The woman behind the questions
While the role of conflict commissioner plays a big part, Anne Crawford says there's much more to her life

Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

NNSL (Dec 14/98) - Long-time Iqaluit resident Anne Crawford might just be the most talked-about lawyer in the Northwest Territories these days.

The civil law practitioner and mother of three was recently called upon to preside over ex-premier Don Morin's conflict of interest hearing. She found Morin guilty of violating territorial conflict guidelines eight times.

While the role of commissioner plays a big part, Crawford says there's much more to her life.

News/North: How long have you lived in Iqaluit?

Anne Crawford: We came to Frobisher Bay in January of 1986.

New/North: Who do you mean when you say "we"?

Anne Crawford: My husband Neil Sharkey. He works for Maliiganik Tukisiiniakvik as a lawyer. He had a job here and I came over and set up private practice.

News/North: Have you always been in private practice?

Anne Crawford: Not always. I articled in Yellowknife for what is now the Peterson, Stang & Malakoe firm and for Ted Richard who is now a superior court judge. I worked for the Metis Nation and I did legal aid work in Dogrib communities in the west for about four years and then came here.

I was in private practice here and then I went to work for the GNWT in the legal director position and then I went to Yellowknife as the director of child welfare.

News/North: How long did you do that for?

Anne Crawford: About two years.

News/North: Did your family go back to Yellowknife?

Anne Crawford: No, Neil stayed here and we did that sort of New York - L.A. thing -- except the tickets are a touch more expensive. We built a house here in 1988 and we've always lived in Apex. I think it was the end of 1989 that I went to Yellowknife but you can't stay married to someone and be separated from them for a long time. It works for a while but as we were getting up to two years, it wasn't going to work.

I came back in 1991 and had a family.

Eleanor -- we call her Ellie -- was born in June of 1993, Margo in December of 1994 and David in September of 1997.

News/North: How much time did you take off when you had your children? Just enough to have them?

Anne Crawford: Yes, basically.

News/North: When were you appointed as the conflict of interest commissioner?

Anne Crawford: Originally there were five commissioners and I was appointed to that in 1992 and a year and a half ago as the sole commissioner.

News/North: When you were appointed, did you ever expect that you would be in this last position that you were in?

Anne Crawford: You can't predict what's going to happen. You have an idea of the full range of what could possibly happen but the amount of time that was required lately wasn't predictable. It takes a pretty big chunk. I sort of estimated that it would take ten per cent of my time, the appointment.

News/North: How long have you been working full-time on this?

Anne Crawford: Between September 12 and November 25, I didn't do anything else. Prior to that, it was taking up lots of my time and since then, maybe a quarter of my time. We're basically finished. My job is to write the report and that's where you express what needs to be expressed and say what needs to be said. After that, it's not really your job any more.

News/North: Because most of your work had to be done in Yellowknife and you make your home here, how hard was it to travel back and forth?

Anne Crawford: It was impossible to travel back and forth because of the limited flights. It would only leave three-day weeks to work so it was impossible. What happened was the Assembly agreed they would pay for my kids' accommodation so we got a little three-bedroom unit and I brought my kids over with me. I paid their airfares and looked after their food and everything else.

My daughter went to school at Mildred Hall in Yellowknife for five weeks. The kids were there with me the whole time except when I was writing the report and they went to my mother's in Edmonton because we were going flat out.

Neil stayed here and he was over for ten days in the middle and we also went to Quebec City one weekend for the Canadian Conflict of Interest Commissioners' Network meeting. It meets once a year and people have an exchange and get caught up on what's happening across Canada.

News/North: Did the inquiry cause upheaval in your family life, having to transplant your children and leave your partner behind?

Anne Crawford: There's an end to all of these things. We were all pretty stressed out at the end but the end was in sight. What were we talking about, seven or eight weeks? I don't need a vote of sympathy.

News/North: Was it a hard job?

Anne Crawford: You have to be very much on your toes all the time. You have to stay alert, you have to be very attentive, you're accumulating an awful lot of information. Every day, your brain is being fed a huge amount of testimony and facts and documentation. It requires real concentration but it's not a huge emotional strain.

News/North: Now that you're back home, what other kinds of things do you do?

Anne Crawford: Family stuff, community stuff, church, office...just like ordinary people. I'm involved with the Elder's Society and their different projects. Living in Apex, we're quite involved in the community there.

News/North: Are you a fairly private person?

Anne Crawford: That's probably true. We've lived here long enough that we have friends and we spend a lot of time visiting friends and having friends visit us. I don't show up at the Legion very often. I think I'm getting old.

News/North: How old are you?

Anne Crawford: I turned 40 during the hearings. I had a good party. I invited no one that was involved in the hearings but everybody from my past time in Yellowknife and we had a party and I completely forgot about the hearings that night.

News/North: Being private, was it hard to be the centre of attention in the hearings and the media?

Anne Crawford: No, I think people are entitled to have opinions about the work I've done. People are entitled to comment, that goes with the territory.

I feel like I did my job. This is what they asked me to do, I did it, I did the best I could, it's somebody else's responsibility when I'm finished.

People in Iqaluit aren't as involved in those kinds of things as they are in Yellowknife. As soon as I got off the plane I felt like it was over with.

News/North: Is this where you wanted to be at 40?

Anne Crawford: I'm not the kind of person that has a goal. I wanted to have kids and that was definitely a plan but I don't have a career aspiration. I don't want to be Prime Minister or anything.