Home page

Text size

E-mail this page

Barbara Clement was flown more than 300 km to Yellowknife from Fort Simpson in mid-March to receive potentially life-saving treatment for her kidney disease. The three-times-weekly dialysis treatment leaves Clement feeling weak, she said.

And right now, she has to go through it alone.

Clement's common-law partner, Peter Hardisty, had to return home earlier this month as the benefits afforded to him as a non-medical escort ran out.

Now, Clement is left to find a place of her own so that she and her family can be reunited.

Until then, Clement is living at the Vital Abel Boarding Home in Ndilo. It is unlikely she will be leaving there any time soon because the waiting list for public housing can be anywhere from one to two years.

Clement won't be eligible to apply for public housing until the middle of next month because current regulations state residents have to be living in Yellowknife for six months.

Clement is also in financial straits as she had to leave her employment with the government in Fort Simpson to come to Yellowknife for treatment. Applications for financial assistance have been unsuccessful.

To compound the issue, if Hardisty and their three children want to come visit Clement, they're looking at a trip that will cost hundreds of dollars each way.

Under current regulations, the health authority allows stays of three weeks for non-medical escorts, after which re-approvals are needed.

The authority is a well-funded entity that needs to focus its measure of success on how well it helps patients, rather than how much money it has saved.

Forcing a solitary lifestyle upon someone who wants nothing more than to be with her family is unfair.

"I was in tears," Clement said. "I want someone to be here with me."

Anyone forced into such conditions could see their mental health affected from not being with the people they love during what very well may be the toughest challenge of their lives.

Specialty health services in the NWT are limited which means people have to travel long distances for treatment. Being away from family support can be as much a detriment to personal health as the condition being treated. This must be factored into health department policy so people don't suffer through stressful treatments alone and afraid.

The call for trained tradespeople is a familiar one in the North. More than a decade ago, when diamond mines Ekati and Diavik came on line, agreements were negotiated that included employment commitments to Northerners, and specifically aboriginal Northerners.

Leah Von Hagen, who was the manager of workforce development for Diavik in those early days, noted that there were difficulties with meeting these commitments.

"With a small population of about 43,000 people in the Northwest Territories, and other industry already in the area drawing on that small population for their workforce, our challenge has been finding people with the necessary skills to work for us."

A dearth of trained tradespeople is not unique to the North. It's a world-wide problem, hence the focus of governments on programs to help develop a skilled workforce. Targeting youth, for example, is one way via Skills Canada.

The Mine Training Society, which turned 10 years old in August, is another way to ensure the right training takes place. And it is taking the right approach - partnership.

Around the time of the society's inception, Education Culture and Employment was operating in a vacuum, with mines having to train workers themselves, with their own programs.

With the partnership approach - which involves industry, the GNWT, and aboriginal governments - industry can identify needs and the right training can take place.

This will prove valuable in the long run, by helping meet the challenge of a predicted increase of need for a skilled workforce by 2017, but also by providing skills to Northerners that they can carry with them.

As Skills Canada notes, people who are employed in the skilled trades and technologies are virtually guaranteed long, productive, and stable careers.

While Aug. 23 is a day that hardly yields a blip on the radar of most Canadians, it should be recognized, without fail, across this great nation of ours.

Black Ribbon Day is a national day of remembrance for the suffering put upon millions of people by the aggressive and superior military powers of a Communist and a totalitarian regime.

It traces all the way back to Aug. 23, 1939, when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed their infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, containing secret protocols to define the territorial spheres of influence Germany and the Soviets would have after a successful invasion of Poland.

For its architects, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, the treaty of non-aggression hid their desire to divide the continent between them on the eve of the Second World War.

The pact survived until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

The deal struck between Hitler and Stalin and forged by its namesakes, foreign ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, led to the people of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland and Romania's Bessarabia region (Moldova) suffering brutal occupations at the hands of the Nazi and Soviet soldiers.

Finland actually turned away its Soviet would-be conquerors, but did lose the Karelia region to the Soviets. During the occupations, hundreds of thousands of people were taken to Siberian labour camps.

The number of generations the pact affected was put on display for the world during the marking of the 50th anniversary of its signing on Aug. 23, 1989.

About two million people joined hands to form a human chain stretching more than 650 km to link the states of Tallin, Riga and Vilnius.

The demonstration became known as the Baltic Way (the Chain of Freedom) and literally forced Mikhail Gorbachev to acknowledge the pact in public for the first time.

Today, with Russia seemingly looking to assert its authority once again, it could be argued the importance of observing Black Ribbon Day has never been higher.

Too often, as the years pass after a major conflict, people start to forget the price paid by so many in the name of freedom.

They also tend to forget, or simply deny, how quickly freedom can be snatched away when the circumstances are right for an aggressive power.

The groundwork of atrocities being committed was well underway when the war finally spilled outside the boundaries of Europe.

Every Nov. 11, we honour the memory of our own brave men and women who gave their lives for freedom, as well as our allies in the States, Britain and France.

We live in an age when numerous countries have nuclear capability and other strive to obtain it.

We hear of the use of chemical weapons in other parts of the world, shudder when told of terrorist attacks, and give thanks for living in a country as safe as ours.

Others believed their freedom was safe, too, until it was taken away and the world as they knew it ceased to exist.

Now, more than ever, it's important to remember the suffering of these victims. While a black ribbon may be symbolic, it speaks volumes to remind the world we remember!

When funding for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was cut by the federal government in 2010, there was outrage in Northern communities and the government was lobbied by aboriginal groups to rethink its decision.

People knew even then the detrimental effects the funding cuts would have on the 100 community-based healing programs across the country that were funded by this organization.

Over the past three years, these grassroots programs that offered support to residential school survivors have been disintegrating around us. Earlier this month, one more program bit the dust.

The Embracing our Human-Nest program, hosted by the Healing Drum Society based out of Yellowknife, offered group counselling sessions throughout the territory. Its demise means the loss of six jobs and the loss of a program that was offered to nearly 1,000 clients since its inception in 2002. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation, meanwhile, is set to close its doors next year.

These program cancellations do not come as a surprise. The foundation has been stretching its one-time funding of $350 million from 1998 until the very end, but endings are never as clean cut as we are initially led to believe.

The federal government set up its residential school clean-up job to be as smooth as possible. It ensured it filled in the blanks in its accounting books, offering settlement payments - Common Experience Payment - to residential school survivors to avoid legal backlash for decades on end. It checked off financial compensation and checked off healing programs through the foundation and then, in 2010, through Health Canada.

But more is needed than that. In a report issued by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, it states that "as payments flow to survivors, they should be received in the context of a healing environment. Community support networks should be established and maintained to maximize the potential benefits of the Common Experience Payment while minimizing its potential negative effects."

While money from Health Canada is still filtering to organizations such as the Healing Drum Society, the Gwich'in Tribal Council and the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation to provide counselling services and community-based support workers, the consistency of continuing programs is critical to healing.

This time, with the termination of Embracing our Human-Nest, it's group counselling, which was a popular means of healing. There were nearly 200 people on the waiting list for the program when it dissolved on Aug. 16. For many who used the program, it was the group dynamic that most helped, sharing stories with others who continue to suffer years after residential schools in this country ceased to exist.

There is no substitute to the grassroots healing programs offered within communities, such as those offered by the Healing Drum Society. The front line workers such as Joe Pintarics, executive director of the society, see the need for these programs and know which ones are working. The disruption of these programs adds to the confusion that survivors feel and shakes the foundation they have so bravely created brick by brick.

Pintarics shakes his head when he recalls Prime Minister Stephen Harper's apology to aboriginal people for the Indian Residential School system in 2008. It calls the more than 100 years of horrific abuse to some students a "sad chapter in our history."

The chapter isn't over. Every page that turns adds more suicide, more lack of parenting, poverty and substance abuse.

The more we learn from these healing programs, the more help can be given to people who need it. Cutting off the support these programs offer is destructive and is a detrimental step backward into the past, erasing any progress made.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper got his pants dirty with the Canadian Rangers in Gjoa Haven last week, lying prone in the dirt with a Korean War-era Lee Enfield rifle for some target practice.

He participated in an Arctic sovereignty patrol with the Rangers as part of Operation Nanook, the annual military exercise involving hundreds of Canadian Armed Forces personnel. Harper shook hands with elders dressed in traditional caribou and seal skin clothing and posed for photographs on the barren landscape.

Earlier last week, in Hay River, he announced $5.8 million in funding for the NWT and Nunavut Mine Training Society's Mining the Future project, which aims to prepare Inuit and aboriginal people for jobs in the mines.

Generally speaking, Harper's Conservative government has been good to the North. A permanent military facility just opened at Resolute, which will support the many Inuit who work with the Canadian Rangers. Ottawa boosted its funding for the Rangers program so another 1,000 Rangers could be hired. There are now more than 5,000 Rangers in 178 patrols, an increase of 25 per cent since 2007.

However, we can't help but wonder if Harper, during his annual tour of the North, has looked at the daily living conditions of the average Nunavummiut. Social indicators in many communities are dismal.

Food security is a dream for many people. The latest food basket comparison from the Nunavut Bureau of Statistics shows the price of a two-litre carton of milk is $7.35 in Gjoa Haven and a one-kg package of pork chops is $15.44. In many communities, paying for the high price of food has a negative ripple effect, resulting in no resources for clothing, shelter and cleaning supplies.

Israel Mablick Sr. of Iqaluit told Nunavut News/North on Aug. 15 that he shares a two-bedroom unit with his wife, his mother, his sister, his nephew and his five children. Many Nunavummiut live in similar deplorable conditions.

Should Canada's stewardship of the North be measured by how many diamonds and minerals can be hauled out of the ground? Or by the strength of its military presence?

At the end of the day, it should be measured by the state of its housing and the physical and mental health of its people.

And that is where the Conservative government is falling short. It is outrageous that the government is spending $620,000 on testing a stealth snowmobile when an 11-year-old boy takes his own life in Repulse Bay, just the latest suicide of several recent tragic events in remote communities. The suicide rate in Nunavut in 2009 was 65 people for every 100,000 residents, startlingly high compared to the national rate of 11.5 suicides for every 100,000 residents. Still, there is little help for those contemplating suicide or the families left behind.

Harper has done well on issues related to a military presence in the Arctic, expanding the Rangers program and creating support for employment and resource development.

Now, it would be nice if he could focus some attention on the basic needs of the average Nunavummiut.

The city is yet again at the top of a long, dark slide peering down through the shady mist at its development dreams.

It knows no better than anyone else what awaits it down there but is jumping in headfirst nonetheless. Thirteen years after swearing off the development game when it was left hanging to dry by its private partners on phases I and II of Niven Lake, the city is seeing opportunities everywhere as the principal architect of a grand scheme.

Granted, there have been recent successes. The city's upscale "waterside residential" development project at Grace Lake is 90 per cent sold, while 70 per cent of the properties at phase VII of Niven Lake have also found buyers.

The danger comes, as always, when the bottom drops out of the market and taxpayers are left holding the bag, as was the case in 2000 when the city was forced to borrow $3.1 million from the territorial government to complete its Niven Lake project.

Last week, administration unveiled a vision for several residential development projects in the city, including an area of land between Taylor Road and Ptarmigan Road and an extension of the Niven Lake subdivision, which could potentially lead to the development of 800 new housing units over the next seven years. Niven Lake Phase VIII would cost $17 million while Ptarmigan Road, with 240 single-family homes and 400 multifamily units, is expected to cost $36 million to develop.

These are ambitious projects to say the least but the city's zeal to dive deeper into the development game is a troubling trend considering the uncertainty that awaits. The influx of 350 workers to clean up Giant Mine has been touted as one group of potential home buyers, but it's difficult to see what else will generate the boom required to fill these homes.

The city points to new mining projects on the horizon but there are no guarantees that even the most likely mines will get built - Fortune Minerals' NICO project near Whati and De Beers' proposed diamond mine at Gahcho Kue.

And if these mines do come to fruition, they won't produce enough jobs to replace those lost when the existing diamond mines, Diavik, Ekati and Snap Lake, begin winding down over the next 10 years. The fact of the matter is Yellowknife's population has been stagnant or slowly declining for the last decade. The Conference Board of Canada, meanwhile, reported a 5.1 per cent drop in the NWT's Gross Domestic Product last year.

This might not faze some private developers but they are better positioned to make that call than bureaucrats at city hall with no personal stake in developing homes and other properties.

This point is demonstrated when one looks to 50 Street where the three derelict properties the city purchased for $975,000 last year sit empty and unused while a so-called smart growth committee ponders what to do with them. No taxes are being collected on them, a fuel tank leak cost another $52,400, and the city will have to pay for their demolition.

It remains to be seen what lofty scheme will be conceived to rehabilitate this land situated between two busy bars that refused to sell to the city. Conceivably, a plan will come at some point but at the end of the day one wonders why the city bought the land in the first place if it didn't have a plan to begin with.

This is one more reason why city hall should leave development to the developers, and let the market determine when and where properties are built.

Deh Gah School in Fort Providence always seems to have some sort of exciting initiative in the works for its students, such as the six-week camp underway at Willow Lake.

Twenty-one students and 10 adults flew to the camp on Aug. 16 and 19. They will not be returning to the community until Sept. 27 or 29.

Some people may think that sending youth out of the classroom and into the bush for six weeks is not a traditional teaching method. It may not be a traditional practice in terms of the modern education system, but it's certainly traditional when the history and culture of the Deh Cho are considered.

But what about all of the subjects the students will be missing? The flip side to that is all of the knowledge the students will be learning that they couldn't be taught properly in a classroom.

All Deh Cho schools incorporate on-the-land camps into their school year. Deh Gah School is taking that one step further with a longer and more isolated camp, ensuring students will have a richer and more meaningful learning experience.

Area leaders often speak about the importance of Deh Cho youth having a strong foundation in their culture, language and history. By knowing who they are and where they come from, the youth can then more successfully live in the modern world. The idea is often referred to as creating youth who are strong like two people.

This camp will give students that firm basis in traditional skills.

The things the students will learn, such as how to make dry fish and dry meat and how to survive on the land, can't be fully explained in a classroom. The isolated nature of the lake also makes it easier to immerse students in Dene Zhatie. If that language is what the adults are speaking, the youth will be more likely to follow the example.

There are also other benefits to teaching in a camp setting. How many parents have wished that they could get their children to spend less time with video games, iPads and cellphones and to drink less pop and eat less junk food? None of those things will be available at the camp.

Six weeks in the bush may sound less like school and more like camping, but the benefits of teaching students in an on-the-land setting can't be underestimated. Hopefully similar models will soon be adopted by other schools in the region.

If there's as much turmoil as I've heard surrounding last week's announcement by Inuvik Gas that it's ending its franchise agreement with the Town of Inuvik, residents need to "keep calm and carry on."

To some extent, I can see why the announcement was confusing. Its wording was perhaps too carefully crafted and didn't explain well what was going on. There's a simple rule in writing that says "write so you can't be misunderstood" that is far easier said than done. This is an example of where that's gone a bit awry.

"There's a lot of confusion from all over town," Coun. Clarence Wood said.

"I was confused by it as well," added Coun. Melinda Gillis.

However, there's not a lot of excuse for the kind of over-reaction that was discussed at last Wednesday's council meeting. If you read the announcement carefully from top to bottom (and perhaps more than once), it's pretty clear the sky isn't falling on Inuvik as winter sets in.

So in a nutshell, the town and the company are letting the current agreement run its course by next year at this time. There will be gas available from Inuvik Gas this winter to heat your home.

In the meantime, the town and Inuvik Gas will see if some kind of a new agreement can be negotiated. The town is also free to consider every option available, and that's what it is doing, said Mayor Floyd Roland.

For the last year or two, Inuvik Gas hasn't been the most popular company in town. That's been even more true this year since energy costs skyrocketed. Now, with the franchise agreement ending, it's time to hold the company's feet to the fire and bargain hard for a new, better deal. If Inuvik Gas can't provide it, maybe someone else can.

Coun. Kurt Wainman made a lot of sense when he said during the meeting last week that the problem is that people aren't reading the announcement with due consideration and then jumping to conclusions.

"People aren't reading the notice properly," he said.

It's one of the problems with modern life. The pace is so fast that oftentimes people aren't spending the time to read and comprehend such information properly and then process it carefully.

A quick glance at popular Inuvik sites such as the buy, sell, trade page will show you the same thing.

I've lost track of the times I've seen someone not read a post properly and then start asking questions that were already addressed in the original post. Upon occasion, I've done it myself, so I'm equally guilty of breezing through things without concentrating decently.

Residents should just take a deep breath and carry on with their normal daily business for the moment.

We welcome your opinions. Click here to e-mail a letter to the editor.