A justice system injusticeYellowknifer - Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Although a piecemeal combination of circumstances led to a 19-year-old woman's nearly two-week lockup in RCMP cells recently, what really underlies those circumstances is an inequity that gives men better treatment than women while in jail awaiting court dates.
Near the end of February, Tamara Simpson was arrested, charged with trafficking and held in RCMP cells in Yellowknife for 12 straight days because, even though the majority of court cases are heard in Yellowknife, the city doesn't have a women's jail.
Women who are remanded and awaiting court appearances in Yellowknife must either be flown to and from the women's jail in Fort Smith or appear by video. In some cases, particularly in the arraignment phase, female prisoners are lodged in barren cells at Yellowknife RCMP headquarters under 24-hour lockdown where the lights are never dimmed, visitors or phone calls are not permitted aside from lawyers, and there is no window or pillow. The cells have water, a toilet, a blanket and a mattress and those who stay longer than two days and are expected to stay longer, have an opportunity to shower.
While this may appear to be an unfortunate aspect of the justice system, it's a lot more than that, and here's why. If a man is arrested and charged in Yellowknife for the identical crime, his holding cell is at the North Slave Correctional Centre where he can watch TV, access recreational activities and the outdoors, have visitors and does not have to endure the stress of boarding planes for court dates.
The current situation violates the right to equal treatment before the law, and the territorial government is obligated to do something about it.
The women's facility was built in Fort Smith in an effort by legislators to spread the wealth of infrastructure among communities. This is all fine and good but becomes a game of political football when cases are before the courts in Yellowknife where almost all of the other institutional elements of the NWT justice system are located.
Thus, lengthy stays for women in RCMP cells, such as Simpson's, or that of an 18-year-old who last year spent five days in cells, or the 21-year-old women who spent 21 days between Yellowknife and Inuvik awaiting court appearances in 2008. Men do not have to suffer this indignity and privation so it's a wonder the Department of Justice allows it to continue.
The situation seems a perfect recipe for a human rights case. It appears doubtful the territorial government could claim hardship - even in the midst of making tough budget choices - when confronted with its duty to accommodate both sexes equally.
Hopefully, it won't come to that. Hopefully, the GNWT comes to recognize that allowing women to languish in RCMP cells for days on end is wrong and justice won't be served until a proper remand centre for women is established in Yellowknife.
Great game, ugly nightEditorial Comment by Darrell Greer
Kivalliq News - Wednesday, March 23, 2016
It was surreal.
That's the only word to describe being on the ice for the First Air Avataq Cup final between the Rankin Miners and the Coral Harbour Islanders, and feeling like Coral was the home team.
If I was forced to guess how many of the fans were cheering for Coral, I'd say 75 to 80 per cent.
And there were times the crowd was downright nasty towards both teams.
Cheering when a player gets injured and is bleeding on the ice? Really?
I was involved with every Avataq Cup as an official and there were years the fans were as divided as the players over the outcome.
And some years were far more intense than others.
The first time Iqaluit sent a team to the Avataq, they had the misfortune of playing a lesser Rankin team that was already eliminated from the playoffs in their final round-robin game.
The Rankin team had one goal in mind and it wasn't to win a hockey game.
A handful of players did everything they could to goad members of the Iqaluit team into a fight, so they would be ejected and unable to play in the playoffs.
Others weren't that nice and were deliberately trying to injure Iqaluit players until, one by one, they were all tossed out of the game.
It was nasty but the vast majority of the Rankin crowd was not impressed.
The arena grew eerily quiet when an Iqaluit player was illegally body checked or challenged to fight.
Many in the crowd were embarrassed by the Rankin team's behaviour and their silence showed it.
The next day, when Iqaluit played the main Rankin squad, the crowd cheered so loudly for the hometown team you couldn't hear yourself think on the ice.
Perhaps the most intense rivalry throughout the Avataq's run featured Rankin's Miners and Huka Inuks between 2009 and 2011.
The teams asked no quarter of each other, and they gave none.
The truth of the matter is there was no love lost between the two teams.
It was also an interesting dynamic in the crowd during that rivalry.
Divided almost 50-50, the fans were as invested in the outcome as the teams were.
Yet, for all the competitiveness during those years, things never felt ugly.
And as awesome of a championship game as we were treated to this year between Coral and the Miners, the mood in the arena was ugly.
Make no mistake, there were feelings deeply hurt by some comments this year.
Ugly is not a word I'm used to using when describing the mood at the Rankin arena nor, thankfully, is it a mood that manifests itself very often in our grand old barn.
It would be a crying shame if the same mood were to launch the inaugural Terence Tootoo Memorial in 2017.
The strangest thing about it is that the Miners were treated like you may have expected when they were a hockey juggernaut, demolishing almost every team in their path.
Let's be honest, everyone loved to boo the Gretzky-led Oilers in their heyday, except Edmonton fans.
But that hasn't been true of the Miners for the past four or five years now.
It was a strange - some would say surreal - old night in the barn, and not one I look forward to revisiting anytime soon.
Mental-health care mazeNorthwest Territories/News North - Monday, March 21, 2016
To the east of the NWT, Nunavut's premier Peter Taptuna has declared suicide a crisis in his territory. To the south, a northern Manitoba First Nation has declared a state of emergency after seeing six suicides and 140 attempts in one two-week period in March.
Here at home, it's common knowledge that many people - especially youth - struggle with mental-health issues. According to the most recent NWT Health Status report published in 2011, youth ages 15 to 24 have a suicide rate of 3.9 per cent per 10,000 - the highest of any age group in the territory.
News/North told the story last week of a mother struggling with this very issue in Fort Smith.
She took her daughter to the health centre multiple times because she had begun cutting herself and talking of suicide. It wasn't until she had attempted suicide three times that health-care providers in the community told the family that not only are there community wellness workers and counsellors living in Fort Smith, but youth can be referred to Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton for long-term mental-health treatment.
Why is it that nobody told this family about the resources in Fort Smith? Why did she have to be medevaced out three times - much more expensive than a passenger plane ticket for a voluntary in-patient stay - before she was finally referred to an Edmonton hospital?
The health department was purely reactionary in providing health care to this teen. At no point did a health-care worker offer a proactive measure to help this girl - she was repeatedly medevaced and sent home with more prescriptions and higher dosages of existing prescriptions after multiple suicide attempts, despite the fact she gave her mother and nurses at the health centre ample warning that this was something she was planning to do.
While the department is currently working on action plans and strategic frameworks to address youth mental health, there is one solution that seems obvious - create a user-friendly interactive pathfinder that families can browse on the health department website. This pathfinder could display options available to people based on the information they input.
For instance, if somebody is struggling with depression, they can type that in, and if they are in Fort Smith, the website will give them a step-by-step guide to accessing the wellness counsellors in the community. It could also let people know of any programs or services available at municipal and federal levels.
To be fair, there is no jurisdiction in the world that has figured out how to tackle mental-health issues and suicide. If there were, we'd surely be looking to them for blueprints.
But this family decided to share the details of their own experience with the NWT health-care system in order to demonstrate just how hard it can be to get a nurse or doctor to intervene in a meaningful way in this territory when somebody is threatening to hurt themselves.
Not to mince words - the system as it is now is labyrinthine. Let's at least give people a road map.
Sacrificing caribou grounds takes pro-development too farNunavut/News North - Monday, March 21, 2016
An announcement of the Government of Nunavut's change in position on protection of caribou calving grounds not only took those assembled at a Nunavut Planning Commission meeting March 7 by surprise, it generated shock in other quarters.
Objections from the Kivalliq Wildlife Board were quick, with president Stanley Adjuk swiftly sending a letter addressed to all MLAs denouncing the government's new position.
The Nunavut Wildlife Management Board March 16 released its position on the protection of caribou and sensitive caribou habitat, calling for full area protection for caribou calving and post-calving grounds (which include key access corridors leading to and from the calving grounds).
Full area protection includes the prohibition of industrial activities, including mineral, oil and gas exploration and development, construction of transportation infrastructure and related activities, the board stated. This position carries considerable weight, considering that the mandate of the territory's wildlife management board is set out in Article 5 of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement.
Premier Peter Taptuna has made it clear from the time he began his term as leader that he is pro-development. And so he should be. It is his role to help create economic activity in Nunavut, to create jobs for Inuit and other residents, and to send signals to industry that Nunavut is open for business.
That is a position we support and that even his detractors acknowledge. "The Nunavut Wildlife Management Board would first like to state that it is not against responsible industrial development. However, the board is of the view that there must be an appropriate balance between development and protection of wildlife and wildlife habitat," the statement begins.
The quote captures the essence of the issue. It is a balancing act but we believe it is not an unrealistic desire to want both economic development and protected caribou populations.
Iqaluit-Sinaa MLA Paul Okalik, soon after resigning from his positions in cabinet, was quick to point out that there is plenty of room within the territory for responsible development.
"According to the plans as they are today, six per cent of the territory makes up about the total calving grounds for caribou in our own territory. That leaves another 94 per cent of the entire territory for development," Okalik said in the legislative assembly.
Taptuna has said that protection of calving grounds would spell the end to consideration of the proposed Manitoba-Kivalliq power project. The Kivalliq Wildlife Board disagrees, saying proponents could apply for exemptions.
We are having a hard time understanding why Taptuna is expending political capital on these issues.
With initial estimates of more than $900 million, and better options to solve the territory's electricity generation problem available, a hydro line to the Kivalliq region from Manitoba has a slim chance of ever going forward.
Likewise, proposing the sacrifice of cherished caribou, a hallmark of traditional lifestyles, for industrial interests, when so much other land is available, does more harm than good.
Silver lining in death of headframe Weekend Yellowknifer - Friday, March 18, 2016
Make not doubt about it, Con Mine's Robertson Headframe is an iconic piece of the Yellowknife skyline. Visible from many kilometres away from all points on the compass the headframe stands as a marker for Yellowknife itself.
Soon boaters, pilots, snowmobilers and snowshoers will have to rely solely on compass and GPS to make their way back into the city from Yellowknife Bay, as most do already. Like most pieces of recently retired industrial infrastructure the headframe, though striking from afar, is essentially industrial scrap metal.
Unless some benevolent millionaire is going to step up to the plate and cover the costs associated with reclaiming and preserving the headframe as an historical artifact -- and none are forthcoming -- people should not bemoan the loss of the headframe too greatly.
Iconic, yes. A work of art? Definitely not. It needs a new paint job, the roof is leaking, and its single-purpose nature limits its usability as something other than an enormous marker in the sky.
Its destruction is part of the land reclamation plan for the mine site and it seems nothing will prevent that plan from being carried through to its completion.
This is, in at least one way, a good thing. That Con Mine would go through its productive life cycle with its owners seeing complete land reclamation through to the end is how mining should be carried out in the North and everywhere.
Its toppling will be a sad reminder that Yellowknife's gold mining roots are fast become a blip in our collective rear view mirror but its razing is a moment to celebrate as well - what the mine didn't become. No monumental environmental and financial disaster that severely impacted the well-being and trust of First Nations in the surrounding area.
Yellowknife was built on mining and it would serve us well to remember that. But Yellowknife's future is not tied to the headframe, and holding on too dearly to what has past no matter the cost was never in anyone's interest.
Police can't build trust by shielding bad apples Weekend Yellowknifer - Friday, March 18, 2016
Justice may be blind but the trust people have in their police force should not be.
That trust appears to have been broken in the case of former Yellowknife RCMP officer Chris Kosmenko, who, according to a report with the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, lied to gain entry to a family's home he had no legal right to enter.
Kosmenko told social services there were unsupervised children in a home after arguing with the father of a teenage boy he was seeking to arrest. The father wouldn't let the officer into the home, saying the boy was not there, which, according to the report, was true. The officer, acting in disbelief or simply out of spite, called social services to report that children were alone in the home and possibly in danger even though another officer could see an adult was present through a window.
The family sued for the invasion into their privacy, eventually settling for $24,000 in damages.
Whether the officer was ever disciplined for this flagrant abuse of power the public apparently will never know. That's because the RCMP refuse to provide any information on the case of any kind. We do know, from the family's lawyer, that Kosmenko has since been promoted to corporal and is now serving in Calgary.
This is not a mere personnel matter. Police officers are public figures by the simple fact that they have been entrusted with powers ordinary citizens do not enjoy. When that power is abused by individual officers the RCMP has a duty to explain what happened and what steps are being taken to ensure it doesn't happen again.
As city defence lawyer Peter Harte notes, RCMP officers in the North by and large perform their duties admirably well. He was addressing a Statistics Canada survey that found NWT residents are less trustful of police than their southern counterparts.
Alas, the RCMP's choice to close ranks around a few bad apples risks sabotaging its efforts to rebuild that trust.
Home-built solutionDeh Cho Drum - Thursday, March 17, 2016
What's to be done about the Northwest Territories' housing crisis?
Across the territory, there are 800 people on the waitlist for public housing. According to Caroline Cochrane, the minister responsible for the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation, all those people are homeless.
In an effort to curb some of that figure, the NWT Housing Corporation has been hiring companies to import modular homes from elsewhere in Canada.
While those companies doing the importing are from the North, the homes themselves are pre-built elsewhere instead of being constructed in the North.
That, according to Cochrane, is because importing allows the government to save money.
However, some MLAs see modular homes as having an unacceptable impact on the economy.
A lack of consultation with communities has only added fuel to the fire.
Now, Nahendeh MLA Shane Thompson is determined to hear what the region has to say on modular homes.
Thompson pushed the issue in the legislative assembly on March 3, and has since been in contact with some of the leaders in the Nahendeh to get their input on the situation.
He feels importing modular homes undermines local economies. In the legislature, Cochrane said importing modular homes costs the government 30 per cent less than constructing stick-built homes would. It seems clear that when it comes to the North, it is always cheaper to import.
That's because the cost of bringing in materials and hiring builders to construct homes locally will likely always be higher than bringing in pre-built homes.
Additionally, the NWT's current economic situation can lead to short-term thinking. It prompts the government to put on blinders and in that respect short-term cost reductions can look very attractive.
However, Thompson is right that the long-term impacts of importing homes could harm the NWT's economy.
The fact that the North needs homes is indisputable. But alongside that, it needs jobs, some economic presence for workers to take advantage of, some method for the 800 people who are currently homeless to get their feet under them. By allowing construction of stick-built homes at a higher cost, the government would provide a much-needed stimulant to the economy. The effects of that would go far and beyond the current economic slump.
A little extra money toward home-built solutions is not the worst idea. Despite tight economic times, nothing stimulates an economy like an increase in jobs. The effects will not be seen right away but in the end the NWT would emerge stronger, with small communities that are stable.
One can only hope the government will heed that feedback and consider alternative solutions.
Now is the time for assessmentInuvik Drum - Thursday, March 17, 2016
The Inuvialuit Regional Corporation sent a letter to six federal departments last week calling for a Regional Strategic Environmental Assessment, essentially a massive and comprehensive version of what companies have to do before they're granted permits to develop land and water resources.
Now, as a reporter, I'm generally skeptical of buzzwords like capacity building, knowledge-based and strategic.
While bureaucracy is certainly better than utter chaos, the process can be clunky, long and expensive, paying already-overpaid government employers for moving paper around. That being said, despite being replete with its own buzzwords, the assessment proposed by the IRC is a different beast.
The argument presented by the various game councils, community corporations and IRC chair Duane Smith is there are gaps in the current knowledge that need to be filled and that there appears to be an appetite at the federal level to work more closely with indigenous peoples in the Arctic to develop it responsibly. The letter also presents the case for doing it now, while industrial activity is virtually non-existent in the area.
This last bit is perhaps the aspect of this plan that makes the most sense. In Germany's family-owned business system, when times get tough, they don't lay off workers and close up shop. Instead the owners invest their own money -- they keep people on to clean up the factory and they implement training programs. When the economy picks back up again, they are ready to hit the ground running, with happy, better-trained workers who feel some loyalty to the company.
Obviously there is not a perfect correlation here, but the parallels are interesting. A Regional Strategic Environmental Assessment would likely employ a lot of people on many levels -- from government scientists to the people hired to take them out on the land.
It would contribute to the bank of knowledge about the region that could then be accessed by anyone looking to work in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, which would be valuable to everyone.
Doing it while industrial activity is quiet not only makes practical sense, it makes -- dare I say it -- strategic sense because those doing the studies wouldn't be rushed or directed by any specific oversight.
Bureaucracy may largely be a make-work project, which can be problematic for jurisdictions looking to cut ballooning costs. But this proposal is the best kind of make-work initiative for people on the ground and, in this case, on the water, too.
