By Michael Ganley -- And Harper’s other mistakes during his Northern swing

No disrespect meant to Dennis Patterson, but his selection by Prime Minister Stephen Harper as Nunavut’s new Senator reeks not only of nepotism – a frequent criticism of Senate appointments – but also of colonialism.
Patterson had a long and distinguished political career in the North. He was premier of the NWT from 1987 to 1991, and headed the 20-year effort that led to the creation of Nunavut in 1999. But he doesn’t live in Nunavut, and hasn’t for almost a decade.

The Constitution Act says a Senator must “reside” in the province he or she is chosen to represent. Apparently that requirement is not always followed (as opposed to, say, most laws). The issue reared its head a few years ago when Mike Duffy was named to the Senate for P.E.I., even though he hadn’t lived there for 40 years. Eventually, Duffy met some technical definitions of residency to quell the unrest, and Patterson has done the same by buying a house in Iqaluit.

But even if legal requirements can be met, moral ones cannot. Nunavut has little enough representation in Ottawa with one MP and one Senator. Having one of them live in Vancouver is an insult to the 30,000 people living in the territory and an affront to democratic principles.

Patterson told the Nunatsiaq News that while he lives in Vancouver, he’ll get a place in Ottawa and travel regularly to the North. To which I say, stay at your place in Iqaluit and travel regularly to Ottawa. I can only imagine how often Patterson, while in office, railed about out-of-touch southern politicians making decisions for the North. Yet now he has bought into it, an extension of the colonial relationship that exists between Ottawa and the North.

The appointment is particularly disappointing when you consider the man Patterson will replace. Willie Adams was born on the land 60 kilometres east of Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, and brought an Inuit sensibility to the job. NWT Senator Nick Sibbeston tells of a time when the chair of a Senate committee brought a clock to hearings to try to limit the time Senator’s took to make their point. “We reminded [the chair] that he would have to recognize the cultural difference and recognize that someone like Willie needs more time, because the way of the Inuit and other aboriginal people is to tell a story and to take their time to make a point.”

The Patterson decision is just one of the mistakes Harper made during his voyage North. There was also the unintended humour of a press release from the Prime Minister’s Office that misspelled ‘Iqaluit’ as ‘Iqualuit’, which means people with unwiped bums. But from a serious, pan-Northern perspective, the worst news was Harper’s decision to place the headquarters of the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, CanNor, in Iqaluit. The decision will diminish the agency’s effectiveness because it’s tough to get qualified people to commit to a long time in Iqaluit. (It can be tough in Yellowknife and Whitehorse, too, but not nearly as tough). Harper admitted as much, saying his top mandarins gave him “a million reasons” not to put it in Iqaluit. “It’s much more difficult to house an agency here, create an agency here, staff an agency here, overcome all kinds of technical problems,” he said. “Why don’t we as a federal government face that directly?” Nice sentiment, but some things, like geography, simply can’t be overcome. It takes a long time to get to Iqaluit, especially from the Yukon (give yourself two days each way) and even from some of Nunavut’s own communities: It’s much easier, for instance, for somebody from Cambridge Bay to get to Yellowknife or Whitehorse than it is for them to get to Iqaluit.

On an even more profound level, the biggest projects that would make the biggest difference in the socio-economic conditions in the North – and therefore should garner the greatest attention from CanNor – are in the NWT and the Yukon. The biggest, of course, is the Mackenzie Gas Project, which would give a foundation to the NWT economy for decades to come. There are also several significant mining projects in each of the NWT and the Yukon. Nunavut’s biggest private sector project is Baffinland Iron Mines’ project on Baffin Island, but it’s dwarfed by the MGP alone.
CanNor is setting up satellite offices in Yellowknife and Whitehorse, but the head office, with the extra resources and influence, is in the wrong place. It’s a cynical reward to Nunavummiut for electing a Conservative Member of Parliament, and worse, it hamstrings CanNor from the start.