THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON THE ARCTIC
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Monday, May 28, 2018
The Special Committee on the Arctic met this day at 6:30 p.m. to consider the significant and rapid changes to the Arctic, and impacts on original inhabitants; and, in camera, for the consideration of a draft report on the subject matter of those elements contained in Division 9 of Part 6 of Bill C-74, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on February 27, 2018 and other measures.
[English]
Maxime Fortin, Clerk of the Committee: Honourable senators, as clerk of your committee, it is my duty to inform you of the unavoidable absence of the chair and deputy chair and to preside over the election of an acting chair.
I am ready to receive a motion to that effect.
Senator Oh: I propose Senator Neufeld be the acting chair for this committee meeting.
Ms. Fortin: Are there any other nominations? It is moved by the Honourable Senator Oh that the Honourable Senator Neufeld take the chair of this committee. Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
Senator Richard Neufeld (Acting Chair) in the chair.
The Acting Chair: Good evening and welcome to this meeting of the Special Senate Committee on the Arctic. My name is Richard Neufeld, I am a senator representing British Columbia and I am chair of this committee for part of this meeting.
So our guests understand, the chair, Senator Patterson, is held up in another committee meeting, and I believe Senator Bovey is the same. We will just begin this and eventually Senator Patterson should be back here.
I would now ask senators I round the table to introduce themselves.
Senator Oh: Victor Oh from Ontario.
Senator Coyle: Mary Coyle, Nova Scotia.
Senator McCallum: Mary Jane McCallum, Manitoba.
Senator Deacon: Marty Deacon, Ontario.
Senator Eaton: Nicky Eaton, Toronto.
The Acting Chair: Tonight, as part of our study on the significant and rapid changes to the Arctic and impacts on original inhabitants, we will now dedicate a few meetings to the following topics: economic development and infrastructure.
For our first panel, we welcome, from Employment and Social Development Canada, Adam Fritz, Director, Indigenous Coordination and Engagement; and Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Director General, Indigenous Programming Directorate.
Thank you both for joining us. I invite each of you to proceed with your opening statement, after which we will go to a question and answer session. The floor is yours, gentlemen.
Adam Fritz, Director, Indigenous Coordination and Engagement, Employment and Social Development Canada: Good evening, Mr. Chair and senators. First, I would like to thank you for inviting us here today to speak to this committee and specifically to discuss Indigenous skills and employment training programs that are supported by Employment and Social Development Canada, or ESDC, specific to the Arctic region.
I am currently the Acting Director General of the Indigenous Affairs Directorate at ESDC, which is responsible for supporting Indigenous program design and reporting, labour market information, providing a coordination and advisory role for Indigenous engagement and leading our departmental work in support of the federal reconciliation agenda.
I am joined this evening by my colleague Jean-Pierre Gauthier, who is the Director General of the Indigenous Programming Directorate. Together we have shared accountability for the management of ESDC’s Indigenous skills development programming.
ESDC funds Indigenous organizations to design and deliver skills development and employment training to help Indigenous people be prepared for, find and keep jobs. We do so through two primary programs: the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Training Strategy, or ASETS, which is currently undergoing renewal to the Indigenous skills and employment training program, ISET, which we will be discussing shortly; and the Skills and Partnership Fund, or SPF.
Mr. Gauthier and I will be sharing our remarks this evening.
What is ASETS? ASETS is a broad-based labour market program that funds a network of 85 Indigenous-led service delivery organizations with over 600 points of service offering a full suite of skills development and job training, from the acquisition of essential skills such as literacy and numeracy to more advanced training for in-demand positions in growth industries.
SPF is a project-based and opportunity-driven program that is focused on preparing Indigenous workers for specific job vacancies in partnership with employers.
From April 2010 to March 2018, over the last eight years, through these two programs, ESDC has invested $540 million in 32 organizations across the Arctic. This is including 18 service delivery organizations that provide ASETS services directly, as well as 19 SPF projects. Together, over the same eight-year period, these two programs have served approximately 40,000 clients in the Arctic, of which more than 19,000 found employment and 9,000 returned to school.
An example of our work in the Arctic can be seen in the successful partnership between ESDC and the Mine Training Society in the Northwest Territories. This project provided training, skills development and work experiences in the mining sector to Indigenous people living in both the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The training included introduction to mine life cycle, mine geology, mineral processing and other mine-related instruction. The Mine Training Society has been supported through an extensive partnership with the government, industry, Indigenous communities and educational institutions, leading to a successful project that ended in March 2017 with 1,593 total clients served, 420 total clients employed and 49 total clients returned to school. That is one example specific to the Arctic.
A second example I would like to highlight is the Northern Ontario School of Medicine in Thunder Bay, which held a pilot project of health careers camp that supported 18 students from six communities across Nunavut to attend a health careers camp for Nunavut students held in Iqaluit in February 2018. This camp helped students become aware of career opportunities in the health care sector and the education requirements necessary to pursue those careers.
What is truly unique about the programs ESDC supports is that they are delivered by Indigenous organizations who know best the needs of their communities. They provide resources to respond to emerging opportunities and capitalize on growing economies while integrating traditional knowledge and approaches.
I will now turn to my colleague, Jean-Pierre.
[Translation]
Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Director General, Indigenous Programs Directorate, Employment and Social Development Canada: Good evening, senators. Currently, we are working with Indigenous partners to co-develop the implementation of the new Indigenous Skills and Employment Training Program, which will create four distinct labour market strategies, to increase capacity and flexibility to respond to the unique contexts, needs and circumstances of First Nations, Metis, Inuit and urban/non-affiliated Indigenous peoples. Budget 2018 will invest an additional $100 million annually to support this program, once the maximum investment has been reached.
New investments and a targeted and flexible approach will in part respond to the long-standing social and economic challenges faced by Indigenous communities in the Arctic, which are exacerbated by geography, lack of economic opportunities, the higher cost of doing business in the north and the lack of infrastructure.
[English]
In the Arctic, we have First Nations, Inuit and Metis service delivery organizations with extensive experience in delivering employment and training. While the new program will continue to be delivered by these organizations, specific arrangements will be made with modern treaty holders with self-governance to provide them with greater autonomy over the use of funding. For example, we have been in discussion with the Yukon self-governing First Nations to flow a portion of the funding through their existing fiscal financing arrangements.
[Translation]
We are also working with the Nunatsiavut Government, signatory to the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement, on a similar funding approach. We will continue discussions with other modern treaty holders over the coming months to assess their interest.
The department is required to respond to specific obligations in the Nunavut Agreement; for example, we are responsible for developing the Nunavut Inuit Labour Force Analysis, which is to be used by government organizations in Nunavut to assist in formulating Inuit employment plans and pre-employment training.
These developments are important to fulfilling our treaty obligations and advancing reconciliation. They are equally important to supporting Arctic economies as Indigenous governments and peoples take on more responsibility for shaping the future.
We are pleased to take your questions.
[English]
The Acting Chair: Thank you very much, gentlemen. We’ll go to questions.
Senator Eaton: You have given us examples of how many people you have served and how many people are employed or have gone back to school. Is there any kind of follow up? Do you keep track of whether a person stays employed in that particular area or stays in school?
Mr. Gauthier: We are currently working, especially in the context of the new program that we are rolling out, on improving our ability to track that kind of information. Right now, we have a very good reading as to how many jobs were provided and how many people returned to school. We want to work with our partners in the North to establish a better follow up of these clients.
The other thing that we observe quite a bit is that people tend to go back and forth between training development and the workplace as they actually develop themselves.
[Translation]
Senator Eaton: Is it done with respect to learning?
Mr. Gauthier: Absolutely. It will be done for each step. People want to develop their skills in a learning environment so that they can have better-paying and more stable jobs.
[English]
Senator Eaton: We have heard a lot in the past about the frustration over the non-use of a language, say, from a various area. How many job ideas come from the Inuit themselves, or do most of them come from employers in the North who say, “We’re short labour. Please help us to find people?” Do the Innu communities themselves ever come to you and say, “We need teachers. We need nurses. Train us to do this. Train us to do that?”
Mr. Fritz: It is different from organization to organization and region to region as to what the labour market realities are in those areas. I would say that both of those examples take place. I don’t have exact numbers in terms of how many in each area, but there are definitely examples of entrepreneurs in the North, in Nunavut and other parts of Arctic Canada, where they come to our Indigenous ASETS holders or Indigenous service providers to deliver ASETS services to get help on business planning so that they can set up their own either tourism company or different type of entrepreneurial venture. We also work closely with larger employers, such as the mining industry and so on. That has availability as well.
Senator Eaton: Have you found, for instance, in the construction industry, that there are certain ways of building in the North now? We heard from a previous panel — I think it was from the Labrador panel — that they are experimenting with how to build houses and foundations that don’t crack, that move with the tundra. Are there specific ways of training people in the North that are different from training people in the South to do jobs?
Mr. Gauthier: I would say that training is very much customized. That is why we go through local delivery agents to deliver the training that responds to the reality of the region. They work together with companies, entrepreneurs and so on that are looking for certain skill sets or certain competencies. It’s that dynamic relationship that will guide the training and adapt it, as much as possible, to the conditions that are prevailing in these areas.
Mr. Fritz: Our service providers also work very closely with local educational institutes, which have the local knowledge to teach Northern and Arctic-specific skills as well.
Senator Eaton: Yes, because there must be skills very specific to the North.
Senator Coyle: Thank you very much for your presentations and for being with us here this evening.
Just picking up a little bit on what Senator Eaton was asking, I have three questions. The first one is about the trends. What are you seeing now? I am sure, over this period that you are reporting on, things are changing and there are new areas of skill development and education that are just on the horizon and that either the people in these communities are asking for themselves or the potential employers are asking for them. That’s my first question. I’ll ask my other two after that.
Mr. Gauthier: I will start, and Adam will feel free to add.
The way we’ve structured the program, the way it works, it is very responsive to the actual conditions present. Therefore, if there is employment available or opportunities, for example, in the mining sector, that is where the delivery agents or delivery organizations will try to focus their training a little bit more. It is very much being driven by a local perspective attached to the opportunities that you actually find locally. Therefore, the overall economic context that you may observe in the North is a key driver for finding jobs.
Senator Coyle: What sectors are you largely seeing these days?
Mr. Gauthier: Mining is very present, very strong. There is also a fair amount of effort being put into fundamental skills training as well, for example, literacy skills and lifestyle, to equip people to assume a position and all of the constraints that come with the workplace. There is also a big interest in trades professions. They are always popular in terms of training.
I don’t know if you would have other suggestions.
Mr. Fritz: To build off of that, I’m sure you’ve heard there are many needs across the North and the need for skills development at many levels. Traditionally, natural resources have been and remain a key part of the economy. What we are hearing in terms of trends through our network of Indigenous service providers is the need for raising adult basic education to ensure that people can get a foothold into different types of skill sets, from elder care, nursing, the health care industry, supporting governance for new organizations that are becoming self-governing, tourism, and fishing in certain parts of the Arctic as well. Natural resources is definitely still a strong sector.
Senator Coyle: Thank you.
I’ll just go fairly quickly over the remaining questions. Could you speak about women and men and what sort of gender differentiation you see and the takeup of your programs and the demand?
I’m curious about the capacity of the delivery organizations. It seems to me that those are absolutely the key to the success of the programming in the local areas. Are you supporting the capacity development of those service-delivery organizations?
Finally, are you doing anything — and maybe this is outside of your bailiwick — to provide training in self-employment and small business development?
Mr. Fritz: I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but, in terms of women versus men in accessing our services, we are roughly 50/50. If anything, it might skew a little bit more toward women overall. As well, in some of the SPF projects that are about to be launched or have recently been launched, there has been a focus in the new programs on attracting youth and women. That is definitely something that has been looked at.
Do you want to touch on capacity building?
Mr. Gauthier: Capacity building is actually one of the key objectives of the new program we are currently discussing with the different organizations. We are currently going around the country, actually, speaking to different organizations. We were in Vancouver just last week, meeting with various ASETS administrators on the ground. There is a meeting next week in Alberta to speak to the Northwest Territories partners as well, in Edmonton.
This is intended to be a key feature or a key concern because we have the same observations you do — making sure that we develop the capacity of these organizations both in terms of delivery and in terms of proper management of their operations. You have very strong organizations right now, but there are other organizations that could benefit from a bit of help. This is definitely one of the focuses of the effort that we want to put into the new program that is being discussed for implementation.
Mr. Fritz: Other than capacity building, we have funded distinctions-based technical working groups — Inuit, Metis and First Nations — over many years to support lessons learned and capacity building as well.
On self-employment, one of the things that was mentioned was business services. One of the supports that can be provided for entrepreneurs is to support people who want to be self-employed and help them with business planning, access to computers and other things as well that might not be available to everyone across the Arctic. I am not sure exactly how many people take that up, but it is definitely an eligible expense and some people take us up on that.
Senator Deacon: Thank you, Senator Coyle, for your questions, because there was only one more to add to that group.
I am trying to appreciate the diversity in the different regions and what might be unique to some regions. You talked about customs, customizing and meeting folks where they are. Are you able to talk about how programs are adapted to the reality of different regions or perhaps give us an example?
Mr. Gauthier: It often starts with the individual coming forward and approaching the organization for some skills training and employment training. At that time, an assessment is done of the person to see what are their strengths, what they should work on or needs and what interests them. They will develop a whole plan with that individual.
Sometimes it goes back to ensuring that the literacy and the basic skills are strong, making sure that the pace of a workplace is well understood and the commitment. It depends. It is customized by individuals, depending on where they are. Eventually, they will move on and go to trades and then beyond that. Eventually, you will have stronger individuals that have a different background and want to go to college or university.
Therefore, the plan is driven very much by the individuals in terms of responding to their needs. That is why it is done locally and close to the communities, because it is a big step for many people to embark on that kind of process.
Mr. Fritz: In terms of some of the unique challenges that different parts of the Arctic have, some areas have much greater road and communication access than others. In some areas, for example in Nunavut or Nunatsiavut and Labrador, a lot of the communication has to take place via email or telephone as opposed to face-to-face if there is not always a service officer in every community. Only certain hubs can help others. As well, there are different market realities across different parts of the country and different relationships in terms of their collaborative efforts with other parts of their communities.
Senator Deacon: Thank you.
Senator Oh: I was looking at some of the figures provided by you. From April 2010 to 2018 — eight years — you have a program where ESDC invested $540 million in 32 organizations and 18 service delivery organizations. What is the total funding that you get from the government every year?
Mr. Gauthier: For the total funding per year, the base funding is $292 million over that period. However, for the past couple of fiscal years, there was an additional investment of $50 million, and now we have the budget decision that is providing an additional $100 million. It is ramping up to $100 million. This year, 2018-19 starts with $66 million and will work its way up in about five years to $100 million on top of the $292 million.
Senator Oh: How big is the organization? How many employees do you have?
Mr. Gauthier: We have a network of 85 organizations dispensing training across the country. There are organizations specifically located in the North. The team uses the list of regions identified in the document that underpins your study. The Arctic strategy framework identifies the regions northern Quebec, northern Manitoba and all three territories. They went by those regions and identified all the established service providers that we have there. That is how they assembled these numbers.
We also have another program, as we mentioned a couple of times, which is the Skills and Partnership Fund. It is a project-based investment. Essentially, a private sector enterprise can come forward with the help of one of our service providers or another organization and say, “We want to do a special project to support the development of a mine site,” for example. We also have those that have to do with a province, for example, in northern Ontario for electrification, putting power lines in remote areas. Different projects will emerge. These projects are the other part of that investment and are done project by project specifically, with a beginning and an end, and it is serving a purpose.
The ASETS program provides a basis, based on individuals, and then you have projects in there, but you have a dedicated fund for projects, which is SPF, the Skills and Partnership Fund. This one is about $50 million per year.
Senator Oh: What are the 18 service delivery organizations?
Mr. Gauthier: We have them in the tab.
Mr. Fritz: I think I know them off the top of my head. There are two in the Yukon, the Council Yukon First Nations as well as the Aboriginal Labour Force Alliance, ALFA. For northern Manitoba, there is one, Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak. In northern Quebec, it is the Kitavik Regional Government or KRG. I usually use acronyms; I am not used to saying them out loud. In Nunavut, it is the three regional Nunavut organizations that flow under the NTI, Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated. There are seven in the Northwest Territories representing each of the different First Nations, Inuit and Metis groups: the T’licho Government, Sahtu Dene Council, Gwich’In Tribal Council, Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, Akaitcho Territory Government, Northwest Territories Metis Nation and the Deh Cho First Nations. And in Newfoundland and Labrador, there are four groups, one representing the Inuit, two representing the two different Innu communities as well as the NunatuKavut Community Council, which used to be the Inuit Metis group.
The Acting Chair: I have two more questioners and one on second round, and we have about three minutes. I will ask you to be fairly succinct in your questions and answers, please.
Senator Jaffer: Thank you very much for being here. You said you work to improve the standard of living and quality of life for all Canadians, promoting a labour force that is highly skilled. Some of the other presentations have spoken about people in the North not being able to reach their complete potential because of lack of schools, lack of secondary schools and lack of resources. Do you have adult programs for people to catch up so they can be a highly skilled work force? Do you have any way for them to catch up so they can become highly skilled?
Mr. Gauthier: That is one of the fundamental goals of the ASETS program, the skills and employment training program that we have. It goes by individual. It will take an adult and see where they are personally in terms of what they have as experience and schooling and so on. They will develop a plan for those individuals and take it as far as they say they are interested in going. We will help the individual progress in that direction. People come to the organization at different levels. It depends on where their background is. Yes, we are definitely working with adults.
Senator Jaffer: You teach them how to study?
Mr. Gauthier: Yes.
Senator Jaffer: Do you have initiatives specifically for Aboriginal people?
Mr. Gauthier: The different organizations will tend to specialize for First Nations or Inuit nations and so on. So, yes, they will tend to cater to a specific clientele, which is attached to communities and are relevant to the whole process. Much of what the person may have to deal with is rooted in the community sometimes.
Senator Jaffer: I will stop there.
Senator McCallum: Thank you for your presentations. I wanted to speak more about what Senator Jaffer talked about. What I’m interested in is the life skills that the people need, because in Manitoba they did have projects for hydro and there weren’t enough life skills given or support for addictions. A lot of the people did find employment, but it was not long-term. Do you have that problem and how did you address it?
Mr. Gauthier: We have been going the country and engaging with our partners, and they talked a lot about that. They called it wraparound service. Essentially it’s more than just teaching a trade to someone. It is making sure they can actually seek employment. It goes from drafting a CV to solving personal life issues such as addictions and daycare for their kids because they need to leave their kids in hands they trust to be free, in their mind, to pursue their development. Mental health was mentioned a number of times in our discussions when we have been meeting different organizations. It is a reality. Sometimes it starts there. Before you can teach someone how to drive a 10-wheel truck, you have to deal with some of those issues first.
It is a big commitment for an individual to come in and have this interview. That’s why they do a personalized plan. They take time to take the person and walk with them, depending on what they need. And, yes, all the things you referred to, life skills, we are told are very much at the heart of a lot of the activities or interventions they actually do.
Mr. Fritz: Not all of our Indigenous service providers provide that type of training themselves. Often they are reaching out to other educational institutions or organizations within the community, although some do it themselves. It is a partnership approach that they take.
Senator McCallum: Thank you.
The Acting Chair: Thank you, gentlemen, for being here and answering our questions. We appreciate it.
In the second portion of this meeting, I am pleased to welcome, from the National Indigenous Economic Development Board, Hilda Broomfield Letemplier, Board Member; and Adam Fiser and Frances Abele. The floor is yours. After the presentations, we will go to questions.
Hilda Broomfield Letemplier, Board Member, National Indigenous Economic Development Board: Good evening to all committee members. Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today.
I would like to introduce myself. My name is Hilda Broomfield Letemplier, and I’m here on behalf of the National Indigenous Economic Development Board. I’m from Happy Valley-Goose Bay in Labrador, and I’m very happy to be in Ottawa.
Our board is made up of First Nations, Inuit and Metis business and community leaders from across Canada whose mandate is to advise the whole of the federal government on Indigenous economic development issues.
Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the traditional territory of the Algonquin and Anishinaabe peoples.
I will begin by speaking on the topic of infrastructure and economic development in the Arctic.
Canada’s North is facing a significant infrastructure deficit, one that is a major barrier to improving the quality of life in Northern Indigenous communities and acts as a predominant barrier to economic and business development in the region.
In 2016, our board published Recommendations on Northern Infrastructure to Support Economic Development. Our key finding was that Northern business and community leaders consistently ranked improving infrastructure as the single-most important criteria for attracting investment and facilitating business development in remote communities.
We also found that public investment in Northern economic infrastructure that supports major resource development would yield significant economic and fiscal returns. Specifically, for every dollar spent on transportation and energy infrastructure, it would yield about $11 in economic benefits and $11 in fiscal benefits.
Our report generated seven recommendations in three broad areas: coordinating investments in economic development infrastructure, increasing infrastructure funding and financing, supporting Northern community capacity by funding research and comprehensive community planning. Bold investments in Northern infrastructure are needed now in order to realize the North’s great economic potential.
On the topic of labour market in the Arctic, in 2016, our board published the report Reconciliation: Growing Canada’s Economy by $27.7 Billion. This work included analysis on the expected economic impacts for Canada that would result from closing the gaps in economic outcomes between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population.
In contrast to the rest of the Canadian population, the Indigenous population is young and growing fast, with almost half under the age of 25. This presents a significant economic opportunity for Canada to fully engage the Indigenous labour force, especially in the North. However, there are significant gaps in the economic outcomes between the Indigenous population and the non-Indigenous population in Canada, which grossly impacts Indigenous participation in the labour force.
We are currently in the process of publishing our second of three Indigenous progress reports. Early findings have reinforced our assumptions that much work is still required to advance the economic outcomes for Indigenous peoples.
Our most recent findings concluded that compared to non-Indigenous Canadians, the high school completion rate is significantly lower for Inuit, at 56.1 per cent. Young Inuit women were the only group to experience a significant increase in the employment rate from 2006 to 2016. However, the employment rate for young Inuit women is approximately 15 per cent below that of their non-Indigenous peers, and for the top five industries in the North, Indigenous peoples earn between 31 per cent and 66 per cent of what non-Indigenous peers earn.
While businesses across the North struggle to attract and retain employees, reinforcing community level infrastructure, large-scale infrastructure and serious investments in a growing labour force will be an essential part of supporting an investment-ready North.
I’m a woman in a non-traditional trade and an Indigenous woman, so this is really from my heart and all the experience that I bring to help mentor and be there for women who want to share their own business.
Thank you for listening today.
The Acting Chair: Thank you very much.
Adam Fiser, Principal Research Associate and Co-lead, Northern and Aboriginal Policy, Conference Board of Canada: Good evening, everyone, and thank you for the opportunity to participate. I’m a principal research associate with the Conference Board of Canada and co-lead our Northern and Aboriginal Policy Practice.
There are indeed significant and rapid changes occurring across the Arctic, and First Peoples in the territories, Churchill, Manitoba, Nunavik and Nunatsiavut have a front row seat. For the purpose of this discussion and to stay within my allotted time, I will limit my remarks to Canada’s territories.
What makes a national or federally directed response to changes in the Arctic difficult is the significant diversity that one finds across the inhabited Arctic regions and its First Peoples. There is variation in the challenges that Arctic regions and communities encounter and variation in the capacities and opportunities they have available to respond to their challenges.
The Conference Board of Canada's latest territorial research and forecasting reinforces the point I want to make about respecting Arctic diversity. Let’s start with Nunavut, which is on the cusp of a mining boom, with GDP growth expected at 4.4 per cent in 2018 and 9.1 per cent in 2019. By 2021, five mines will be operational in the territory, yet the majority of new jobs involved will go to a rotational workforce that flies in and out from regions outside of territory.
Nunavut’s demographic position is unique in Canada, with a fertility rate that exceeds its replacement rate. But while Nunavut's population is young and growing, only 55 per cent of its adult population aged 20 and over had at least a high school diploma in 2016. The territory’s unemployment rate, presently over 14 per cent, is expected to remain above 13 per cent well into the 2030s. In the wage economy, limited educational attainment means limited opportunities for job advancement and career development.
This is the case in the mining sector, but it’s also a challenge for Nunavut’s public sector. Inuit fill roughly half of the Government of Nunavut’s positions despite representing 86 per cent of the entire population. Moreover, Inuit fill only 36 per cent of executive level and 17 per cent of senior management positions in the Government of Nunavut.
For Nunavummiut, infrastructure deficits in housing, clean energy, marine transportation and connectivity mean that a comfortable built environment and access to goods and information come at a much higher cost than most other regions of Canada. Such hard constraints affect learning opportunities, access to services and quality of life. These hard constraints also impede the territory’s ability to diversify its economy and help grow other sectors, such as its fisheries and arts.
In comparison with Nunavut’s mining growth, the Northwest Territories is facing a decline in its signature diamond mining industry. Over the next decade, the Northwest Territories’ gross domestic product is expected to decline by an average of 3 per cent per year. By 2035, all three diamond mines operating in the territory will have closed. By 2035, unemployment is expected to rise from 6.8 per cent in 2017 to over 10 per cent. With mining production and associated services in decline, job losses and outmigration over the next 17 years are also expected to contribute to a shrinking labour force.
Although important factors, the Northwest Territories’ geographic, demographic and infrastructure challenges are not as pronounced as Nunavut’s. The prevailing factor we’ve been hearing about is institutional and relates to rethinking how the Government of the Northwest Territories and Indigenous governments in the territory co-regulate natural resource sector activities and split their share of taxes and royalties with the federal government. Yet, with the decline in diamond mining and associated service sectors, the Government of the Northwest Territories, like the Government of Nunavut, is rightly concerned about its resident labour force and opportunities to promote skills development and economic diversification.
Lastly, in comparison, Yukon stands out among the three territories for its more highly skilled resident workforce, its investment in infrastructure and its ability to stimulate partnerships with the federal government and private industry. This is expected to promote GDP growth of 8.1 per cent in 2018 and an average of 6.2 per cent between 2019 and 2025. Unemployment is also expected to remain low over the next 10 years, at around 4 per cent.
Yukon's natural resource sector is entering a new phase of growth, with three new metal mines expected to open over the next 10 years. The recent announcement of Yukon’s resource gateway project is expected to unlock greater resource sector potential by upgrading and developing much-needed transportation networks, but the potential to undertake such a project is predicated on Yukon’s geography, settlement patterns and associated historic investments in roads, hydro power, connectivity and other forms of critical infrastructure. Its successful undertaking going forward will also depend to no small extent on the Yukon and federal government’s evolving relationships with impacted Yukon First Nations.
Compared to Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, Yukon’s demographic story is also distinct due to its greater proportion of residents aged 65 and over. Health care spending comprises the biggest share of the Yukon government’s budget and, with the territory’s growing senior population, Yukon is also expected to face increasing demand for health care infrastructure, such as long-term care facilities.
My message with these short vignettes is simple, though the challenges are complex. There is no one-size-fits-all response to the changing circumstances and socio-economic needs of Canada’s Arctic regions. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from studying Canada’s diverse Arctic regions, at the end of the day, federal responses will need to be co-developed with Arctic regions and localities and tailored to their unique realities.
Thank you for your time.
The Acting Chair: Thank you very much.
Frances Abele, Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University, as an individual: I’m a chancellor’s professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University. I spent most of my career trying to understand the North and working with Indigenous people there. Though I did live in Yellowknife for a few years, mostly I have done my work as a visitor based in the South. I have worked on everything from political and economic development to comprehension claims implementation to education and employment and training.
More recently, I’ve read through the transcripts of your hearings, and I know you’ve heard from Northerners and many others who have a great deal of knowledge to share. I thought that instead of presenting more information, I would offer some thoughts about what to make of the future of the North.
The first of four points is I often feel like we’re stuck in the 1970s when I hear people talk about northern development. Low educational attainment, the need for adult upgrading and training people for blue-collar jobs related to non-renewable resource extraction — all of those things were talked about when I was in my 20s, and as you can see from the grey hair and wrinkles, I remember the 1970s, and we have not moved in our thinking about how Canada should do northern development. I think we are at the moment now where we don’t really have a choice. We need to shake out my new ideas and try some different things.
That brings me to my second point. I know you have heard people talk about climate change. I’d like to talk about the potential for climate change to change everything in the Northern economy and in Northern societies.
I think adaptation to climate change will become the largest megaproject the North has ever seen. We have to replace roads and we have to find new ways to engineer construction and all the buildings that are required. We have to find and implement new forms of conservation practices so people in Northern communities will not entirely lose the food security that they get from harvesting the fruits of land. New ways of earning a living will need to be developed. It seems to me attention must be paid to the medium term — we should be thinking 50 years out — and about the interaction of various forms of investment. Investment in infrastructure should also be an investment in the social and human development of the North.
The outstanding question is: Who will do that planning and who will ensure that there is coordination so that what the economists call a virtuous circle develops. At the moment, there are two or three, depending on how you count, orders of government managing many different programs and doing their best to coordinate the impact of those. Sometimes we do it well, but we’re not doing it well enough to face the challenges that face us in the future.
Part of the challenge after climate change is the burgeoning population of young people in the North. We haven’t improved educational attainment very much at all in 40 years, and now there is a large population of people who are very young parents, who didn’t finish school and whose children are having trouble doing well in school because they are living in overcrowded housing and because often the family is suffering other challenges. Unless we address that problem with a lot more focus and deliberateness than we have been doing, it will not get better. It certainly will not get better automatically because we are able to generate jobs in mining and construction projects. We need something more coordinated and concerted than that.
The obvious place to look for that is education and to look at how we do education in the North. For some of the reasons Mr. Fiser offered, I don’t want to generalize about what the K-to-12 system needs in the North. It varies a lot depending on the territory or the region you are looking at, but if there is an opportunity to talk about education, I would welcome doing that.
There are some successful educational models, and they don’t look very much like ordinary schooling as we know it in Southern Canada. There's a program here in Ottawa called Nunavut Sivuniksavut, which you have probably all heard about. That’s a program that has found the successful combination for taking young adult graduates of high school — they are already quite accomplished people — and preparing them for further employment or for entrance to university. Over 30 years, they have developed a successful formula, and that includes making sure that the basic needs of the young adults are met so they have social support, they have the money they need to live and they have emotional support when they need it.
The curriculum they have combines cultural and linguistic education with education in the wider world. They put a lot of work into developing cohorts of students who can help each other sustain each other through their educational program. They’ve made selective partnerships with educational institutions like my own so that students are able to go from a small community in Nunavut to their two- or soon-to-be three-year program to university entrance.
Almost all of the people who have been through the Nunavut Sivuniksavut system go back North to work. Very few stay here, and I think that has something to do with the nature of the education. I’m sad to say there is very little in Nunavut in the educational system that combines the qualities that Nunavut Sivuniksavut has to help build success.
There is a start. There are other innovative approaches in other parts of the North. Yukon College has its own approach. It will be Yukon University someday soon, and it has a Bachelor of Indigenous Governance that combines a lot of interesting features of Indigenous political thought and how to work in the Westminster system.
The Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in the Northwest Territories has another model. They call themselves a “bush university” and they deliver university courses in an eco-lodge out on the land. Each is taught by an expert from Dene or Metis culture and the university professor. Sometimes they can combine those things, but there are not so many, so there are both elements.
These things are the beginnings of what could be a diverse and innovative northern universities system. Other people have said this, but it is an embarrassment: Canada is the only Arctic country that lacks a university in the North. I think when you say that most people think of building something like a small Carleton. I don’t think that’s necessarily what we should be thinking about. We probably need a network of educational institutions that is sensitive to the diversity of each region and that can work at least bilingually in the local language. There are enough Inuktitut speakers to have a decent Inuktitut-speaking university, but those people probably should be learning in English as well. We are good at bilingualism in Canada, and we need to think about that for the northern university, or multilingualism.
I have one last point to make, and this is related but separate. Mary Simon, in her report to Minister Bennett, called for an adaptation plan as a national priority. She was thinking about climate change and how the North will benefit from and contribute to Canada’s climate change commitment.
In order for us to have such a plan, we need a very strong system of intergovernmental co-operation. There are several Indigenous governments in various parts of the North now. There are the three territories and then several provincial governments, depending on how you define the North. Those governments and the federal government, of course, which has the big bucks and the big boots, all have to work together to plan for adaptation to climate change in a way that doesn’t leave social development and health issues behind.
I think that’s our challenge. It’s a really big challenge for this country. If we don’t do it, the cost will be very high because things will get worse in the North and not better under the pressure of all the other changes coming upon us.
I would like to provide a concrete example in closing. Part of what I do at Carleton is deliver an online graduate program in Indigenous policy and administration. There are many people in the Arctic who would like to take our program, and some of them do, but they have to battle with really crappy broadband access. It's terrible. They can’t submit their assignments on time and they can’t be sure they can be part of online tutorials. There are a lot of problems with broadband accessibility.
Adequate public investment in broadband Internet would improve the accessibility not just of our program but ones across the country. It would reduce the barriers for students in the smaller communities, partly by directing making access easier but also by bringing the university into their community so people can see how a university course works. If we have the technical room to do it, we could offer tutorials to high school students that were examples of what you would study at university. This happens all the time in South and some of your kids have probably benefited from it. It doesn’t happen in Northern Canada. You can’t ship children down to our universities.
I have to stop now. Okay.
The Acting Chair: You have a lot of questioners that want to ask you questions.
Senator Eaton: Ms. Letemplier, I know Happy Valley-Goose Bay rather well as I fish on the Eagle River every summer. I know the feeling of where you live.
You were talking about removing some of the legal and regulatory barriers to accessing capital. Could you give us some specific example of what should be done? I think it is important for the Innu to tell us what they’d like us to do and what they need as opposed to us going up there and saying, “This is what you need.”
Ms. Broomfield Letemplier: From me and our perspective and lifestyle, we have lived it. We have been through everything. We’ve been there from the beginning. This is where we live. This is our home.
With the regulations, we have, historically, been told how things should be. It is important for people to be able to share what they see as what is good for the future, because this is our life. This is how it has always been.
Senator Eaton: Is it financial literacy? Is it lack of collateral? What do you think the barriers are that people face when they want to access capital to build something or create something?
Ms. Broomfield Letemplier: We started our business in 1991, and we had a hard time. Our business now is one of the top five industrial mining suppliers for the Vale nickel mine up in Voisey’s Bay, Labrador. It’s just been difficult. The banks and different organizations, government organizations, they don’t feel or believe you can do what you say you can do. They see you struggle. You are out in the middle of the ocean, and they throw you a life preserver, but they leave you in the water. They don’t give you enough or support you enough. We actually re-mortgaged our home three times and literally ate Kraft Dinner for six months.
Senator Eaton: Do you think it’s because there is no one who is Indigenous that sits across the table and makes the arrangements and they don't understand where you are coming from? Is it a north-south cultural thing, where you are talking to people who have no idea what it is like up north?
Ms. Broomfield Letemplier: Absolutely. We started the first ever manufacturing company in Labrador, and we’ve been there since 1991. We diversified our company. We actually fabricated storage containment tanks for the diesel used in communities in Labrador.
When the mine started, the mine was our biggest supporter. They took us by the hand and helped us grow our business. They helped us be strong, independent, confident businesses that hire Indigenous people. We train them and work them through journey-person status. We see them go to work in their local communities and start their own business.
Senator Eaton: Do you think you should have a northern bank, a regional bank, or one that deals in the territories and in Labrador somewhere that would understand what you face?
Ms. Broomfield Letemplier: I think so. With the money that we have paid out even to the government with interest charges, penalties and fees, we could be retired now. We could probably have hired a lot more people.
There are so many barriers with trying to keep the government and the bank happy, trying to always prove that you can do what you are doing instead of letting you go ahead and do what you need to do. There are a lot of other companies like ours that struggle.
Me being a woman in a non-traditional trade and being an Indigenous woman, I have come a long way. When we started our business, I only had a two-year program. Since then, I have taken project management courses. I want to do the Institute of Corporate Directors now.
I am one little Inuk from Labrador who started a business, who is sitting on a national board now and representing First Nations, Inuit and Metis across Canada. It is such a good feeling to know that your voice can be heard and that you can get out there and show other women that it is possible for any woman to do anything.
You need the support. You need to have the education behind you. You need to have people who let you know that they think you have done a good job and that you are strong and independent.
There definitely needs to be more support with regard to banks. Small businesses like ours make the banks rich. We don’t get the opportunity to climb up there and grow and develop our businesses as we should, I don’t feel.
Senator Jaffer: Thank you very much for being here.
You said, if I am not mistaken, Mr. Fiser, that 50 per cent of the workforce was Inuit, but the other comes from the South or from other places. The challenge is the transient workforce. Can any of you address that issue? People work there, but they don’t feel they belong to the community. They don't feel they belong. They just go in and out. What does that do to the community?
Mr. Fiser: To clarify, it is roughly 50 per cent of the Government of Nunavut’s workforce that is Inuit or Indigenous. In terms of the mining sector’s retention, it is probably much lower than that. Our estimates are that it is about a quarter of the workforce that is Inuit, whereas the rest are part of this rotational workforce.
Your question is about what could we do to attract them or allow them to take up roots?
Senator Jaffer: No. What we have heard from others is the fact that people come for a short time, work and leave. You build communities by people feeling they belong to that community. When you just come in for a short time, you don’t have that investment. What does that do to the fabric of the community?
Mr. Fiser: For the most part, if you ever have an opportunity to visit some of the sophisticated mining camps, they are basically self-contained communities. The personnel are flown into the communities, and they have their needs and wants addressed within the camp. They don’t really have an opportunity to go out and interact with the various communities of Nunavut, apart from their coworkers who may be coming in, for example, from Baker Lake, Rankin Inlet or Cambridge Bay if it’s Hope Bay mine, for example. So there is certainly a disconnect. This isn’t always the case for people. There will be unique characters who fall in love with the North and want to take up roots there. There are many stories about that. However, in terms of the system of rotational work, it is the nature of mining, unfortunately. It doesn’t create many opportunities for these types of social bonds.
On the other hand, mining companies such as Agnico Eagle, the diamond mining companies in the Northwest Territories, have relationships with the Indigenous communities. It’s through impact-benefit agreements based on the treaty rights of these communities, and part of their obligation is to invest in the communities and to pay attention to what their needs are. We do have the example of Agnico Eagle Mines inviting elders to come in and provide counsel to Inuit workers who are feeling homesick, because they are also on the same rotational workforce. We see allowances in terms of scheduling to enable people coming in from the Nunavummiut communities to also then go back to their communities for hunting and trapping.
We still see these kinds of attempts at integrating this major economic force that’s situated within the territories with the original inhabitants of those territories. However, there are always challenges in trying to do it right, and I think people are still learning how to do that right.
Ms. Abele: Perhaps I could add a bit about the families of the people who live there. The rotating in and out — two weeks in and two weeks out — is the same for northern Indigenous people who go to work at the mines as well.
Picture a family that works as a household in a community. They may be used to mutual support, sharing child care and going on the land. When one of the members starts to work at a mine, that person is gone for two weeks out of every month on a regular basis. It certainly changes the family dynamic, and it can also put a lot of pressure on usually the wife who is at home with the kids. Also, how do you manage the infusion of cash that comes with that? For some people, some families, it works fine and it is not a problem. All northern communities need cash income to survive now, just to even pay for gas to go hunting. It isn’t simple to figure out how to integrate mining or even employment in a government office with the way people are accustomed to living in northern communities.
That is why school attendance is related to this, and that is why there is a problem with people taking up even government jobs that are offered in their community. It is difficult sometimes to integrate that with a healthy family life, or the family isn’t healthy enough to integrate it. There is a lot of friction, but mining presents those particular problems that all of the men go away for two weeks and they all come back.
Ms. Broomfield Letemplier: Also, in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, there are just as many women who go to the site and men come out as well.
One of the things that needs to be emphasized is the nickel mining in Labrador is fly in and fly out. There are people coming from all across Canada, down south and everywhere that come in and fly in and fly out for different kinds of positions. It is important that anybody coming in or out of the site for any of these mines for any work in the North should have cultural training. Because I see the disconnect. I have gone to site. You see the Indigenous people sitting on one side and the other cultures sitting on the other side, and they don’t have an opportunity to connect. These sites are world class. You can gain weight when you go up to the site. They have their music and cultural food. They have training too. It is amazing, the development and the service that they provide to their staff that they bring in. I think it is really important to bring in culture training for anyone that flies in and out of the site.
Senator Jaffer: I am the chair of the Diversity Committee at the Senate, and we are looking at ways to encourage young people from the North to come and work here in the Senate, with someone mentoring them, because we believe that the Senate workforce needs to be diverse as well. We are struggling. Should we bring three? How should we set it up? You may not have answers now, but if you can help us, because I think you are the ideal people. Because the Senate believes that we need to have a diverse workforce working for the Senate as well, and we don’t have young people or people from the North. Do you have any way we could proceed with that?
Mr. Fiser: Indeed. This goes back to Frances’ description of Nunavut Sivuniksavut. There is an excellent model here in Ottawa that you should study because I think you could get some great ideas on how to work with these young leaders and bring them into the Senate. That would be my recommendation.
Ms. Abele: Before we leave it, there is another model in Toronto. The Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation has a Glasgow fellows program named after Jane Glasgow. They have a different model, but they choose young people from across the North. They provide them with mentorship and things to do and funding for their research.
I think one of those two models would work very well. I would advise against just advertising and bringing people down one by one.
Senator Jaffer: I agree.
Senator Galvez: Thank you very much for the interesting conversation we are having.
I have some experience in the North. I was in the North as an engineer doing environmental impact assessments for mining, and I am also a professor. One thing in common that you three have said is about environment, natural resources, education and Indigenous culture. For me, those are the three pillars in which development should rise, and I'm wondering how we can coordinate these three pillars.
From my experience, to motivate Indigenous students in our classrooms, the subject that we teach is important. I have seen them motivated by forestry and biology, but not necessarily engineering. I like your example because you have come through all these phases and have been successful in what you are doing. I would like to know what is your motivation. Because we need to show carrots to the students to be passionate and motivated, and then go back with this same passion and motivation to convince others about it so that there is a domino effect and our efforts bear fruit. Otherwise, as you said, we will still be in the 1970s. With this boom of climate change that brings challenges but also brings opportunities, we don’t want to see it as the Far West. What do you think could be the answer there?
Ms. Broomfield Letemplier: When I went to school, I never thought that I would go to college or university because I didn’t have anyone. I think it is important to have role models and mentors to come out and speak to the students. Have someone from the Senate go there and talk to the students.
I am a member of the Nunatsiavut government, and when I went to school there was no funding, so I quit Grade 11. When I quit Grade 11, I had three jobs. I didn’t think there was any need for me to go off to school. I got my appendix out, so I lost a lot of school, so school wasn’t big on my radar.
However, if I had a mentor or if I had someone to follow at that time, I would definitely have stayed in school. I look at my friends that I went to school with who are now retired and who became teachers and those kinds of things, and here I am still in my own business still trying to make it work. In those days, though, we didn’t have any funding. We have funding for education now. If I wanted to go back to school for seven years, I could, but I don’t think I want to do that at this point in my life.
I think it is important to have people come and share their knowledge. I speak all the time. I just spoke at the STEM conference in St. John’s a couple of weeks ago. There were 200 students there. If I can speak and enrich one person or plant a seed in one person to have them think about those things in the future, I feel I have done something and given something back to the youth. That is the kind of thing I like to do. I am a visual and hands-on person, so I want to listen to someone. I want to be motivated by them. That gives me the strength that I think I could go ahead and do something.
That is like being on the national board for the last three years, and I just got reinstated. I feel comfortable and confident, but I know I can do better, so I want to do the Institute of Corporate Directors so that I can do a better job with the board and be able to promote the board in a stronger way and be a spokesperson for them as well.
Mr. Fiser: Senator Galvez, you got me thinking about what really matters in that work and education for a young person. I think it is emphasizing the connections to their culture and to their social fabric so they realize their cultural identity. Just because they go out and get a math degree or an engineering degree doesn’t mean they will lose who they are as First Peoples. They will not be separated from their community.
In curriculum design, it is about emphasizing the bicultural and multicultural. It is about making meaningful use of Indigenous cultures and demonstrating physical principles, for example, in physics. We are seeing this, for example, in the Saskatchewan curriculum. The University of Lethbridge has pioneered some approaches to do that. It is about making the connections meaningful and concrete. It is not just paying lip service and saying, “Here is your Indigenous culture and it is very important, but you have to learn this.” It is about intertwining the two and hybridizing it.
The other component is about emphasizing their leadership because they are inheriting the mantle of responsibility in their communities. When they go back to their communities, it is not just them going back to Toronto. They are going back to their homeland. All of that is connected to their treaty rights as Indigenous peoples and as young leaders who will be responsible for taking their communities to the next level in terms of its social and economic development. It is making those points come home to them and making them concrete in terms of what they are doing now in their experiences in primary and secondary school and, hopefully, post-secondary school is about them making a better life for their communities going forward and taking advantage of those opportunities.
Ms. Abele: I agree with what both of my colleagues have said, but I would add one more thing.
I have spent a lot of time watching Indigenous students come to the university. We all do a lot now. There are student centres, counselling and extra help. But still, big universities with 25,000 students can be very alienating for all first-year students, particularly so if you have come from a community where there are no elevators or where you didn’t see how a big library worked. That is, you never, ever saw one. The gap can be pretty big, but not everywhere and always. That is one of the reasons why I think it is so important that there be a university system in the North. People can get used to seeing that is a professor; she lives next door to my mom. You see them in the grocery store. If you start university and falter, you don’t have to go back from a long way away with an expensive ticket. You might never get out again. You can take a term off and go back to university. It is that sort of familiarity, ease of access and personal knowledge of people who are studying. I think all those things will also help, along with the things other people have said.
Senator Deacon: There is a lot to think about. Thank you for being here. I think we have all heard that you can't judge until you have walked a mile, or 10,000 miles, in somebody’s shoes. We are trying to picture and put these pieces together of the baseline of what life is like plus what we are trying to achieve.
In my background, I spent a lot of years on what I would call customized learning and all kinds of programs. I’m familiar with the Ottawa program, but ultimately the most successful piece is bringing learning to where people are. We know that. We talk about it, and we make the best things work with folks coming down to Ottawa and Toronto and different areas, but as you said — whether it is hybridizing or the different terms used tonight — it is about bringing learning to where the learner is and what the learner needs.
I will come back to that again and your opening comments about education, which is what we are talking about obviously. Keeping that in mind — not the leaving, but doing a better job bringing learning to the needs of the community — I would like to talk more about that. We have also talked a bit about I would call the high school/post-secondary. Grade 4 is when our young girls are either motivated or not to carry on in the classroom, to be involved with extracurricular activities and to reach out. Our boys aren’t much further behind. I am thinking about younger learners when I am listening to you this evening because that’s a critical piece, too.
Could you share anything with us on that younger learner and that hope and dream about what that means and what we can be doing to align services and supports to bring learning to the communities?
Mr. Fiser: It is absolutely fundamental and is part of the other social supports offered by the community. It is also ensuring that the school environment itself is integrated with the community as a whole. Everyone knows it's not just the parents who will help that child succeed through school. It's also the extended family and neighbours and all the various types of events that happen in a remote community’s life that are opportunities for learning.
I'm thinking about some of the interesting programs to teach kids about living healthy lifestyles,such as their sexuality, how they deal with hormones through their cultural lens and then learning what the mainstream curriculum might be teaching them. All that is taking place not just in the school but also outside the school, in the community, with elders, with various folks who are providing social programs.
It is like the bush school, for example, where a lot of learning is taken out on the land. You can apply all sorts of concepts such as biological and engineering concepts and learning about the stars. All of this can be intertwined by also being out on the land, being part of your community and experiencing your culture in a meaningful and tangible way. It is maintaining that fabric between the school and the community, which is really essential. That needs to start fundamentally quite early on.
Ms. Abele: There are communities, if you think across the North, where I think there is a real crisis in the relationship between community and the school. There are other places where it all seems to be working pretty well. It’s hard to generalize.
I want to acknowledge that there are many places where the parents are engaged in the school. Someone told me a story about Alkali Lake, British Columbia. When they started their process of renewal, one of the priorities of the elders was to make sure that the kids went to school. If a kid didn’t go to school, the elder was at the family’s door the next day, asking, “What's happening? Is everything okay?” It is definitely a whole community effort.
For the places where there is that extreme alienation, I think it’s difficult. I don’t think there’s a quick fix for that at all. It has something to do with teachers cycling through the community.
Senator Deacon: Like crazy, yes.
Ms. Abele: Or the inexperienced teachers. They don’t stay very long very often. It needs to be a basket of measures, such as encouraging more locally trained teachers to stay in the teaching profession. The Government of Nunavut drained off a lot of Inuit teachers because they had the education to work there. We need to produce more and to do something about the supply. Communities need to come together and figure out how to take control of their school. I don't think there is an outside solution.
Senator Deacon: No.
Ms. Broomfield Letemplier: Also, with science, technology and math now and the five sessions across Canada, you have 10, 11, 12, 13, 14-year-olds who develop technology for clean water in Africa and those kinds of things. Those are the types of mentorships that need to come into the classes. Young children need to be motivated about what they can accomplish in their future.
Accountability has to be there as well. I have seen so many cases where children just get moved along. They can’t do the work but they get moved up to the next grade. Their attitude is that it doesn’t matter and they can wash dishes. There is nothing wrong with that, and every job has a reason to be there, but there is no drive or push. They need to be motivated that they can be anything, go anywhere, do anything. They can be doctors or astronauts or what have you. A lot of the children just don’t have motivation. Sometimes children are so smart that they’re bored. They need to have that extra motivation.
My granddaughter will be 12 this summer, and for her birthday, her wish was to go to Montreal for a woman’s leadership course. She is waiting to find out if she will be accepted to the school for the gifted. That shows that education in the South is much more engaging. There are so many more opportunities for children. In the North, children don’t have that opportunity. If you don’t go to school, that’s okay and you don’t go to school, and so on. There definitely needs to be more focus put on the young students. If they are not getting the encouragement or the interest from their parents or from their families, they think they can fly through life and not do anything. They don’t realize how good they will feel or the pride and self-esteem that they can have. There needs to be work on those types of issues for sure.
Senator McCallum: Thank you for your presentations. I always learn so much from all the speakers that come here.
I wanted to shift the topic to the role that informal education played in Indigenous learning before residential schools and how that informal learning — I don’t know how else to put it, it’s the land-based — involved spirituality. That’s a word that doesn’t come in very often. That spirituality comes through the culture and through the language.
I listened to you speaking about, “I wish I had gone to school.” You would have. There is so much that informal education teaches us that you’ll never learn in a textbook. I think that’s the strength we have as Indigenous people. That’s how we pass on tradition and life skills. That was interrupted by residential schools, and after that came that lack of family structure.
When you look at bringing back that strength that Indigenous people have, how would you see it play out? Just taking them onto the land doesn’t mean that they are going to learn that. I was thinking about the language bill that came that they really fought for, but it’s not working because of the way it’s being implemented. They have their solutions. They fight for it, and sometimes it’s implemented in a different way than they saw.
Mr. Fiser: This is a fundamental challenge, and it plays out in many different ways, given the diversity of Indigenous communities across Canada.
In Nunavut, this is a massive nation-building exercise that they’re undertaking. We have never seen anything like it. What they are going through and experiencing with their transformation of curriculum, their desire to have representative government, their work with the mines, all of this is very experimental, right? In terms of that curriculum development, I think folks want to see change happen perhaps more quickly than it can at this point. It will be difficult to adapt a whole suite of, for example, non-Inuit curricula, like sciences and maths, into Inuktitut or Inuinnaqtun. That takes time. You need the teachers. You need the resources. You need all sorts of things in place. Just understanding what children go through when they are experiencing a kind of bicultural mode, a bilingual, multilingual mode of education, all that is still somewhat a bit new, especially for Nunavut.
Although there are certainly people’s frustrations with curriculum and why things aren't moving as fast as they’d like, they’re learning and making a conscious effort to understand what’s working in different communities and regions of Nunavut. That also is not just one monolithic environment. Each region is also quite distinct. I think they are doing the best they can to adapt to circumstances and to keep learning. I’m hopeful that things are moving in the right direction.
In terms of those ingredients, what does it take, and what are the elements from prior to residential schools that need to be revived and kept alive? I think it has a lot to do with governance the school system. Initially, we talked about the importance of making sure that the schools are connected to the communities, and this comes through in, for example, ensuring that elders are there as part of advisory committees with the schools, are there to advise on curriculum development, are there to provide counsel to young people who may be having a difficult time and wondering, “How come the spiritual dimensions of my education aren’t necessarily being addressed?” It’s really creating opportunities for the communities to be engaged, for families, parents, to be engaged, for elders to be engaged, and connecting it with the culture itself.
Nunavut certainly is making a lot of attempts to do that, but it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work with limited resources.
Ms. Abele: You really stopped me with your comments, and I think what Adam is talking about is what has to happen. It isn’t traditional Indigenous education. The people of my generation — I was born in 1950 — the leaders of the generation the same age as me did go to residential school. I guess I have to be geographically specific. I’m talking about the Northwest Territories, the Mackenzie Valley. They did keep their own language, and they did have on-the-land skills, and they did become leaders in their 20s. They are really bicultural people. They are the one-and-a-half men and women. How did that happen? The people I know were educated by their grandparents. They had the formal schooling, and their families, by and large, thought they had to go because they saw the changes that were coming. But they valued and didn’t want to lose their language and all of the knowledge about living in the landscape that is embedded in the language and that none of us have access to if we can’t speak fluently.
It seems to me that that generation and those individuals' kids are fine, but there are a lot of people whose parents lost their way or who are two or three generations along now. There, you are right. They are just going out on the land for three weeks as part of the curriculum. It’s not the same education. In that regard, I think the Dechinta model is better because it brings people for a long period of time with elders and teachers from the culture. It won’t be the same as it used to be, but it will be something like that, something that is healthy in the way that that’s healthy and that builds self-esteem and confidence.
That’s all I know about that, but I think you have raised the most fundamental question about what is going on in our generation now.
Ms. Broomfield Letemplier: I’m probably going to go off topic a little. It’s sort of on the same thing. In 1941, my dad moved from northern Labrador, Rigolet area.Tikoralak is where he was born. He was a guide, so he actually took the doctors and missionaries along the coast of Labrador by dog team. When the base started in 1941, he relocated to Labrador, and that’s where he started our family. I’m one of 10 children, but we escaped the residential schools. So we were really lucky, and my dad worked hard to bring our life and to start us in Labrador.
On that point, for Indigenous people, I think the children are affected a lot by what they see and their goals are affected as well by what they see and what their parents go through. They always see social welfare, and Indigenous people are tired of getting a hand out. They want a hand up. They want to grow their families. They want to enrich their lives. I’ll give the example of fly-in, fly-out operations of many mining developments in different corporations in Canada. Corporate Canada is responsible for helping to enrich the lives of people that they hire. But what does it say to you when you are told that you are not good enough to be a labourer, when they fly in labourers from the South and you’re not given a job of flags person because it’s a two-day course and corporate Canada is not interested in investing in a couple of days training so that you can actually go into your community. This is where you live. This is your home. You’re not going anywhere. You want to grow your families. You want to contribute back to your economy.
In that regard, I think it’s time for corporate Canada to realize that they should be giving more to the communities than they actually are. They should be supporting the people who live there. They are not going anywhere. This is where they want to be. It will be so much better for the children who live there. They’ll see the pride and the self-esteem again, like I mentioned earlier, that their families grow through. If there is no incentive for them, they think, “I’m going to go through the same thing in my lifetime, so why bother? Why do I want to learn? Why do I want to go to university for years and years if I’m not going to be recognized?” That’s just a little bit further to your thoughts on the residential school.
Senator Coyle: Thank you very much, all of you, and to my colleagues as well. This has been a rich discussion. It’s clear from the concentration of the discussion on education — informal, formal, creative forms, adding in the spiritual, the Indigenous, and as you had said, Ms. Broomfield Letemplier, role models, seeing where you come from and feeling good about that, but also seeing possibilities that you may not have known exist, and possibilities for people like you.
There is an emphasis on education. We are here doing a study right now on economic development and infrastructure, and what I’m hearing is education, education, education. There are some successful models and we need to know what they are. We’re hearing we need diverse solutions for diverse environments. That is the basic human infrastructure we have to be talking about right now for anything — economic development or anything else we’re talking about here. So, I really appreciate that and I will not belabour that because we’ve spoken a lot on that.
I have a couple of questions. Mr. Fiser and Ms. Broomfield Letemplier, I’m very curious about your organizations. Do you talk to each other as organizations? How does that work? You’re both focused on economic development solutions for the people of the Arctic. How does that work, the working together, and then who else do you work with, and are you having effect with either corporate Canada or Canada’s government, which is what we’re here to talk about?
Dr. Abele, I have a million questions for you, but I will try to pare it down. I completely agree with you. Like you, I’ve been hearing the same old thing, same old solutions, even some of what we’ve been talking about here at the table tonight, same old stuff since the 1970s. We know the Arctic is shifting and changing in ways that we can hardly even imagine. I’m curious about scenario building based on what we do know in terms of where things are going, not just which mines are closing down, et cetera, but where things big picture are going in the North and who is doing that scenario building and how does that relate to economic development?
You speak about broadband as a powerful tool for education, but I can't help but think that it is also a powerful tool for economic development. I live in a town of 5,000 people in Nova Scotia. When I hired somebody to come and work at the university with me, she brought her husband from Washington. He never left his job in Washington. He did his job from Antigonish. If we had economic opportunities in the North that were broadband dependent, wouldn’t that be awesome.
Ms. Broomfield Letemplier: We have done a lot of work with infrastructure, and one of the things we noticed is that the people’s core needs are not being met, such as clean water, good food and good homes to live in and lack of access to broadband. That is a lot of work. We realize that the core needs are not being met. Adam has actually done work for us on the board, and he did the first study. It’s right here. We actually work with the Conference Board of Canada and we work with economists who come up with the statistics for us so that we know the proof is there in the statistics we provide, and we definitely feel that we are having impact with the federal government. We’ve met with the minister several times. They have actually been to Nain in September. Five ministers went to Nain and a couple of parliamentary secretaries went up there. We see the quality of the food is getting better in the North. They’re looking at building a couple of multi-complexes in the North.
We definitely see that we’re having impact, and we really certainly hope to have a bigger impact in the future. One of the files I’m working on now is food security. Women’s entrepreneurship is big in my profile, and procurement is quite big as well. Being a small business owner, a lot of these projects that come out are multi-billion-dollar projects that can be broken down so small businesses such as ours can bid on that.
The government has the power, and with the nation-to-nation feelings they have now and the support they have for Indigenous communities, it’s great to see that those changes are starting to happen. There is a huge opportunity going forward and, of course, you can tell I’m pretty excited about the opportunities we have to make changes for the future.
The government has all the power. For instance, one of the things I was thinking about with regard to food security is the money that is put there and the regulations that are put there. There are so many regulations that can be tweaked and changed. With respect to food security, if you have food that has a certain lifespan, instead of letting it go to the dump and letting it run its cycle and it gets thrown out — you could watch APTN and you see Indigenous people rooting through the garbage looking for food or whatever. Why don’t you see non-Indigenous people doing that? It is because they don’t have to do that. But if the government put in regulations saying here is the food expiry date, when there are two or three weeks left, give that to the community sharing freezer, to the kids Eat Smart! program, to those kinds of things. Don’t just let it go until it's no good and then get rid of it. Implement those kinds of changes.
Ms. Abele: On the scenario building, there are a couple of professors working on this. One of the challenges we face is the intergovernmental challenge. There is a question of convening and marshalling all the good minds. There is intelligence and knowledge in all the northern regions, but that will not come together by itself because it’s hard to communicate and because it needs research support and things like that. That said, the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee is starting a new project on building a sustainable future for the North, and I’m writing a book. I’m on sabbatical and I’m trying to write a book about the future of the northern economy. That’s fine, and we’ll make a contribution, but I think we need a governmental response as well to focus attention and make sustained plans — plans that are bigger than a single program, no matter how good, and longer than a single mandate.
Mr. Fiser: As a footnote, Senator Coyle, the Conference Board of Canada does have a team that does scenario planning, apart from economic forecasting. I’m happy to talk with you offline about some of the work we do. Recently, also, there were folks from the OECD who were down and interested in regional economic development with respect to Indigenous communities, and they have similar questions to yours. That’s another resource that will be coming up. That was done in partnership, I believe, with the folks from INAC and some of the regional development agencies.
Ms. Abele: I am part of that project, and I forgot about the OECD project. It’s not very far along yet, but I would be glad to make the connection.
The Acting Chair: Thank you for your testimony. It was very interesting.
Senators, Senator Patterson has sent me a message. He’s not going to make it to the meeting tonight, but we have two items that we have to deal with in camera and then go back into public. One is the budget and one is our recommendations in relation to the budget.
I will suspend the meeting to let the presenters go and then we will go in camera.
(The committee continued in camera.)
(The committee resumed in public.)
The Acting Chair: We are back in public, and I need a motion to adopt our proposed budget for a fact-finding mission in the Western Arctic.
It is agreed that the proposed budget application for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2019, be approved for submission to the Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration. Can I have that motion?
Senator Jaffer: I move the motion.
The Acting Chair: Moved. Everybody is good? That’s great.
(The committee adjourned.)