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Monday, July 21, 1997 Who's in charge?
Now that the gender ratio question has been dealt with, Nunavut has turned to the issue of how to elect its top politician. Some want all voters to have a say through an election. Others prefer the existing system in the NWT, in which MLAs pick one of their own.
Lost in the debate so far is the fact that the premier does not serve in isolation. Direct election with a party system may leave a premier with a mandate in conflict with the rest of the assembly. Without a party system, there could be no mandate at all.
Similar problems arise with the selection of cabinet and the role of party politics. Sometimes the big picture is more important than the details.
We certainly aren't confident that the government's decision to privatize translation services is a good one. At least not at this time.
With eight official languages in the North, we can ill afford to lose a government service that is not guaranteed to be picked up by the private sector.
The driving force behind so many official languages is one of cultural preservation -- not just ensuring that people who exclusively use such languages as North Slavey and Inuktitut have access to government information, but to foster and nuture the use of the languages amongst the people of the North.
What the government has done, essentially, is off-load the responsibility for the preservation and proliferation of the languages to the private sector.
The government says it made the decision to privatize translation services at the request of aboriginal groups. However, we have doubts as to whether that actually happened. In fact, Dene Nation vice-chief Gerald Antoine said his people and their representatives weren't even consulted with prior to the government's privatization plan.
Further, the North's language commissioner is questioning the move, wondering why the government wants to "reinvent the wheel when the wheel is already here."
Regardless, the government, in this instance, has a duty to protect all the languages, especially when there isn't a mature language translation industry entrenched in the North.
The other factor is cost and the minister responsible for the language bureau, Charles Dent, says no money will be saved by privatizing the service. The move could end up costing us even more.
This is one decision the government should strongly consider reversing before the progress the North has made linguistically is threatened or destroyed.
Should the feds be worried? It seems that Kyle Whiting of Fort Simpson has been updating the good citizens of that community on the Chiapas insurgency in Mexico.
If you recall, the indigenous people of Chiapas started an armed protest that resulted in brutal suppression by the Mexican army.
Admittedly there is a degree of tension between the federal government and the Deh Cho First Nations, but surely it hasn't come to armed insurrection. Over the summer, perhaps someone could do a presentation on Mahatma Gandhi.
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