Affirmative Action In Nunavut: Good, Bad, and Ugly
I’ve been engaged in an interesting debate with some folks in Nunavut who feel that there’s something “racist” about the notion that a post-colonial society might need to take special measures to redress the imbalance between former colonizers and the formerly colonized in the government workforce.
Prior to the creation of Nunavut, the eastern Arctic was run by the Government of the Northwest Territories, based in Yellowknife. Inuit formed a tiny minority of the NWT’s population, but occupied most of its land (and a good deal of its mineral wealth). So decisions on the development their land, the education of their children, the delivery of their health care, the use of language in their hamlets, and the governance of their communities were being made by the large majority of non-Inuit who made up the NTW legislature.
Inuit make up about 85% of the population of their territory. But they staffed a tiny percentage of positions within the GNWT, nearly all at the administrative and secretarial levels. It was argued that most Inuit didn’t have the education or experience for more senior employment, and that was partly true: but of course, since Inuit didn’t control the system, there was nothing they could do about creating an education system that would fix that. Undereducated, so can’t get government employment; under-represented in government, so can’t improve education system. One of those ptarmigan-and-egg situations.
Even educated and qualified Inuit had a hard time finding employment in government.
“Qualified” means possessed of the skills, knowledge and attitudes required to do a specific job. Qualifications are usually one of two types: “Screen” (which means essential - the candidate MUST have it) or “Rated”, which means it’s desirable - the candidate’s level will be assessed against that of the other applicants.
The notion of “qualified” was worked against Inuit in Nunavut in a few ways. Screen criteria were sometimes set unnecessarily high. Note that I said SOMETIMES. No one can disagree that an accountant MUST have a CGA, or a Nurse MUST have recognized certification. But one point I read a Program Officer job description that required a university degree. Useful and desirable? Yes, certainly. Essential? Probably not, depending on the actual function. Certainly at the point in time, it was a clear signal that “No Inuit Need Apply”.
Staffing actions also failed to recognize other skills or knowledge that might have given Inuit an employment advantage. For example, the ability to speak Inuktitut is ESSENTIAL if you’re delivering front line service to older Inuit, especially in the communities. But that wasn’t always acknowledged.
The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement sought to redress that through Article 23, probably the most widely misunderstood part of the Claim, both IN government and by the public. It’s a bit more complicated than “THOU MUST HIRE INUIT”. It requires that all Federal and territorial departments prepare Inuit Employment plans aimed at 85% Inuit employment. But these plans were to represent more than just hiring quotas: the Claim specifies that they also involve comprehensive and long term pre-employment plans and pre-employment training plans. Pre-employment plans were to involve a review of position descriptions and competency analyses, elimination of false screen requirements, and determination if there were any unfair barriers to Inuit employment. (For instance, there were originally no requirement in place that jobs should be advertised bilingually). The pre-employment training plans were to involve an in-depth assessment of needs, a labour market analysis to determine where the major gaps were, and the development of programs to address those gaps.
The idea was good, and the approach was comprehensive. But that critical labour market analysis was never carried out (one of the first of many instances of the Feds - in this case, the Liberals - simply ignoring their obligation). And so most “Inuit Employment Plans” ended up simply being numerical targets.
And that doesn’t work. Engineering a major shift in the demographic breakdown of a territorial government is a HUGE task, one that would realistically require a generation of retooling the education system, development of a wide range of training programs, and slow, carefully monitored transition. If the federal and territorial governments had actually committed themselves to that process in good faith, things might have happened. Instead, both the Feds and GN simply set quotas, failed to meet them, shrugged, set new quotas, failed to meet them, shrugged, set new quotas…repeat ad nauseam.
Fast forward to today.
The Good: a new Education Act is in the works, a new Adult Learning Strategy is in place, and levels of Inuit education and school completion are rising.
The Bad: At least ten major third party and internal studies have accurately said that achieving representative levels of Inuit employment is going to require a massive, long term commitment of funding for education, training and transition. The best and most comprehensive analysis, by Justice Thomas Berger, was submitted to the Federal Government, and has been, essentially, shelved. Then Minister of Indian Affairs Jim Prentice felt it was “interesting”, but that “more study was needed”.
The Ugly: Anger among Inuit in Nunavut is rising. These are folks who traded away their land for a series of federal commitments which are simply being ignored. Levels of Inuit employment have actually fallen in some areas. The Feds have ignored the Auditor General’s direction to review and address their implementation obligations. At the community level, local people remember the promises that were made, but see non-Inuit bureaucrats being hired from the South while unemployment in their hamlet rises - and they’re getting angry. So is NTI, the organization that represents Inuit in the implementation of the Claim.
If representative levels of Inuit employment are going to be achieved, both the governments and NTI have to realize that they’re not talking about a five or ten year process. Becoming a Deputy Minister or a Senior Policy Advisor takes a southern bureaucrat (who probably has a Master’s degree in public administration) a decade or two of experience to achieve – it’s nonsense to think a “trainee” can acquire that knowledge in two years. So how to bridge that gap?
• Make “Beneficiary Status” a rated criterion, rather than a screen criterion, and award points for it during a hiring action: but ensure that all applicants meet the mandatories – otherwise they don’t get interviewed.
• STOP doing what too many departments are doing - hiring unqualified people to satisfy an IEP, or ignoring certain critical job requirements.
• Identify the long term problems that are limiting the number of qualified Inuit available on the labour market, bite the bullet, and start taking long term steps to address them. The Berger report had a lot to say about that; so do studies by Abele, Kulchiski, the RCAP, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and others.
• Inuit organizations should stop blindly applying political pressure to meet the 85% level in an unrealistic timeframe, and commit to a process of joint, long term planning and advocacy, in partnership with the GN, to get Canada back to the negotiating table.
But in the eyes of some of the folks I was debating with, all this begs the larger question. Does the proactive attempt to staff the Government of Nunavut with a representative level of Inuit represent “racism”?
I have my own thoughts (surprised?) But let’s hear yours. And please keep it civil.
Greetings from Down Under!
“Racism” is hardly an appropriate category for the Nunavut experiment in self-government (let’s bracket the latter term for now–I’m not wholly comfortable with it, but it gives a general sense of what I mean).
Nunavut is the result of two parallel processes–a land claim and a linked demand for a new territory. The place is 85% Inuit, and it was patient Inuit who, over many years, achieved (in part) their aim. But for eventual success, the feds need to live up to their commitments.
The Berger Report of 2006 should be required reading for anyone who wants to offer an opinion on this. Nunavut is right now a basket case, with a suicide rate 11 times the national average, a land of poverty, drugs, alcohol and despair. Up to one-half of the kids are deaf from chronic ear infections–they have to use microphones in the classrooms. The sedentarization of the Inuit after WWII has been tremendously socially disruptive.
In this context, calling it “racist” when the demand is raised for appropriate levels of Inuit representation in government is simply absurd. They are 85% of the population. Imagine if the Canadian public service were 85% American–would the notion that just maybe Canadians ought to be more involved in their own governance be deemed “racist?”
I think the measures you have outlined–which require a massive commitment to education and training, a commitment that is already supposedly there–are the only way to fly. Otherwise colonial rule will continue, and dependency, and demoralization, and further social erosion.
You didn’t mention the new Official Languages Act. Where are we with that? Right now you can’t even find the Nunavut Public Service Act in Inuktitut/Innuinaqtun.
“Racism” is a red herring. We’re talking simple concepts of democracy and representation, nothing more. And there’s a long way to go before those concepts are made concrete.
Saturday Blogwhoring
by matttbastard
Ok, so I missed the midweek linkfarm–my apologies once again. Feel free to sock it to me one time in comments. Oh, and go show the one Melissa M. some love–that teaspoon don’t shine itself, dig?
Stageleft: Affirmat…
I can disagree with that. If a person can demonstrate their abilities to do a job, then let them do it. Certification can become symbol worship - and the higher the number of letters/symbols after one’s name, the greater degree of worship offered.
Hey–I posted hours ago–wha’ hoppen?
Sorry, Dawg…you spent a while languishing in the Spam Tank. Don’t know why.
Several of the folks I’m discussing the issue with on another site are also suggesting that it’s “racist” for NTI to provide its benefits only to beneficiaries…that tells you a bit about where they’re at.
Hope all goes well in the South! So they actually have internet in New Zealand? Who knew?
“I can disagree with that. If a person can demonstrate their abilities to do a job, then let them do it. ”
Good theory. But it falls apart in the real world, where Liability and Errors and Omissions insurers (not to mention legislation) require that certain functions be performed by folks with a certain level of certification. Determining empirically whether or not someone can remove a spleen could prove to be a costly and messy process.
No, it’s not racism; anyone who thinks it is is someone unable to see or understand privilege. Which generally means they have privilege.
I tend to frame the discussion in terms of advertising and brand recognition or writing: taking it into another realm sometimes has broken through barriers with people.
Quick! Think of a banker! What does that person look like?
If the majority of the time in North America that’s a white middle class middle-aged dude, then that is the primary “brand” of banker. And groups of people - especially poor ones - don’t have advertising firms, and often have internalized their own “brand” labels. Of course, people are *people*, and there IS no difference between people in jeans and people in sherwani, but we like to pretend.
I am intrigued that you’re also addressing the “learning the skills necessary” end. This is the part that I haven’t seen spoken about as much, and I think it’s really, really important.
Being a part of a minority in my schooling, and having friends who are of all manner of backgrounds, we’ve often discussed the frustration of tokenism. As an individual you don’t want your achievements to be chalked up to affirmative action, either externally or internally: you want to be able to say “Look at what I did!” with pride, without a nagging fear that you were given a handicap.
Doing the job, and doing it well, is the best medicine to combat internalized negative stereotype, but (and this is studied and shown), it is harder for people with activated stereotype to excel right out of the gate. In psych, locus of control is shown to correlate to outcomes - you’ll have a better outcome if you say “Ooops, I didn’t study enough”, than if you say “Oooops, I am a person who sucks” - but it’s only been recently that I’ve seen studies applying this to larger sociological patterns. (Although I’m sure the studies existed before.) I remember one recently showing that it works immediately like magic just before a test… you can reliably depress women’s scores in math tests by telling them, prior to going in, that “women suck at math”. Activating negative stereotype is powerful, removing locus of control. In that particular case, I have personal experience, and the only way I knew to combat that was to put the locus of control in my court again - I CAN be good at math if I apply myself, whereas I can’t not be female. But that takes education and experience, not tokenism, to learn.
So there’s a two way street, here, in rectifying imbalance: first, making people in power hire outside their own “brand” preference, and second to have the “branded” people decide they’re just people and throw off any further branding. (( Or, sometimes, to choose to accentuate the “good” of the brand. I get this, and I think culturally it’s true - certain cultures do have attributes - but I am generally against essentialism. People deserve respect and opportunity simply for being people, not for being more noble or nurturing or spiritual or non-materialistic than normative.))
Of course, another helpful thing in throwing off the brand is to see people “branded” like you succeeding. Women doing math, for example. Then you know that your non-controllable variable - gender, race, ability, etc - isn’t a death sentence.
[...] action is sometimes practiced to right a specific historical wrong, but more frequently to correct a [...]
After you give all those Inuit jobs, and allow them to make decisions re their govm’t and the programs which are destined to them, do we have any results?
Too often, we have seen natives take (rightful) control of their destiny and flubb it in a way that is inexplicably worse, then ask for MORE funds to undo the harm they did to themselves.
All native tribes are not alike. I hope the Inuit are smarter than the rest of ‘em.
Should we see drastic improvement on things like school drop out, alcohol dependence, drug use, and other ills that plague their community, I say go all the way with Affirmative Action and make it 99% Inuit.
If they f*ck things up, then regress to the previous system.
I can tell because of your grasp of the subject and this country’s policies on Aboriginal peoples, including Inuit that… Let me guess… You probably work for government in a justice or attorney general department, maybe native (provincial) or Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC - federal).
There is no “regress to the previous system” available. It would be similar to a hypothetical situation in Alberta; it follows self-destructive energy and development policies that add to global warming, melt Rocky Mountain glaciers, reducing spring run off, causing widespread drought and contaminated underground aquifers making safe drinking water scarce or only available at great cost to cities and towns, to farmers for irrigation, and to individuals wherever one lived.
The provincial gov’t — as you put it — would have f*cked things up and they would be up that particular creek without a shovel. At least, that’s what I would suppose.
Hope this helps.