too easy to view Nunavut as a place with limited odds for success. Conversely, through patience and collaborations with organizations like QIA, we are beginning to acquire the skill, experiences and resources needed to deliver made-in-Nunavut solutions. What is needed in the context of implementing the Nunavut agreement is a continued desire to work with Inuit-led proposals to deliver Inuit-led solutions consistent with the vision of the Nunavut agreement.
I will leave you with two specific examples where dedicated action could be taken to improve upon the implementation of the Nunavut agreement in the near term.
In the context of major project development, such as the Baffinland Mary River project, more time and attention should be placed on assessing the socio-economic implications of such projects, specifically the net benefit capture of Inuit and Nunavut as a whole. Such work would foster an environment where traditional benefits, such as jobs, training and contracts, could be weighed against foregone opportunities due to limitations of the market capacity in Nunavut. In other words, there are only so many Inuit who can work at a mine, yet once the ore is gone, the benefits are gone. This traditional model of benefit assessment and capture needs to further evolve.
A second example, there are strong inequities among Inuit land claims organizations and territorial governments with respect to resource management, particularly in marine areas. As a representative of marine people, with almost entirely coastal communities, this is an area where improved definition of management regimes will add much-needed certainty for all parties.
One of the areas we’ve looked at extensively over the past year is engaging what we call a whole-of-government table. It’s a phrase coined in the Inuit realm by Mary Simon in her special report to Minister Bennett several years ago. What QIA has learned in terms of navigating the pathway to yes for our Inuit Impact and Benefit Agreement for the Tallurutiup Imanga National Marine Conservation Area is that the federal government needs to desire an evolution within its practices and relationships with Inuit, specifically a commitment towards delivering tangible results as opposed to an intrinsic focus on compliance with antiquated administrative processes. QIA is eager to work with the federal government in these areas.
That concludes my opening remarks. I’m very happy to follow the committee with any forms of questioning or discussion you’d like to lead with. Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: I’d like to thank you for your presentation.
Senator Anderson: Akana. You just stated about the federal government’s need to address antiquated processes, policies and directives in place. Do you have any specific antiquated policies or processes in mind when you’ve identified that as a need?
Mr. Williamson Bathory: I can give you a couple of direct examples. I’ll draw on our work with Minister McKenna’s office and the Tallurutiup Imanga NMCA. When approaching that project at the onset, we knew we were engaging in a very ambitious pathway to create this NMCA. The timelines we were provided when we agreed to it was about a two-year timeline, which is rather quick. Generally, we would proceed through that type of work in potentially five years or more.
What we impressed upon the minister, and were able to work with her staff and senior officials upon, was to ensure, right from the start, Inuit would receive direct benefits from this project. Our history of parks and protected areas suggests quite a long time delay between the point an IIBA is negotiated and the benefits evolve through the implementation of a contract. What we agreed upon was to start a pilot program in the community of Arctic Bay. That pilot program is a guardian program, to use a term likely familiar to the committee — Uattijiit is the Inuktut term we’re using — to ensure while we’re around the table negotiating, that if the intention is to truly create the conservation area, Inuit need not wait longer to effectively participate in that process. The lessons we can learn through on-the-ground implementation can feed back and inform the negotiating table as opposed to the inverse. That would be an immediate example.
A second very quick example is from our parent organization, Nunavut Tunngavik. Their funding agreements, once an agreement is in place, like an IIBA, and the utility of grants as opposed to contribution agreements. Very large differences in the annual administration required to first access, then receive and then report on funds allows parties to focus on the delivery side of that agreement as opposed to the administrative side. Those would be two simple examples I could provide you with.
Senator Anderson: I had another question in regard to the funding of the territorial government. I believe the words in your report are “chronically underfunded territorial government.” Are there specific areas you could identify that you believe are underfunded within your territorial government?
Mr. Williamson Bathory: If I could draw to your attention — a document I presented entitled A New Approach to Economic Development In Nunavut. I see you have it in front of you. I’ll walk you through to pick up on a discussion earlier, just to work with what the committee has already heard.
The topic of infrastructure. As an Inuit organization beginning to acquire resources and as an organization tasked to negotiate the agreements for these marine conservation areas, we quickly look to partner with our territorial government on what opportunities we saw coming to the table. What we learned is our territorial government really doesn’t have a vision beyond how to meet the immediate needs of critical infrastructure. The reason I draw your attention to this document is we’ve introduced a concept of economic infrastructure and we’ve introduced a concept of harvesting infrastructure. In those concepts, we are trying to break the tradition of only having infrastructure funds go to the most critical needs. In our region that specifically means using something like the National Trade Corridors Fund, which if you read about the fund in the past few years and the intention of that fund, it would seem that it could open up all types of economic opportunities for the North. In our region it’s being used to replace airport landing strip lighting and to improve the gravel and landing strips. It’s very much as far as you can reach to just keep communities actively functioning.
We’ve had success in our negotiation with the federal government. We hope to conclude those negotiations and bring forms of marine infrastructure that would fall into the economic infrastructure category and harvesting infrastructure, infrastructure that would support economies which already exist in communities but aren’t formalized in any sense. Food sharing practices, harvesting from local environments, providing food that exists in the environment to the local market and inciting those activities.
Senator Anderson: Quyanainni.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you for all of this. I want to take a look at the fourth recital you gave us and the fourth bullet, where you say the parties have negotiated this land claims agreement based on and reflecting the following objectives, the fourth one being to encourage self-reliance and the cultural and social well-being of Inuit.
Can you tell me where that now stands?
Mr. Williamson Bathory: I think if we looked back 10 years relative to the work I’ve outlined the QIA was undertaking and if we project it 10 years forward, we would look at that very differently. Ten years ago, QIA kicked off the Qikiqtani Truth Commission because of the public outcry of residual hurt and pain in the communities of colonial practices. If members are interested to venture into that material, you’ll hear very deep-seated and heartfelt experiences of relocation, of dog slaughters, of colonial policies that really immediately and very quickly transformed Inuit society.
In the past 10 years, as the examples I laid out very specifically were to demonstrate that Inuit and QIA were a small organization. We represent 15,000 people and 13 communities. We’re one of four key Inuit organizations in terms of how the DIO statuses are laid out. We’re forced to punch above our weight every single day to make sure that statement moves forward in a way that allows for Inuit to decide for themselves.
Another example I can give you is just this week our economic development arm, our subsidiary, Qikiqtaaluk Corporation, just filed an application to develop a deep seaport in Qikiqtarjuaq to support the growing inshore fishery in Baffin Bay so that the quotas that Inuit hold can be processed in Nunavut and not in Greenland, so that the jobs and economic spinoff opportunities land in Nunavut and not offshore. Specifically with the Qikiqtani Truth Commission, we are pushing alongside Ministers Bennett, O’Regan and LeBlanc to deliver a formal apology, along with a long-term commitment to provide funding for social programs. That money would go straight into the QIA legacy fund, with the vision of growing our ability to provide social programs that our board decides to fund on a perpetual basis.
Our institution is also placing a lot of emphasis on early childhood development and education, targeting day care streams, specifically Inuktut language retention and curriculum. Those would all be examples moving forward that we feel would likely capture that last recital, the statement and the recital, in a tangible way. That’s what our organization is working through today.
The Deputy Chair: One of the issues we have heard a lot about throughout our sessions over this past year but particularly today is the inequity of education. We heard it in the international sphere this morning in terms of northern peoples versus southern peoples. We certainly heard it when we travelled to the North.
I wonder if you can tell me, where does the issue of education fit with the work you’re doing, and are you seeing any improvement in opportunities and achievements?
Mr. Williamson Bathory: That’s a very fair question. I’ll be the first to admit that in the realm of Inuit organizations Nunavut Tunngavik works very actively in that field. They take the lead for Inuit interest in that realm. Specific to what QIA does, I can answer.
Since the settlement that took place several years ago, resulting from lack of compliance with implementation of the Nunavut Agreement, there was a large settlement. Two sums of money were set aside, one to create an education and training corporation that’s overseen by NTI, the Government of Canada and the Government of Nunavut. There are a lot of plans and motion in that area.
I, unfortunately, am not the best person to speak to it. What I can speak to is part of the settlement also gave Inuit discretion to use funds at their full discretion.
What we have just recently passed through the NTI board meeting is setting up what we call an Inuit development fund. Monies under that fund will be dedicated to applications that Inuit organizations bring forward to create economic benefit within Nunavut. It is a form of — you can consider it a no- or low-interest loan facility that will allow Inuit organizations to bring forward development proposals.
Specific to our organization, we’re partnering to develop daycare curriculum. Several months ago we held a workshop of all daycare managers within our region to start streamlining curriculum development and delivery.
Finally, within that Skills and Partnership Fund in terms of merging into testing what we’re calling the capacity of the mining sector, we’re finding a lot of success in very specific apprenticeship programs, working with small groups, working in a setting that allows for Inuktitut instruction and working within delivery — within Nunavut.
We have got a plan in place with Baffinland to create a training facility in Pond Inlet so that heavy equipment operators, for instance, don’t have to go to Morrisburg. They can reside in Nunavut and you see less economic leakage.
I hope that helps answer, in part, your question.
The Deputy Chair: You and I, as you said, met the other day. We met with your president. I think we had a far-ranging, interesting discussion on a variety of things.
During the course of that discussion, you talked about 10 years of negotiating and working with the federal government and that you — correct me if I am wrong — yes, there were ups and downs, but I think you felt that the discussions and negotiations had been positive and that you’d come some distance.
I wonder if you want to reflect on that.
Mr. Williamson Bathory: Yes. Again, in the context of our relationship with the federal government, as I highlighted in my introductory comments, there was a point in time we filed and were successful on an injunction. We had one portion of the federal government seeking to do seismic activity. In the same geography a different ministry was looking to create a conservation area.
We’re now at the point where really for us it kicked off with Mary Simon’s report to Minister Bennett, creating an awareness of a whole-of-government approach that has since led to the Inuit-Crown Partnership Committee creation and the ability for Inuit to use that table under the leadership of ITK president Natan Obed, co-chaired by the Prime Minister, to bring Inuit-led proposals forward to seek to collaborate with the federal government and to seek to bring greater unity among Inuit regions.
I think the line we used when we last met in your office was, if we’re able to raise the high tide mark in one of the regions on a specific topic, that should provide greater platforms for other Inuit organizations as well. That’s very much how we’ve been approaching our work and the dialogue at the ICPC table.
The Deputy Chair: Talking about the high-tide level, and that was your phrase the other day, you said this afternoon that on the Mary River project that 20 per cent of the employment went to Inuit peoples. Drawing on that and the success that you’ve had and the goals that you have, what recommendations do you have for us as a Special Committee on the Arctic formulating recommendations for the federal government on the Arctic Policy Framework, what recommendations do you have to us to make skills training really relevant to Inuit needs?
Mr. Williamson Bathory: That’s a terrific question. I’m very thankful you asked it.
Again, if I look to our A New Approach to Economic Development in Nunavut document, one of the sections we focus on is dedicated long-term funding, funding that does not change because of partisan politics, because of third-party interest to explore, to develop, to advance a commercial interest.
Specifically in the context of Mary River, the $9 million that we received from the Skills Partnership Fund has a four-year funding window. When that $9 million runs out, we’re then relying on exclusively what we’re able to negotiate in our benefits agreement and what we are able ourselves to bring to the table.
We know that the level of activity we have now can’t be sustained without that type of government support. Quite literally, the goal of the Skills Partnership Fund was to convert a statistic of 100 full-time Inuit employees to 200, to double the Inuit workforce.
The reason that’s so key is because the multiplier effects of employment and education are so strong in the North. It’s a direct correlation between a single individual supporting not a traditional southern family complex of a family of five but, quite literally, a very large extended family, which was why in the Tallurutiup Imanga NMCA negotiations we focused so heavily on measuring that agreement on what is the residual amount of spending under this benefits package that will reside in Nunavut and will reside in households.
The metric we’ve come up with to measure success for that conservation area is a very simple one, but it’s defined as we want to ensure that every Inuk in the impacted communities of this conservation area, of which there are five, has access to a serving of country food, locally harvested food, every day. A one serving per day per person approach. Then through our economic development proposal you can deconstruct what is it going to take in financial resources, in policies and in partnerships to achieve those outcomes.
On one side you’re literally talking about food on the table, from the Nunavut environment. On the other side you’re talking about how to maximize and sustain the resource development industry. In both cases, if you’re going from 100 to 200 employees, or one serving of food, we think that we have a model to construct those solutions. The core is sustained funding that isn’t tied to partisan politics and that allows for an evolution. Inuit will always come with new ideas but allow those ideas to come through success as opposed to dependency.
The Deputy Chair: I have two questions coming out of that. They are different kinds of questions.
You talk about long-term sustainable funding. I’m going to go back to my many years of working in the arts. That’s exactly the kind of thing that we were looking for, for sustained funding so you can keep organizations running. Of course, there’s project funding, which is one kind of funding, and there’s sustained funding ongoing that’s another.
Governments, of course, have to work within their financial years and you can only promise money so far ahead. We understand that reality too.
What needs to be put in place for funding? For governments, four-year funding is long-term funding; for recipients, it may not be. What needs to be put in place to have that four-year funding revolve in a meaningful way? At what point in a four-year run do you need to have the discussions so there is no gap before you start another four-year run? Is it at year three? Is year four too late? Where does that need to be?
Mr. Williamson Bathory: I’ll go back to the two examples we are working with. I will go to page 3 of my opening comments, the third-to-last paragraph. I highlighted where we could do better collectively to assess socio-economic impacts associated with major projects.
You could move forward with a model in which a project which receives a positive recommendation leaves the hands of the Nunavut Environmental Impact Review Board and arrives on the desk of Northern Affairs — in this case, Minister LeBlanc’s desk — for final review and consideration before approval.
I would suggest at that time, consideration could be given to the type of investments that could support socio-economic development. In our case, the skills partnership fund project will see a report for the phase 2 application come forward, likely in November of this year according to the schedule. That’s the point where parties have reviewed a proposal and federal action is being taken to either approve or modify the proposal and to set out terms and conditions of a certificate. It is then monitored on an annual basis.
There is an instrument there that already exists to link socio-economic monitoring with funding opportunities. Right now, those aren’t coupled together. For instance, you could see the federal government having a defined pot of money — say $10 million in Nunavut — for approved and functioning major projects. You would be able to consider the distribution of those monies on a more stable basis. Should a new project be brought forward, you would consider whether new funds would be committed to stimulating the economy. Through the assessment process led by the Nunavut Impact Review Board, where should those funds be best placed? I think there are mechanisms at our disposal.
The Deputy Chair: You will follow through on those mechanisms?
Mr. Williamson Bathory: By Friday, if you encourage me to.
The Deputy Chair: Let me change direction here for a little bit. Several people who appeared before this committee referred to the hunting economy. Can you talk to us a bit about the importance of that hunting economy in Nunavut’s overall economy? How do we enhance support for the hunting economy? What do you feel is the view of the contribution of the hunting economy to the Inuit culture of self-reliance?
Mr. Williamson Bathory: I’ll state, first and foremost, that this was the thrust of Ms. Sandra Inutiq’s presentation on the Arctic Policy Framework before this committee on April 1. I’m happy to pick up on it. It is a body of work on which we’ve worked as a group for several years. I’m happy it’s starting to get some attention.
Another document that touches on this is called, “QIA’s Response to ’Stronger Together’: An Arctic and Northern Policy Framework for Canada.” In that document, several pages give very clear, concise responses to your questions.
To save a bunch of paper-shuffling on my end, I will jump to page 13. There are also earlier sections that give some illustration of this.
We are here today and I’m employed by QIA because of the strength and resilience of Inuit harvesting practices. Although some of the communities we represent were created by the Canadian government, the geographies largely align with areas of long-time Inuit land use and occupancy. I mentioned earlier the project with National Archives. We are seeing emerging in common-day life in Nunavut, a very clear thirst to sustain an economy around what Inuit do best which is occupy their homeland, provide for their families and be active monitors in the environment.
In the context of our negotiations on Tallurutiup Imanga, we’ve converted that into evolving the guardian’s concept, which has its heritage out of B.C., to include a role for active harvesters, making hunting into a full-time, paid occupation.
I saw some of the notes from the day that Sandra Inutiq presented. Oceans North also presented their perspective on the families who are doing the best socio-economically in communities. It is those families who are harvesting, who are passing on language skill and tradition through being on the land. Unfortunately, the cost of those activities can be rather astronomical. It requires a steady wage. It requires a lot of local ingenuity.
One of the ways we’ve put forward — again at page 13 — is specific investment in marine infrastructure. We’re calling for improvements to harbours. Right now, only one Nunavut community has a completed small-craft harbour. For a marine people and a marine jurisdiction, that simply doesn’t cut it.
We’re also working to develop what we call multi-use infrastructure — facilities that have garages, offices, equipment and supplies to allow the community to self-sustain itself. Those would be linked to food-processing facilities and then offices for the staff. We’re also looking to build mobile training opportunities to encourage transmission of knowledge between elders and youth.
Again, the hunting economy, in principle, goes back to one serving of country food per person per day. Achieving that requires a whole lot of organization in ways that, right now, are only done informally. It is only done by Inuit themselves paying for those activities out of the wages they are otherwise able to earn. We know it identifies strongly with the skills of men and women but specifically with the ability for young men to be able to learn and grow into an occupation.
The president of our institution grew up in Grise Fiord. He aspired to be a sewage truck driver because that was one of the jobs he saw. His family ran a very successful guiding business. They had a dog team to feed every day. They took people out for polar bear hunts. He never connected that with an occupation.
If we can create harvesting as an occupation, we’ve embodied something that already has cultural momentum. We’re not waiting for someone in Ottawa to set up a program. That program will ignite and will run itself.
The Deputy Chair: There being no further questions, I really do want to thank you for your testimony and for the time and responses you’ve given to us.
With that, we will adjourn. Thank you very much.
(The committee adjourned.)