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UNW rejects new offer on pay equity dispute

UNW President Jackie Simpson has said no to a GNWT offer on the pay equity dispute that Finance Minister John Todd tabled Monday morning at the start of new contract talks between the two sides.

ANNETTE BOURGEOIS
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT ­ GNWT Finance Minister John Todd says the GNWT will spend $25 million to compensate hundreds of female civil servants who've been taking home less salary than their male counterparts for more than 10 years .

But Jackie Simpson, the president of the Union of Northern Workers, said that doesn't come close to the $100 million the union wants and has rejected the offer.

The two parties are at loggerheads again in a dispute over equal pay for equal work that has spanned a decade.

Todd announced Monday that his government is prepared to settle the dispute with the UNW during collective agreement negotiations, which began Monday.

Simpson, shortly after hearing the minister's proposal, maintains that the UNW will not discuss any pay equity settlement that's tied to contract negotiations.

$25 million in retroactive pay

Todd proposes to spend $25 million in a one-time, retroactive pay equity settlement, $9 million in ongoing costs to maintain pay equity for current and future employees and $6 million in other costs associated with contract negotiations.

It's this package he presented to the union Monday morning.

"We'd like to patch it all together," Todd said during a press conference in Yellowknife Monday. "That maximizes, if you want, the dollars we put in the hands of northerners in the short-term in the retroactivity pay, and long term in the ongoing pay equity expenditures."

Simpson, however, said the issues will remain separate.

"Pay equity is a very different issue and a very different negotiating table," she said. "I thought it was made very clear, as close as last week, that we were not prepared to mix the two."

Despite the UNW's firm stance on this point, Todd said he's hoping to reach a deal with the union by March 31, when the collective agreement between the GNWT and the UNW expires. Mediated talks between the parties on the pay equity issue broke down recently after months of talks.

Nurses, secretaries to get more

Under a new job evaluation, the GNWT proposes to increase the salaries of traditionally lower-paid employees, such as nurses and secretaries. Todd said this will cost the GNWT $9 million in ongoing costs.

The one-time retroactive pay equity settlement, which the government suggests is $25 million, would be determined using this system.

For example, a school secretary who has worked for the GNWT since 1989-90 would receive about $6,200 in retroactive pay.

A community health nurse employed by the GNWT for the past decade would receive about $14,400. A court reporter working during that same period would get back pay of about $13,100.

The UNW hasn't accepted this new job evaluation system.

"They did not involve the people affected," Simpson explained. "This is a one-sided study."

Must be affordable

Last week Simpson said the union is prepared to ask the Human Rights Commission to impose a settlement if talks remain deadlocked.

It's an alternative that Todd said could be devastating to the GNWT. He says, on the other hand, that his $40 million package is affordable.

"If we cannot come to an negotiated arrangement that's affordable and a third party decides what it should be, and it's not an affordable situation, it will mean further downsizing and further program cuts," Todd warned.

Todd said his government could come up with the $40 million through "creative management" which wouldn't involve more program cuts.

He said the settlement the union wants ­ an amount he suggests is close to $200 million ­ is unreasonable.

Simpson called Todd's figure "inflated" and said the union is asking for only half that amount.

"I didn't suggest that $100 million had to be paid tomorrow, but we did wish to talk about conditions," she said of the negotiations, adding that amount is based on a 1989 joint equal pay study that involved the GNWT.

Todd wants UNW members to vote on deal

Todd suggested the union executive call for a vote of its membership on his deal.

"There's a significant amount of dollars being put in the hands of northern people and I think that's an important issue here," he said.

A large percentage of $25 million in retroactive pay could end up in southern pockets, however, because a large number of people entitled to that money may no longer live in the North.

"I don't have today a clear, defined percentage of the people who are North and the people who are South," Todd said.

"The reality is you have an obligation and responsibility to pay these people, whether they live in Mississauga or they live in Grise Fiord."

Simpson said the issue of retroactive pay does not affect the entire union membership and it would likely never go to a vote.

Todd:No wage cuts in pay equity proposal

Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT - Civil servants whose jobs may be reclassified to a lower pay rate won't have their salaries cut, Finance Minister John Todd told MLAs last week.

Todd is proposing to introduce a new job classification system to bring pay equity to GNWT employees.

A skeptical Jane Groenewegen, the MLA for Hay River, however, wanted to know if employees whose positions are reduced on the pay scale would have to take a salary cut.

"[I] think there is a government term. They say they 'red circle,' which means that if a person is in a job, while they are in that job, they remain at that pay level they are at," Todd explained. "Should they leave and the job was readvertised, it would be readvertised at a lower pay level.

"[T]hose whose jobs have been reclassified down should have nothing to fear because, as I said, and I am going to repeat it again, the pay level will remain the way it is while they are in that job."

Todd presented the new job classification system to the Union of Northern Workers this Monday as negotiations for collective bargaining began.

Is Nunavut's population "explosion" just an alarmist myth?

Demographers and economists say that Nunavut's rapid population growth is natural and beneficial - and that we have nothing to fear in the long run.

DWANE WILKIN
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT - It's so oft repeated now in connection with warnings about health-care costs, housing shortages and bursting welfare rolls, that some politicians have begun to take Nunavut's population "explosion" as an article of faith.

Iqaluit MLA Ed Picco recently joined his voice to the chorus of concern, rising in the Legislative Assembly to appeal to the Government of the Northwest Territories for a "family planning strategy."

When Baffin leaders meet later this year, the so-called baby boom is expected be high on their agenda.

Not surprisingly, given a natural reluctance to discuss the touchy subject of sex and human reproduction, the best that Health Minister Kelvin Ng has mustered so far in response to calls for a family planning awareness campaign, is to promise to address the issue in a future minister's statement.

Still, it seems no reference to Nunavut today would be complete without at least some mention of the territory's distinct demographic profile - usually in grave tones.

Health and social workers worry about being able to meet future demand for their services. Municipal planners wring their hands over housing needs of the next millennium.

No cause for alarm

Nunavut does have a young population and statistics do show a birth rate that is probably the highest in Canada.

But should we be worried?

Probably not, according to one of Canada's top demographic experts.

"I would personally think that was a positive, rather than a negative situation," Thomas McCormack, president of Strategic Projections Inc. recently told Nunatsiaq News.

McCormack, who is scheduled to address a conference of community economic development workers in Iqaluit next week, makes his living helping governments and industries project future spending requirements and business opportunities based on population trends.

He likes to point out that historically, economic development in Canada was tied to, and indeed, would not have been possible without some population growth.

"In a sense, the more people you have, the more they're going to need, and the more they need, the more jobs that will be created," McCormack says.

In southern populations, for instance, the so-called baby-boomers born during a period of unusual fecundity between the 1940s and the mid-1960s, have been a powerful economic force.

One hundred years ago, in a deliberate process of nation-building, massive flows of European immigrants settled the western provinces, driving population growth in Canada to rates that have rarely since been matched in any jurisdiction of the country.

"If there really is a population boom underway in Nunavut - and I suspect it isn't as rapid as it was in those provinces in the early 1900s - I suspect it will have a very positive outcome."

Double the national rate

According to the latest figures from the NWT Bureau of Statistics, Nunavut had an annual birth rate of just under three per cent in 1996. That's more than double the national average of 1.2 per cent.

Based on conservative estimates of birth and rates, at least one researcher in the North has projected that Nunavut's population will reach more than 30,000 within two decades.

And that projection doesn't account for effect of in-migration from the South as a result of the creation of the Nunavut government.

But what demographers call the crude, or simple, birth rate - the total number of births in a given year, divided by the size of the population - doesn't tell the whole story.

"Of course the total population isn't in a position to give birth," McCormack said. "Only females between the ages of 15 and 45 are in a position to give birth. So it's far more useful to look at the fertility rate among that particular group than the total."

More moms, more babies

On weekdays when she's not in class, you can usually find 18-year-old Hannah Uniuqsaraq visiting her baby Michael at the Infant Development Centre, located in a quiet wing of Inukshuk High School in Iqaluit.

The Grade 11 student confesses that the demands of parenthood and her studies can be a little overwhelming at times: between homework and housework, 20-hour days are not uncommon.

Yet she remains fixed on her goal of going to university and becoming a teacher some day.

While many other teenage moms are not so fortunate, Uniuqsaraq counts herself lucky to have the support of a boyfriend, her family and the community.

"If it weren't for the daycare," she muses, "I'd probably have to give Michael up for adoption."

The sheer cost of keeping a child in diapers and baby food had preoccupied Uniuqsaraq long before she gave birth five months ago.

Now, even with her boyfriend's salary, finances are tight. Which is why she says she plans to wait at least 10 years before considering bringing another child into the world.

"If I'm going to add another member to our family I want to be secure financially, with a house of our own," Uniuqsaraq says. "I don't want to struggle all the time."

Hannah Uniuqsaraq and women like her seem to defy conventional thinking about Nunavut's birth rate and what its implications are for future growth.

Fertility rates in decline

Ed McKenna, a community economic development advisor who is working with the Department of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development, began probing Nunavut's population question last year.

What he found came as a surprise: although the current birth rate is indeed higher in Nunavut than in the western Arctic or elsewhere in Canada, fertility rates actually appear to be in decline.

That means women of child-bearing age today, on average, are having fewer children than women of their mothers' generation - the same trend that has characterized southern populations for decades.

"We're not dealing with an uncontrolled, rampant population growth here," McKenna insists.

"It's a very deliberate kind of situation where we just happen to have a lot of people of child-bearing age, and of course they're having children - as we all want to have children. But they're not being irresponsible at all."

Nunavut's own echo

The high birth rate that Nunavut is experiencing now (it varies from a high of 5.7 per cent in Whale Cove to a low of 2.2 per cent in Grise Fiord) may, in fact, be what Canadian demographer and author David Foot has described as the "echo" effect: a rise in births attributed to young adults who were themselves born in a population "boom."

Inuit population growth did explode in the eastern Arctic in the 1960s and early 1970s, McKenna notes, apparently the byproduct of better health and social conditions made possible by the establishment of permanent communities.

In other words, Nunavut's high birth rate is really the effect of past high fertility rates, McKenna suggests, a factor which may no longer characterize young Inuit families.

Family sizes normal

According to its 1996 statistical profile, the NWT Bureau of Statistics reported that Nunavut families have, on average, 2.2 children.

That figure is only slightly above what demographers consider to be a natural replacement fertility rate for any population.

Still, sex and reproduction are a source of consternation for social planners.

"I see an awful lot of one-parent families and the vast majority of them are young single women," Roger Sevigny, director of social services with the Town of Iqaluit says wistfully.

Indeed, StatsCan figures show that women in Nunavut tend to have their babies earlier in life than women in southern Canada.

Yet mortality rates, especially among older northerners, also continue to moderate population growth in Nunavut. This is because northerners tend to die faster than southerners after they reach the age of 60.

"So a baby boom doesn't necessarily mean your population is going to grow that much more rapidly," McCormack points out.

Other factors are important

Ultimately, the question of whether a high birth rate itself is cause for alarm may depend on many other factors, such as how successfully young parents and the communities in which they live are able to meet the needs of a younger, better educated population.

Down the road, success will be measured, among other things, by Nunavut's ability to provide meaningful employment for Hannah and her son.

It will be measured by the wealth that future generations of Nunavut residents are able to create for themselves, and their ability to seize opportunities that population growth presents.

Settling the Nunavut Land Claim was evidently a first important step, McCormack says.

"I presume [it] will provide a firm economic basis for the aboriginal population to start generating the wealth in the North and taking care of themselves."

Iqaluit has more non-Inuit than Inuit males

DWANE WILKIN
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT - Non-Inuit working-age men in Iqaluit outnumber their Inuit counterparts three to two, new StatsCan figures reveal.

Data on Canada's aboriginal peoples collected by Statistics Canada during the 1996 Census and released this month show that non-Inuit males now make up more than 60 per cent of the male population between the ages of 25 and 64.

Iqaluit men between the ages of 25 and 34, in fact, were more than twice as likely to be non-Inuit in 1996.

That's significant, because a large proportion ­ about 17 per cent ­ of the 25,000 people in Nunavut live in Iqaluit.

The figures appear in StatsCan's publication, The Daily and are derived in part from a large-scale survey of people who had reported aboriginal ancestry in the 1991 Census.

Overall, the data show non-Inuit account for slightly more than half - about 54 per cent - of Iqaluit residents who are between the ages of 25 and 64.

77 per cent of youth are Inuit

A high fertility rate continues to drive rapid population growth, though, and Inuit youth far outnumber their non-Inuit contemporaries in Nunavut's capital.

Of 1,975 residents under 25 years old, 1,515, or 77 per cent, were reported to be Inuit.

According to the data, more than half - about 56 per cent - of Iqaluit women between the ages of 25 and 64 describe themselves as Inuit.

Taking all age groups into consideration, it appears Iqaluit's aboriginal population is outgrowing its qallunaat counterpart.

In 1991, StatsCan reported that 59 per cent of the total population of Nunavut's capital claimed some Inuit ancestry.

In 1996, the proportion of all 4,185 Iqaluit residents identified as Inuit was reported at just over 61 per cent, or 2,560.

Between 1991 and 1996, Iqaluit's population grew an average of 4.5 per cent a year.

One in 20 aboriginal Canadians surveyed for the 1996 Census, or about 41,000 people, said they were Inuit.

Cabinet defends $10 million deal with Aurora fund boss

A nondescript office building in Yellowknife is raises ugly questions in the minds of several NWT MLAs.

Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT - NWT cabinet ministers are insisting there's nothing wrong with a $10 million, five-year lease signed last November for a Yellowknife office building that's partly-owned by Aurora Fund boss Roland Bailey.

A phalanx of ordinary MLAs - including Hay River MLA Jane Groenewegen, Mackenzie Delta MLA David Krutko, Nunakput MLA Vince Steen and Kivallivik MLA Kevin O'Brien - have been asking loaded questions about the deal since last week.

Last fall, the GNWT signed a five-year lease with a company called 974102 N.W.T. Ltd. for space inside Yellowknife's Lahm Ridge Tower office building. The lease begins December 1, 1995 and expires November 30, 2005.

Most other GNWT leases and contracts have been frozen until April 1, 1999, so that after division each new territorial government can sign its own leases and contracts.

The shareholder's register for 974102 N.W.T. Ltd. shows that Yellowknife "businessmen" Roland Bailey and Mike Mrdjenovich each own 50 Class "A" common shares in the company.

Yellowknife lawyer Geoffrey P. Wiest and Melanie Dunsmore, described as a "corporate legal assistant" each own one Class "A" common share in the company.

Bailey - who now manages the GNWT's Aurora immigrant investment funds on a contract - is a former deputy minister of the executive and a former deputy minister of economic development.

Pacific Western grants mortgage

The building's certificate of title shows that on October 29, 1997, the Pacific and Western Trust Company agreed to a $4.2 million mortgage on the Lahm Ridge Tower building.

Pacific and Western also supplies financial services to the Aurora Fund, which Bailey manages.

As of Nunatsiaq News' press-time this week, MLAs were still asking questions about the deal and cabinet ministers were still defending it.

A "sweetheart" deal?

"I find it alarming how someone was able to make such a sweetheart deal," Mackenzie Delta MLA David Krutko said during question period Feb. 2.

In earlier questions, Krutko had told the NWT's new public works minister, Jim Antoine, that he couldn't understand why the GNWT had agreed to a long-term lease on an office building when there's already a lot of vacant office space in Yellowknife.

"The number of surplus office space that we have at present... there are some 76,000 square feet of surplus office space in Yellowknife," Krutko said.

"Mr. Speaker, I find it mind boggling how at this time, with all the vacant office space that we have, that this government can get into a long-term contract," Krutko said.

Why the long-term deal?

Other MLAs asked questions that probed the timing of negotations between the GNWT and the new Bailey-Mrdjenovich company.

They also asked questions about why 974102 N.W.T. was able to get a long-term lease, while the previous owner, a company called Lahm Ridge Investment Ltd., was able to rent the building to the government on a month-to-month basis only.

After other questions, Antoine said the GNWT actually began to negotiate a long-term lease with Lahm Ridge Investment Ltd last summer.

Later, in a return to a question from Hay River MLA Jane Groenewegen, Antoine said GNWT officials were aware that Lahm Ridge Investment Ltd was also talking to Bailey and Mrdjenovich about selling the building.

Antoine also said that by November 1, when the new long-term lease took effect, the building was sold and the new lease "assigned" to the Bailey-Mrdjenovich company.

Antoine also said the deal is a good one for the government, and he claimed that the GNWT is actually saving money on renovations promised by the new owners under the long-term lease.

Right now, the Lahm Ridge Tower houses offices occupied by the Department of Education, Culture and Communications and the Department of Transportation.

Kelvin Ng: Ottawa move must be "cost-neutral"

Health Minister Kelvin Ng says he'll allow the Baffin health board to move southern services to Ottawa only if the board can show that it's "cost-neutral."

Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT - NWT Health Minister Kelvin Ng said he won't approve a move of medical services from Montreal to Ottawa if it's more expensive.

"I was not prepared and I am still not prepared to authorize that move unless it proves to be cost neutral," Ng told the legislative assembly last week.

The Baffin Regional Health and Social Services board decided last week to pursue a contract with the Ottawa Health Services Network, an organization composed of several Ottawa hospitals from which specialists would provide medical services to Baffin residents.

Last fall the board decided to end its 30-year relationship with the McGill-Baffin program in Montreal in favor of the Ottawa group, but Ng ordered a cost benefit analysis of that decision after the board failed to give adequate reasons for the move.

The board is currently in the process of negotiating a contract and is expected to make a final decision on whether to move to Ottawa this month.

Baffin House, the boarding home where patients stay while in Montreal, is owned by the GNWT, not the health board, and has an estimated market value of $1 million.

Ng said he'll decide whether or not money from the sale of that building will be used to offset any expenses incurred due to a move to Ottawa.

"As it stands now, that facility has been paid for by this government," Ng said. "As a result of that, that would have to be taken into consideration in any decision before it's finalized."

Airline merger may lead to layoffs

DWANE WILKIN
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT - The merger of NWT Air's operations with First Air could result in some layoffs, the president of Canada's third largest airline said this week.

Bob Davis, president of First Air, estimated that once restructuring of the airline is complete, the merger would result in the elimination of about 20 positions.

"We hope to end up with a single facility in Yellowknife," Davis said. "We also anticipate that if there is some labor reduction, most of it will be taken care of through routine attrition."

Airline employees are represented by several different unions.

First Air, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Makivik Corporation, acquired NWT Air last summer. The merger is scheduled to go into effect March 1, 1998.

Davis said it's too early yet to say whether the reduction in jobs will come from NWT Air or First Air.

First Air, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Makivik Corporation, will continue to use NWT Air's brand name for at least for another year, Davis added.

As for the aircraft's colors, First Air has no immediate plans for a makeover.

"NWT Air has a long history in the North and a very good operating reputation, and just because of its history and its reputation we may elect to continue to use it or we may not. We haven't really decided on that at this point."

NWT Air operates two Boeing 737s and a Lockheed Hercules transport plane.

No further expansion of the airline's overall operations is expcted as a result of the merger.

The merger is not the subject of a review by the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), which has no jurisciction over proposed mergers and acquisitions of Canadian air carriers.

First Air currently has a workforce of roughly 650 employees. NWT Air has 180 employees.

With katajjaq, composer makes footprints in new music

A Toronto composer of electronic music says he was "blown away" the first time he heard Inuit throat singing. One of his compositions is entitled "Footprints in New Snow," after the NIC's 1995 blueprint for creating Nunavut.

DWANE WILKIN
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT - From the moment he first heard it five years ago, the primal cadences of Inuit throat singing have haunted and inspired Christos Hatzis.

First, the strange rhythm of katajjaq evoked childhood memories of a locomotive steam-engine. Then, like the seesaw action of a bow on cello strings, the Greek-born composer found a metaphor for life itself: an endless cycle of creation and destruction.

After spending half of the 1990s exploring katajjaq as a contemporary art form, Hatzis now hopes to do a little inspiring himself.

CD next month

The Naxos international recording label plans to release four of Hatzis' recent compositions on compact disc next month. Each work is based on the tradition of Inuit throat singing, a unique vocal game in which two people face each other and making guttural, harmonized sounds.

The CD incorporates samples of recordings Hatzis made of Inuit throat singing in the Baffin region in the mid-1990s.

"I think those four works now complete all that I can possibly say about this genre," says Hatzis, who also teaches music at the University of Toronto.

"Now that they're going to be released, I think that other people can pick up and continue."

For the sake of Inuit musical culture, somebody sure ought to.

Unless throat singing can be made more relevant to younger listeners, Hatzis says, aspiring Inuit musicians will continue to emulate southern pop stars and country and western singers - musical styles that have little to do with native culture.

"Living cultures should produce living products. That is something that the younger generation should be sensitized to," Hatzis says.

Blown away by throat singing

It was a CBC sound engineer who first introduced Hatzis to throat singing in 1992, while he was working on a radio documentary called The Idea of Canada.

"It just blew my mind completely," Hatzis remembers. "And from that point on it was just a question of finding the means and a way to go up North and actually experience the culture myself," Hatzis said.

He finally did, but was discouraged to discover that, far from thriving, throat singing seemed in danger of being lost.

On a journey to Nunavut in 1995 Hatzis asked a pair of Inuit throat singers if they could create their own song, influenced by the sounds they hear in their everyday lives.

When after a few days the young women responded apologetically that they could not, that they could merely repeat what they had learned, Hatzis' heart sank.

"To me it kind of sounded an alarm signal," Hatzis says.

"Yes, throat singing may survive, but then it will survive as a non-evolving thing, as a museum piece."

Broadcast on CBC FM

Hatzis' throat-singing tributes have been performed on several occasions in southern Canada and Europe and broadcast frequently over CBC Radio's FM stereo network, but are unfamiliar to most northeners, who don't have access to FM radio.

One of the pieces included in the suite, a 38-minute long radio-music documentary called Footprints in New Snow, actually borrows its name from a policy paper issued by the Nunavut Implementation Commission.

"Nunatsiaq News had just been published and the paper did an article on it," Hatzis recalls. "We were thinking of a title for the documentary and I said, 'Well look at this, this sounds more poetic than anything I've ever heard.' "

Piece inspired by Nunavut

Nunavut, a 21-minute long arrangement for string quartet and electronics, dates to 1994 and was originally commissioned for the Smith Quartet with grants from the Canada Council and London Arts Board.

The Inuit music's mystic cultural roots were the inspiration behind Fertility Rites, written last year in three movements for marimba - a type of primitive xylophone of African origin - and pre-recorded throat songs.

"This has been the most succesful of all the experiments I've done," says Hatzis, who describes the timbre of throat singing and marimba music as naturally complementary.

"There's something about the almost hollow sound you get out of a rosewood bar, which almost sounds like... the kind of growly sound you get out of throat singing. When it's played softly, it's almost like it's providing some kind of higher resonance into that particular sound."

The composition, Hunter's Dream, a one-minute "miniature" originally commissioned by Morgan Fisher, keyboardist for the now defunct British rock group Queen, will also appear on the CD.

Hatzis said copies of the CD will be distributed to Inuit organzations across Canada as soon as they are ready. He hopes his treatment of these traditional sounds may find its way into the imagination of younger Inuit musicians.

"If young kids could actually hear throat singing, see the possiblity of its evolution, of its becoming part of a larger cultural context, then more people would pick it up."

A sample of Hatzis' work can be found on his Internet website, http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~chatzis/

My Little Corner of Canada

Unexplained mysteries

by JOHN AMAGOALIK

The Inuit world is filled with fascinating stories and unexplained mysteries. Inuit songs and legends tell of spirits and unearthly creatures. Every community has stories of paranormal phenomena, frightening incidents, and elusive beings that reveal themselves in the darkness of night.

Other cultures in other parts of the world tell of the Yeti, Big Foot, ghosts, and alien beings. Our culture has similar stories, only with different names.

The most common are the stories of "the little people." Right across the Arctic, the accounts are similar. They are small and elusive. Many have claimed to have caught a glimpse of them.

There are some individuals who claim to have had encounters with them. There are even a few individuals who say they have actually lived with them over a long period of time.

Another common story among hunters is about a large winged creature that visits them in the middle of the night.

They tell of waking up to sounds of large wings and something landing on top of their Igloo. They see shadows of large clawed feet digging into the snow. Their dogs are howling and barking. They hear unearthly sounds from the creature. More flapping of wings and the creature is gone. They check for prints the next morning and find the prints of a large clawed creature on their igloo.

I thought this was an isolated story when I first heard it from my father while we were still living in Nunavik.

But I was surprised to hear almost an identical story from two hunters from Baffin Island. My father's story took place more than 50 years ago. The incident with the two Baffin Island hunters happened recently.

There are enough stories about strange things to fill many books. This is one of the things that makes life so interesting.

There are unexplained mysteries about the world around us that pique our human curiosity and keep us looking for answers.>

Editorial

The power of the womb

It was in July of 1983, during the Inuit Circumpolar Conference's general assembly in Frobisher Bay - as Iqaluit was then known - that ICC President Hans Pavia-Rosing won a resounding round of applause by urging Inuit women to have lots and lots of babies.

Pavia-Rosing explained that to form one nation from Greenland to Alaska, Inuit needed to procreate.

There are many GNWT bureaucrats in Yellowknife whose veins would have burst out of their skulls had they heard those words now.

That's because they believe that Nunavut's birth rate is Nunavut's biggest problem right now. Since the early 1990s, the territorial government's brainiacs have been making increasingly loud noises about the "problem" of Nunavut's rapidly expanding population.

Every time you hear GNWT jargon phrases such as "forced growth in the social envelope," it's when somebody's trying to tell you - without, of course, being honest enough to tell you in so many words - that the NWT's aboriginal residents are having too many babies.

To support this view they'll supply you with mounds of evidence.

They'll tell you that every time a baby is born, new expenses are created for the health system, the school system and the social services system. They'll tell you that every new baby creates a need for a new public housing unit 20 years from now. And they'll tell you that every new baby creates a need for a new job 20 years from now.

That's what they mean by "forced growth" - spending that governments must make to serve the needs of all those young children now entering kindergarten and showing up at nursing stations with runny noses and headaches. It also includes the social assistance and daycare money that governments must give their parents to help feed, clothe and house those children.

Every year, that "forced growth" eats up larger and larger proportions of the territorial government's annual budgets. The GNWT's recent wage and benefit cuts and program reductions have been carried out, in part, to free up more money for these social expenses.

Because of all this, there's been a lot of hand-wringing recently among the whey-faced suburbanites of Yellowknife about the dangers of Nunavut's population "explosion."

For example, CBC's Yellowknife TV station recently aired a documentary on that subject. Their work was balanced, fair and thoughtful. But it still left the impression that Nunavut's biggest problem is that Nunavut residents are having too many babies.

The simplistic corollary that flows from this simplistic assumption is that all those poor, ignorant Nunavut residents just don't know enough about birth control - hence all the recent talk about "family planning."

It's this thinking, however, that's ignorant -not the attitudes of Nunavut residents. Those who urge simplistic family planning campaigns should take a second look at history, and at the real facts demographers are giving us.

Around 1950, Canada's Inuit population was in rapid decline. More Inuit were dying than were being born - many dying of infectious diseases brought from Europe and southern Canada.

But after the federal government installed nursing stations in most Arctic communities, Inuit began to live longer and healthier lives. The infant mortality rare plummetted.

Now, all those people whose lives were saved by modern health care are giving birth to their own children. They have, in fact, been doing so for nearly two generations. And those children are in turn giving birth to even more children.

Demographers call that an "echo" effect - when people born in an earlier baby boom grow old enough to give birth to their own children. It's perfectly natural, healthy, and in the long run, good for society.

Demographers are also telling us that, on average, Nunavut mothers are giving birth to fewer babies anyway. They're doing this by exercising free choice -not because they're being told to do so by a bunch of ham-handed social engineers.

Let's not forget this either: over the past 500 years, North America's aboriginal peoples have been cut to pieces by the effects of contact with Europeans, by devastating disease epidemics, campaigns of mass murder and genocidal war, and by assimilation with conquering Europeans.

Why shouldn't any group of aboriginal people -Inuit included - use the power of the womb to re-establish dominance in their own land. The hand-wringing bureaucrats must never forget who got here first. JB

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