Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

IQALUIT (Aug 24/98) - February 15, 1999.

That's the tentative date that voters in Nunavut will head off to the polls and elect the first ever Nunavut legislative assembly.

But, a tremendous amount of work still has to be done before voters get to mark their ballots.

According to Joshie Teemotee Mitsima, Nunavut's deputy chief electoral officer, now that the 19 electoral boundaries and the returning officers have officially been named, the final steps of planning can get under way.

The returning officers begin arriving in Iqaluit today to begin training and Mitsima says that "some will require all of the training and for some it will be a refresher." He says

that finding 19 qualified, bilingual officers with enough time to run an election was a difficult task. Even the most veteran of the returning officers have quite a bit of new information to learn before they return home, says Mitsima.

Many of the changes include revisions in the way electors can vote. In order to reduce the number of citizens voting by proxy and to present a second option to advance polling, the new act allows for people to vote by mail-in ballot and to vote in the office of their returning officer -- tentatively from February 1-12.

"There are a lot of isolated locations and people are always travelling because of their jobs," says Mitsima. These changes may also provide a solution to the problem of getting students, incarcerated citizens and people in outpost camps to vote.

Once their training session is complete, the officers are scheduled to return home

and start preparing for enumeration, scheduled for October 1-8.

"They'll return, hire an assistant, hire and train enumerators and come up with a preliminary list of electors by late October or early November."

Following enumeration, the Issue of Writ for the first Nunavut Election is expected to come from David Hamilton, the NWT's chief electoral officer, sometime in early January. The writ kicks off the candidates' campaigns and officially launches the election.

"Basically, the writ allows people to know that an election is happening and the time period of it," says Mitsima, who further explains that under the Elections Act, 45 days must pass from the day the writ is issued to the date the election is held.

Glen McLean, Mitsima's counterpart in the west, says another crucial change has been made concerning candidates.

"A contribution to a candidate's campaign has to be from the jurisdiction in which they are running," says McLean. He explains that the stipulation is a federal one and holds true in all of Canada's provinces and territories.

Citing $750,000 as a total rough estimate of the cost of the Nunavut election, McLean says the western election will ring in at approximately the same figure.

"That covers travel costs, the payments of election officials and any interpreters that the communities might use."

At the conclusion of Nunavut's election, the clerk of the legislative assembly and the interim commissioner of Nunavut have a period of time to declare the new assembly valid.

On April 1, 1999, the new government begins to sit and cabinet will then be appointed.

Mitsima is excited about that day despite all of the stress that goes along with his job.

"I've never run an election before for a government that does not exist," he said.