Carolyn Sloan
Northern News Services
Published Monday, September 29, 2008

NUNAVUT - After 24 years, former Nunatsiaq MP Peter Ittinuar has returned to politics as Nunavut's Green Party candidate in the upcoming federal election.

Peter Ittinuar

Last week, Ittinuar announced that he had finally decided to run, though it was a choice he had been debating over the last year given his commitments to his family and his position as a land claims negotiator for the Government of Ontario.

"Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party, asked me to run in this riding about a year ago and I had issues with that, frankly," he said. "The real reason at the heart of why I'm running is I think people up here really need help and I don't think the current government is approaching how the federal government should help Nunavut in as broad a scope as they could be."

A former journalist and professor at the University of Ottawa, Ittinuar became the first Inuk member of parliament when he ran as an NDP candidate in 1979. He served two terms representing the electoral district of Nunatsiaq, which later became the Nunavut riding. In 1982 he crossed the floor to join the ruling Liberals when the party expressed its support for the creation of Nunavut.

"I love Nunavut," he said. "It's my homeland and I had some hand in creating it. I had some hand in getting Inuit into the constitution. When I crossed the floor from the NDP to the Liberals, it was specifically for a trade on the process for dividing the Northwest Territories for boundary and so forth, which kind of, in some ways, laid some of the foundation for the creation of Nunavut."

Nearly 30 years after his first federal campaign, Ittinuar said he now has the wisdom and the skills as a negotiator to his advantage.

"I was 29 the first time - I'm 58 now," he said. "The implementation of the Nunavut land claim is something that has to be paid attention to by an MP from here."

See Candidates Forum page 23 for more election coverage.