Basic literacy and numeracy skills still lacking: JRP. Will government download education to the companies?

The western toad is a funny looking fellow. He’s big, as toads go, measuring about six inches from stem to stern, not counting the legs. He’s colourful, with great golden eyes and a stripe down his back. Both the male and the female taste bad; well, to you anyway, if not to each other.

Perhaps of no particular interest to you, the western toad is apparently very important to the folks who laboured long – and long – to produce the recently released Joint Review Panel report on the Mackenzie Gas Project.

These good folks recommended, among their 176 recommendations (Average cost based on the panel’s almost $19-million tab? About $110,000) that, in the interests of adhering to the precautionary principle, the National Energy Board should condition any certificate it issues to the project’s proponents on the oil companies studying the toad and reporting back to whomever it is at Environment Canada manages the toad desk.

Good for them. Concern for one of, dare we say, God’s lesser creatures is surely a mark of a moral mind. But, what of the panel’s concerns for the greater creatures? What of the people hoping to get work on the pipeline when – if – it comes?
The panel noted that “basic literacy and numeracy skills are required for virtually all Project jobs, yet these skills are in substantial need of improvement, especially in the smaller communities.”

And because of this, the panel concluded that, “…there are relatively few people in the NWT qualified to fill the majority of jobs on the Project that require advanced training.” Thus, the case was closed and the panel quickly moved on to worry about the moose and the caribou and the bears and all the other little creatures that live in the woods.

Odd, don’t you think, this seeming lack of concern about the North’s two legged creatures? That no questions were asked by the panel members about how this situation had come to pass? That no panel member thought to raise the issue of why, after all this time and money, the government departments charged with educating the citizens of the North had failed so abysmally?

It’s not as if the idea that people had to be educated in order to get a job was sprung upon the land at this late point. It’s not as if Judge Berger hadn’t noted, way back in the late 1970s, that while education in the North was progressing, “levels of achievement have remained low,” and as a result, “…no skilled jobs will be open to native people… because they have no training for these types of jobs.”

It’s not as if no one knew that Imperial Oil had demanded that any Northerners it would hire for the Norman Wells expansion would need to have a grade 12 equivalency. That was in 1982.

It’s not as if we didn’t know that many people in the NWT suffered from low literacy and numeracy skills, low enough that some government intervenors actually suggested in the BHP hearings, in 1996, that the company should provide literacy training for Northern staff working at the diamond mines.

And yet there was the very same suggestion being put forward by Dr. Frances Abele at the JRP hearings, some ten years later, the only difference being that this time the responsibility for educating the workers would rest with an oil company.

Surely it shouldn’t be left to an oil company, or a diamond mine, to educate people. It would seem to be a given that this is a role for government, that it has a fundamental obligation to help educate its citizens, that the “peace, order and good government” of a country depends upon an educated public, because as Thomas Jefferson knew, “whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” Today, Jefferson is as much remembered for his work in establishing the University of Virginia as he is for his time as president.
It is a cliché, but not untrue, that education is the key to a good future. We know that young men with lower education are more likely to be unemployed, and stay there. We know that without an education, our kids will be worse off than we were and that is not an outcome that should please any parent.

Education is their bridge to a better life, but sometimes we don’t do so well with bridges here in the North. Alaska has its “bridge to nowhere” and the NWT has its “nowhere bridge.” But we must try because, just as the Deh Cho bridge will (eventually) link the two sides of the Mackenzie River, a decent education will lead Northerners to the better jobs.

Doug Matthews, the former director of the NWT’s minerals, oil and gas division, is an energy consultant.