Within hours of Air Canada Jazz announcing its plan to begin daily flights to Edmonton and Calgary, air fares began to fall faster than a rock dropped from the top of Northern Heights.

Canadian North and First Air launched seat sales aimed directly at potential Jazz customers, hoping, we suppose, to let Yellowknife travellers know that they’re not going to roll over just because there’s a new air carrier on the block.

There was plenty of buzz last week over Jazz’s move North and much of the talk was that it will bring a new era of competition to the North.

While Canadian and First Air can say they’re in competition, prices are usually within a penny or two and seat sales magically run at the same time. The planes take off and land within minutes of each other.

The only real difference in choosing which airline to fly comes down to personal preference. Do you prefer sushi or chicken?

Jazz could change all that, as long as you don’t mind paying for bare-bones service.

Lower air fares could get more people flying, but we wonder what the fallout from the new competitive environment will be.

Canadian and First Air have always been strong community boosters.

There is rarely a raffle or a dance that doesn’t include a ticket to Edmonton. Airline banners fly over gala fundraisers, hockey tournaments and more - will that level of support continue over the long haul? Will Jazz be as generous?

The bombing deaths at Giant mine are a black spot on Yellowknife’s history.

Fuelled by hateful rhetoric and violence, Roger Warren planted the bomb that killed nine miners. The fact they were replacement workers doesn’t diminish the fact this was cold-blooded murder.

It may have been heat of the moment, but when a union member protesting delays in Ekati contract talks referred to the Giant murders, the rhetoric was elevated to a dangerous level.

Labour disputes are rife with emotion and words have a way of ratcheting up those emotions.

Union leadership should learn the lessons of the past and make sure all mention of violence is discouraged and discredited.

They’d be better off beefing up efforts to convince territorial and federal governments to outlaw use of replacement workers in labour disputes.

Editorial Comment
Darrell Greer
Kivalliq News

Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI) president Paul Kaludjak would be better served trying to address the problems highlighted by the dismal voter turnout for NTI’s election earlier this month, rather than throwing out the same old tired excuses.

Nice weather may have kept some beneficiaries away, but are we really expected to believe it was the reason only six per cent of those eligible bothered to vote in Baker Lake?

Was warm weather to blame for less than 30 per cent of all beneficiaries casting their ballot for a new first vice-president and vice-president of finance?

Hardly. In fact, we give James Eetoolook full marks for his candid remarks on the turnout being a signal that the majority of beneficiaries are unhappy with the way things are going.

A large part of the maturation process for any culture is when people start to find their voice and, slowly but surely, we’re seeing that in Nunavut.

A growing number of beneficiaries are wondering when they’re going to see all those benefits they heard so much about before division.

While it’s true expectations were too high to begin with, and many goals did not have a realistic time frame attached to them, the fact of the matter is too few Inuit are benefitting from Nunavut.

It’s long been fair game for some leaders to blame the influx of southern workers as the main culprit in holding back Inuit, especially in high-paying jobs.

But more and more Inuit now realize that excuse rings hollow.

As our population becomes more aware, we realize senior management and highly-skilled jobs take years of training and our youth are moving in the right direction.

We’re seeing more graduates every year continuing on to post-secondary education.

It’s a slow process, but we are on the right path.

In the meantime, beneficiaries are getting a pretty good handle on southern terms such as “the old boys club” and “the inner circle” and what they truly mean.

In short, relatively small power bases in terms of the number of people involved wield an amount of power and influence that belies their numbers.

It’s a case of give the electrician a hard time and the plumber, who happens to be the electrician’s cousin, won’t come when your toilet is..., well, you get the picture.

Another word often associated with inner circles is nepotism, which beneficiaries also now understand.

A growing number of people are getting tired of seeing too many jobs that are within reach of the average beneficiary being tossed up into the same family trees.

The low voter turnout shows most beneficiaries are not happy, but they still have one more step to take.

It’s obvious too many have reached the point where they believe it doesn’t matter who they vote for because nothing will change.

But apathy is not the answer. Keep voting for change and change will come.

The next step is to show NTI president Kaludjak he may have been right about the weather - there is a storm cloud of discontent brewing and it may be heading his way.

Editorial Comment
Jason Unrau
Inuvik Drum

The band of Icelandic adventurers who plowed through the snow on the Mackenzie River to Inuvik in three monster trucks this past week was very symbolic as to just how far humans have come in mastering their environment.

Funny how with all their fandangled contraptions and Global Positioning Systems to guide them they still needed a Sahtu trapper to help make it to the Place of Man.

One of the crew members commented that it was his dream to travel in the footsteps of Icelandic explorer Vilhjalmur Steffansson. Perhaps he should have said “drive over the footsteps of Steffansson,” conveniently leaving all the former explorer’s knowledge of how to survive - like the local inhabitants did more than a century ago - firmly buried by the roadside.

This group’s journey - being documented by a filmmaker - is certain to attract future visitors to the region and that’s a good thing. However, it is bankrolled supertourists that have littered Mount Everest with empty oxygen bottles and turned other remote regions of the planet into garbage depots for the rich and tasteless. Let’s hope this stunt isn’t the beginning of a convoy of monster truck wranglers tearing up the Arctic coastline near you.

Yes, catching one’s own food and foraging for fuel to heat one’s cabin have gone the way of the dodo in these parts. Now any old Joe or Jane can cruise in here on a jet plane, hire a cab into town, rent an apartment with all the amenities and get their nourishment at the Northmart.

It’s not a new thought to contemplate, but one worth keeping in mind as concerns about the pipeline simmer. Like it or not, the North is now a part of the modern world and its inhabitants rely on all the same things that most other people who live elsewhere do - heat, a stable electricity supply and food for the kitchen table.

And what have all these necessities brought us? Piles of trash collecting at the landfill, greenhouse gas emissions being spewed into the atmosphere and a 50km pipeline supplying the community with a steady diet of natural gas. Indeed a bubble of dependence has settled on Inuvik.

I remember travelling in Mongolia several years ago. Realizing that I had forgotten to pack a cooking pot (what an explorer!) I asked my driver to stop at a group of sheep herders pulling up camp to see if they had one to sell.

Excited at the prospect of doing business with a foreigner, they rummaged through their things, producing first a battered .22 rifle and then a sheepskin before a pot was located. But what made an impression on me that day was not the austere nature of their camp, but a luxury item that looked so out of place among their miniature horses laden with supplies and Ghengis Khan-era attire.

It was a giant satellite dish on wheels and a diesel generator to which one sad mule was latched. It would seem the group just couldn’t get by without a nightly dose of television.

Bringing it all back to Inuvik, there’s a lot more than cable TV that we here in the North couldn’t get by without. And we’d need more than a mule to pack it all out of here.

Editorial Comment
Roxanna Thompson
Deh Cho Drum

There are numerous sayings about money, many of which apply to the issues surrounding residential school compensation that were raised this week during an information session in Fort Simpson.

“Money can’t buy happiness.”

While money is nice to have and certainly solves some problems, it can’t solve them all.

Irene Fraser, the presenter at the session, was quick to point out that the compensation offered by the government is by no means meant to erase the years of abuse and trauma that many people suffered in the residential school system.

The compensation is supposed to provide a step toward healing, said Fraser.

The problem is that end results are often far different from original intentions.

Almost as tragic as the stories that residential schools created is the fact that the money meant for healing could easily have the opposite effect.

“Money is the root of all evil.”

Fraser shared a number of stories about cases where the money from compensation caused additional abuses. From elder abuse to alcohol abuse, these are things that could happen in the Deh Cho when the common experience payment process, that many people seem to be waiting for, begins and large amounts of money come into the communities.

Anyone who receives a substantial amount of money all at once is bound to have problems if they don’t have a plan.

This is seen all the time in the case of lottery winners who often seem to go from having it made to being worse off than when they started. Sadly, those at the highest risk of misusing the compensation money are probably the same people who were the most traumatized by the schools.

Communities will have to pull together to provide assistance for those who are willing to accept it. Information sessions are a step toward this goal. They introduce people to information they might not have been aware of.

“A fool and his money are soon parted.”

Wherever money is involved there is always someone waiting to take it away and it’s not only the foolish who can fall prey.

There are people who make their living scamming other people out of their money. People posing as lawyers are a concern relating to residential school settlements. Remember that asking questions never hurts and if something looks too good to be true it probably is.

The compensation process will probably be a positive experience for some people. The balancing act will be to ensure the good outweighs the bad for all.

If you haven’t had a chance to acknowledge a social worker yet, don’t worry you still have time.

Social Workers Week runs until March 25. While teachers, nurses, secretaries and other professions get praise heaped on them during their specially appointed days, social workers are often forgotten.

Their job is not an easy one and they deserve our thanks for making the Deh Cho a better place.