It seems photo opportunities with fuzzy white seals are back in fashion among the holier-than-thou gang of celebrity do-gooders.

First ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and wife Heather Mills-McCartney donned orange survival suits to lounge with harp seal pups on St. Lawrence ice floes. Last week, Brigitte Bardot, the 71-year-old French film star who popularized the seal pup protest back in the 1970s, returned to Canada.

Their goal is to get other countries to boycott Canadian seafood products to pressure the federal government to end the hunt.

However noble they think the cause, the celebrity publicity stunts fail to recognize two important facts.

The first is that the population of seals on the east coast is swelling and threatens struggling fish stocks.

More importantly for us, a cornerstone of Inuit lifestyle is coming under attack - something that could prove devastating to harvesters around Nunavut.

Southerners don’t understand the differences between the east coast seal harvest and what happens here.

At worst, this new campaign could push sealskin prices back 30 years, driving up welfare costs and depressing the territory’s economy.

Inuit harvest seals for food, clothing and to sell skins and raise money for their families.

The December fur auction saw prizes rise to an average of $72.65, with top pelts being sold for $142.50. In 2003, average pelts sold for $44.65.

For harvesters like David Pitseolak and his son Jimmy in Pond Inlet, that extra money meant a lot, helping pay off a new snowmachine and putting food on the table.

Murray Angus, a teacher with Nunavut Sivuniksavut in Ottawa, created the humourous “Save the Veal” poster that caught the eye of Northerners, but has yet to stir much interest in the south. Humour is always a good way to fight hysteria and misinformation, but the message has to get out to a wider audience.

The best way to get that international exposure is to bring Paul and Heather to Nunavut so they can experience Inuit tradition. Nunavut Tunngavik second vice-president Raymond Ningeocheak suggested the trip to news media last week.

Other Inuit leaders have proposed a marketing blitz in Europe. That could cost millions for very little result.

It would be better for the territorial government or NTI to spend a few thousand dollars to fly the McCartneys to Nunavut.

Hordes of media would follow and the message would get out: Inuit hunt seals because they must. It’s a subsistence harvest that should not be tainted by images of pretty white seal pups on an ice floe off Prince Edward Island.

If anyone was wondering why the NWT Housing Corporation should be put under the federal auditor general’s microscope, they need look no farther than Hay River.

There, a $3.4 million, 18-unit seniors housing development has been put on hold - because other projects, in Fort Resolution and Tuktoyaktuk, sit empty.

The problem arose when MLAs began questioning why these other two other projects sit empty. It seems pretty obvious that the two projects were built without any understanding of the communities’ need.

As a result, a $450,000 housing corporation contribution toward the project has been put on hold and will now need cabinet approval before it can go ahead.

Jeff Anderson, acting president of the housing corporation, has tried to weasel out of responsibility, saying you can’t consider the project is on hold because there’s no final agreement. That’s just hot air because there’s a sign in Hay River boasting the project that bears the housing corporation’s logo. A commitment was made and now the rug has been pulled from underneath the Hay River seniors by the corporation and its political masters.

MLAs wondered whether there was a demand for the Hay River housing, but all they had to do was ask the right people. The seniors group behind the development has expressions of interest from 48 people. Most importantly, they have raised $400,000 toward the project. And most of the project will be covered by a mortgage, repaid by rents.

They also have to consider the fact Hay River is remarkably different than either Fort Res or Tuk.

Sure, the NWT Housing Corp. has a lousy reputation - from a failed experiment to sell pre-fab housing in Alaska to its inability to collect rent. Plans to covert hundreds of pipeline construction housing units into modular homes in communities continue to generate some skepticism.

The real question was what planning did the housing corporation do before committing $450,000 to the Hay River project? If the numbers add up, clear this hurdle.

The whole episode smacks of politics. MLAs are trying to hold the corporation accountable for past mistakes by penalizing other people.

Fix the housing corp. - fine.

Just let the Hay River seniors build. This is just the kind of development that politicians will line up in front of to have their photographs taken after it’s complete.

Editorial Comment
Darrell Greer
Kivalliq News

An old voice from the past is trying to be heard again.

About a decade ago, lobbying was in full swing across the territory to name the future capital of Nunavut.

The regional centres led the way, but while leaders in Iqaluit worked feverishly to win over the population on the idea, many in Rankin Inlet were turned off by a successful campaign of fear mongering.

The group opposed to Rankin being Nunavut's capital were, for the most part, simply looking out for their own interests in turning the community against the idea.

However, they launched a successful anti-capital campaign by stoking the fires of fear.

Residents were told if their nice little community was made the capital, the doors would be open for the drug pushers and bootleggers.

It wouldn't be long before Rankin would be overrun with despair, with only southerners and criminals cashing in.

The tactic worked, and it wasn't long before the lure of high-paying jobs, economic growth and badly needed infrastructure was overshadowed by the image of a population gone wild on booze, drugs and criminal behaviour.

Let's be honest - as long as there's people willing to buy, booze and drugs will always be a problem.

The dealers and the booze peddlers will find a way to stock their shelves, capital or no capital.

Can those same people honestly say there's no problem with booze or drugs in Rankin today because the community said no to the capital?

Of course not. Rankin has the same problems every community does.

When an RCMP officer tells hamlet council every month that 80 or 90 per cent of their calls were liquor related, that's no different than the majority of police officers in the majority of Canadian towns.

So, fast forward to 2006 and the community meetings held in Rankin, Arviat and Chesterfield Inlet to discuss plans for the road to Manitoba project - and here comes that voice again.

Numerous people raised the issues of booze, drugs and unsavoury type characters using the road to spread their evil into our communities.

And, yes, there will be some who will try if, indeed, the road is ever built.

But they represent a tiny percentage of everyone who will use the road.

For most, the road will mean reduced shipping costs resulting in lower prices at the checkout counter.

Tourism will, in all probability, take a dramatic upswing as southerners take advantage of the road to finally go on the trip high air fares have prevented for so long.

Nothing in life is perfect and there is always risk with change.

But before you get turned off the Manitoba project by horror stories about what might happen, take the time to think about what you know will happen if the day ever comes when the road is open.

If you weigh all the issues evenly, you may soon come to realize the new direction the road will take us in is a positive one - even if there are a few bumps along the 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.

With regards to the article in Nunavut News/North titled, “Gold mine fate now with Ottawa,” March 13, there is no time limit on how long Indian and Northern Affairs Minister Jim Prentice has to review Miramar’s Doris North gold project. The only other mine to pass through this project certificate phase since the creation of the territory was Tahera’s Jericho diamond mine. It did so in roughly 90 days.

The story “TB program ‘working’ despite increase in cases,” in Nunavut News/North, March 13, should have read that children who are infected with TB have two to three times the risk than adults do of developing TB disease. We apologize for any confusion the error may have caused.

In the March 6 edition of Nunavut News/North, in the story “A Who’s Who in Kimmirut,” the photo should have been attributed to Catherine Bechard. We apologize for the error.

On page 25 of the March 13 edition of News/North, Richard Elleze was incorrectly identified in the story “Culture Shock.” News/North apologizes for any confusion or embarrassment this may have caused.