[BRIEF NOTE] On decentralization in Nunavut

[rfmcdonald]

This seems ill-judged.

Nunavut's elected MLAs will review the territory's decentralization program, which promised to spread jobs and wealth outside the capital when the territorial government was formed 10 years ago.

The program has been a cornerstone of Nunavut's public life but has come under criticism from a recent report on the government's policies and operations.

Officials with Premier Eva Aariak's office did not give many details about the decentralization review, which is still under discussion.

However, the issue is expected to come up when the legislative assembly resumes sitting on Nov. 24.

Under decentralization, territorial government jobs and departments are distributed to communities outside the capital city. As a result, some departments are headquartered in small communities remote from Iqaluit.

The Nunavut Implementation Committee laid the groundwork for decentralization in 1995, four years before Nunavut became a separate territory.

"Pretty much every government in Canada and most of the world has a whole series of field offices that deliver service and programs to people, but the decentralization went way beyond that," said Graham White, a University of Toronto political scientist who has studied Nunavut's decentralization policy.

As of 2003, five years after Nunavut was created, 460 territorial government jobs were based in 10 communities.

The idea of dispersing government functions so widely across what's basically an uninhabitable wasteland of two million square kilometres strikes me as not the best idea, or the most economically rational idea. Nunavut's population is quite scattered, actually. Out of the thirty thousand or so inhabitants of Nunavut, one-fifth live in Iqaluit, while in the adjacent and very similar territory of Greenland, one-third of the fifty-eight thousand inhabitants live in Nuuk, with a relatively dense concentration in the relatively hospitable southwest of that emergent island-nation. Can a Nunavut with an economy so dependent on federal government subsidies and relatively lacking in productive assets of its own really afford distributing government functions so widely, or for that matter, such a dispersed population? I wonder.