CHAPTER 7 - PROMOTING DEMOCRATIC APPROACHES TO CIRCUMPOLAR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, NORTHERN REGIONS, AND PUBLIC-INTEREST ROLES
Supporting Participation by Aboriginal Communities as Circumpolar Actors
The main ingredient for successful Canadian policies is a simple one: understanding that the Arctic is peopled.
Arctic indigenous peoples, with a long history of colonization, economic and political marginalization and deprivation of legitimate rights to their lands and resources, are now demanding effective participation in the sustainable development of their homelands and in the making of decisions that affect their political rights as citizens and their status as human beings with a distinct cultural identity.
A forward-looking Canadian circumpolar foreign policy must take this into account. State interests are not withdrawing from a field crowded with Arctic "stakeholders''; indeed, such interests remain dominant in some areas and are indispensable to setting international policy objectives. Rather, the governments representing Arctic states are increasingly being challenged to work together to achieve useful sustainable human development goals, and to do so in ways that respect and support both indigenous peoples' specific rights and broader democratic rights. Getting Canada's circumpolar policies "right" cannot be accomplished in isolation from the efforts of the governments of other nations or of the peoples, citizens and communities across the Arctic region.
In a joint appearance during the 1994 foreign policy review process, two of the most notable aboriginal witnesses before this Committee - Mary Simon, prior to being named Canada's Circumpolar Ambassador, and Rosemarie Kuptana, then Inuit Tapirisat and current ICC President - expressed to parliamentarians a conviction we heard expressed often and in various contexts:
Inuit firmly believe that Arctic policy issues are increasingly transnational in scope and regional cooperation and coordination are essential to effective Arctic policies. We also believe that there must be formal mechanisms for ensuring the meaningful involvement of Inuit in the development of other foreign policies affecting the rights and interests of Inuit.191It is clear both that Arctic indigenous peoples want "in" to the processes of circumpolar policy development, as a matter of right and not of grudging privilege or convenience, and that they want the Arctic states to give international recognition to this right. It is not surprising, therefore, that the granting of "permanent participant" status to three, and probably more, circumpolar indigenous organizations within the Arctic Council has taken on such a particular significance. As well, Canadian aboriginal leaders who appeared before the Committee, notably Ms. Kuptana, Chief Bill Erasmus of the Dene Nation, and Chief Matthew Coon-Come and Ambassador Ted Moses of the Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec, spoke of the importance of having Canada support indigenous peoples' rights internationally within the circumpolar context.
Earlier, in Part I, we cited Ambassador Simon's reference to the quite remarkable changes transforming the human and political face of Canada's northern territories. It is true that native populations in the Canadian Arctic are small and scattered, especially compared with the more sizeable indigenous minorities and urban concentrations in the far north and east of the Russian Federation (see Box 11 "Profile of Circumpolar Indigenous Peoples and Organizations"). Fewer than one-third of 1% of Canadians live north of the sixtieth parallel. The report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples defines the "Far North" more widely, to include the provincial far northern areas; even in this case, however, aboriginal people comprise fewer than half (42%) of a total population of only 152,000. As we observed in the previous chapter, 90% of aboriginal people in Canada live in its less northern parts. Yet, as witnesses told the Committee, and as our visits to Arctic communities attested, these permanent residents are determined to move forward to take charge of their destiny in areas of governance, human and environmental security, sustainable economic development, and shared learning - both within Canada and, increasingly, within a consciously circumpolar context.
Within the North American Arctic, the percentage of native people generally rises as one moves West to East. Alaska's diverse native groups (about 20 languages are spoken) make up only 15% of the state's population - about 85,000 people. In the huge Canadian Arctic, where less than one-third of 1% of Canadians live, there are fewer than 60,000 aboriginal people in total. Yukon has the lowest percentage of indigenous people at about 25%. About half the population of the present Northwest Territories is native: a mix of Indian, Metis and Inuvialuit ancestries in the western part, but a high majority of Inuit in the eastern part that is to become the new territory of Nunavut in 1999. In northern Quebec and Labrador, the approximately 8,000 Inuit constitute a similar majority within their region of Nunavik, while several thousand Innu live in the adjacent area of Labrador. About 9,000 Cree occupy traditional lands in the James Bay area, and there are a few thousand members of other Indian tribes (the Naskapi and Montagnais) spread across the northern half of Quebec and Labrador. In neighbouring Greenland, the world's largest island, the 45,000 Inuit who live there (accounting for over 80% of the population, as noted above) have strong ties to Canada's Inuit.
In the Nordic Euro-Arctic, the indigenous Saami people of this northernmost part of the continent, known as Lapland, number about 60,000 in total: 40,000 in Norway, 15,000 in Sweden, 4,000 in Finland, and less than 2,000 in the Russian part of the Kola peninsula. While the Scandinavian Saami have developed their own forms of representation through Saami "parliaments" (which are consultative rather than legislative), and within regional organizations like the Nordic and Barents councils, they lack the territorial claims status of aboriginal counterparts in North America. The Saami are best know for their traditional occupation of reindeer herding; however, this is probably more of a mainstay in parts of the more remote Russian Arctic than in modern-day Lapland.
Russia's situation is the most complex by far, with over one million indigenous people inhabiting a vast northern expanse that covers nearly three-fifths of the present Russian Federation. Two indigenous ethnic minorities, the Komi and the Yakut, which have their own "autonomous republics" (of Russia's 89 regional entities, these are among the most independent from Moscow), account for about three-quarters of that total. In terms of cultural and socio-economic survival, a more challenging condition confronts the approximately 200,000 so-called "small peoples" of the Russian north and far east, of which 26 are officially recognized by the state. The prospects for some of these northern minorities are extremely precarious, even if, as in the case of the Russian Saami and Inuit, they are now better able to establish supportive links with "cousins" in the West. Canadian Inuit, through the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, have been working with Inuit experiencing harsh conditions in the remote far eastern Chukotka region. However, as the head of the Russian association of northern minorities, Yeremei Aipin, mentioned in his statement at the inauguration of the Arctic Council, the Inuit represented by this association number fewer than 200 people.
This brings up the issue of international representation of Arctic indigenous peoples' interests through circumpolar organizations. The key bodies in this regard, which have accordingly been granted the standing of permanent participants within the Arctic Council, were briefly introduced in Chapter Three and Box 3. The Committee was able to meet separately with the heads of the three principal indigenous associations - in Ottawa, with Rosemarie Kuptana representing the ICC; in Moscow, with Yeremei Aipin; and in Tromsø, with Leif Halonen representing the Saami Council. The oldest body is the Saami Council, established in the 1950s and based in Kautokeino in northern Norway. Its membership is exclusively Scandinavian, with the exception of the recent addition of the small number of Russian Kola Saami. The ICC, established two decades later and based in Ottawa, represents about 130,000 North American Inuit (including in Greenland, which is also part of Norden), and a few Russian Inuit as well. Both the Saami Council and the ICC have consultative NGO status with the United Nations. The newest, all-Russian, body, representing the "small peoples" and based in Moscow, is a post-1989 creation which changed its name in 1993 to become the Association of Indigenous Minorities of the North, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation. In 1994 it became an officially incorporated body recognized by the Russian Ministry of Justice.
The above three circumpolar indigenous organizations first came together in an Aboriginal Leaders' Summit in 1991 to create a continuing channel for pan-Arctic aboriginal cooperation at the nongovernmental level. The three also began working multilaterally with Arctic states through the AEPS process, assisted since 1993 by the Indigenous Peoples' Secretariat that continues within the framework of the Arctic Council. Notwithstanding the progress made by these permanent participant bodies, there are, as indicated in Chapter Three, significant arguments for additional aboriginal representation which remain to be resolved as part of the evolving agenda of circumpolar cooperation.
Already years ago, Peter Jull noted that "northern peoples have consistently preferred autonomy to assimilation." He added that: "Completing the infrastructure of nationhood within our own territory by extending political institutions to aboriginal Canadians is surely as important a sovereignty issue as defending lines on Arctic maps with fleets and lawyers."192 The progress of devolution and development of appropriate democratic government structures in Canada north of 605 is therefore a crucial domestic element shaping the future of a distinctive Canadian role among Arctic nations.193 There is still a very complex, sometimes contested, unfinished agenda of constitutional and practical governance issues - including the scope of aboriginal "self-government" and the future of broader "public government" following division of the NWT, as well as innovations such as the proposed gender-equity provisions in a new Nunavut legislature.194 It is clear, however, as confirmed during our hearings, that Canada's northern aboriginal peoples have found their voice and are asserting their demands for inclusion in decision-making processes at home and abroad. It is therefore essential for this to be taken into account at all levels in developing circumpolar policies.195
What is true in Canada is also true in other circumpolar countries with indigenous minority populations.196 As we heard, the remarkable and uncertain transformations taking place across Russia seem especially important and worthy of international attention and assistance. Russia's vast northern regions are home to a complex mosaic of indigenous peoples - the 1989 census identified 26 ethnic groups known collectively as the "Small Peoples of the North and the Far East" - totalling under 200,000 people. This does not include the larger recognized ethnic and political entities of the Komi and the Yakuts, each with a population above 300,000, although they too are still minorities within their respective autonomous republics. The situation of the "small peoples" is especially vulnerable, as they are far outnumbered on their own territories by Russian settlers, many brought into these remote regions during periods of Soviet military-industrial ambition and forced development, which wreaked havoc on the local environment, human and wildlife populations. These besieged indigenous minorities must now struggle to find their way through the traumatic transitions of the post-Soviet period.197
Piers Vitebsky, Head of Social Sciences and Russian Studies at Cambridge University's Scott Polar Research Institute, which possesses the world's largest archive of information on the Russian Arctic, has written that: "From the 1930s to the mid-1980s, a succession of policies and developments had an almost unremittingly negative impact on the Northern Minorities."198 So, for example, when the world's largest reserves of oil and gas were discovered in western Siberia in the 1960s, the regions's minority peoples, rather than benefiting in a way that could sustain indigenous community life, suffered even more exposure to the environmental, health and socio-cultural consequences of accelerated externally driven development. Fortunately, the Gorbachev reforms of the late 1980s exposed the issues of environmental degradation linked to the plight of northern indigenous minorities and galvanized, at least for a time, Russian public consciousness. An early leader in this fight for recognition of native rights, and for a sustainable, self-governing future for the traditional cultural communities of the Russian North, was the Khant writer Yeremei Aipin, with whom the Committee met as one of a panel of indigenous leaders in Moscow, on the same day as we met with Mikhail Gorbachev himself. Mr. Aipin is now the official representative in the Arctic Council for the "permanent participant" association of Russia's indigenous northern and far eastern minorities, which was first formed in 1990.199
Many of the challenges facing these peoples are similar to, if more acute than, those in other circumpolar regions: negotiation of indigenous land claims, ownership rights and resource management; reshaping of power relations between regional authorities and the central government; preservation of traditional economies and ways of life (communities and cultures based mainly on reindeer-herding, hunting and fishing); regulation of major non-renewable resource development (oil and gas, diamonds, other minerals); and new questions of economic privatization and how to stimulate native entrepreneurial activity in the wake of sharply diminished state support. Despite the democratic opening since 1989, the particular severity of Russia conditions is troubling. As Piers Vitebsky observes:
Native people face the daunting task of sustaining viable communities with high transport costs and overheads. This is a widespread problem throughout the native Arctic and it afflicts large areas of Greenland, Alaska and Canada. In these countries, whatever natural resources are taken out of the northern regions, native communities are sustained in return by a high level of subsidies and provision of social services. The Northern Minorities in Russia, however, find themselves on the outer edge of an industrial state that either wants the land for other purposes or perhaps is coming to abandon the area altogether. . . . Though the ecological situation is probably getting worse . . . there is a widespread feeling that good environmental management is an expensive luxury. In many places, people are reduced to an overriding concern with the need to survive each winter as it comes.200Our meetings in Russia, including that with Minister Vladimir Kuramin, Chairman of GOSKOMSEVER, the state committee responsible for northern development and native peoples, and in Finland with respect to the situation in the Kola peninsula, certainly confirmed chronic problems in supplying basic needs.201 Valery Shustov, General Secretary of the Russian Association of Indigenous Minorities, also spoke about the tremendous amount of work still to be done to establish an adequate framework of legal rights and democratic structures from the federal to the regional levels. Notwithstanding the obstacles, Association President Aipin expressed some optimism that a five-year mutual cooperation agreement recently reached with GOSKOMSEVER, and set to begin in January 1997, could be a domestic breakthrough. Coming after the international breakthrough of aboriginal participation in the Arctic Council inauguration, he was encouraged by its promise of at last giving aboriginal peoples a "control function" and real partnership with the Russian government.202 At the same time, he stressed as critical immediate circumpolar priorities both preservation of the natural environment that sustains native peoples' traditional livelihoods and "creation of a sustainable economic base to allow people to survive" as they try to cope with the uncertainties of market-oriented transition.
Great Russian interest was expressed to the Committee on all sides in the opportunity to draw on Canadian experience and benefit from cooperative endeavours. A notable example cited was a major project on institution-building for northern aboriginal peoples being executed by the Inuit Circumpolar Conference - one among a number of bilateral technical cooperation initiatives we will discuss further in Chapter Nine. It is important to signal at this point that the emergence of circumpolar indigenous organizations has added an important dimension of international political advocacy to local and national-level democratic activism, as well as providing an independent channel for sharing knowledge about such innovative Canadian developments as setting up native-controlled corporations, operating land and resource-based "co-management" regimes, or establishing the new Nunavut territory.203 ICC president Rosemarie Kuptana spoke to the Committee in Ottawa as well about specific needs for official support to strengthen ties with Russian Inuit and Siberian indigenous peoples, including sending humanitarian aid to such depressed regions as Chukotka. In Moscow, Maiya Ettirintina, a former member of the Federation Council from this far eastern region, expressed appreciation of close ties with Canadian aboriginal leaders and of Canada's support for international minority rights. As she put it: "Canadians are people who keep their word, just like traditional minority peoples." Representatives from the republic of Sakha (Yakutia) praised ties built up with Canada's northern territories and saw opportunities for further aboriginal involvement.
Minister Kuramin underlined to the Committee in Moscow that Russia wants to learn from Canada's experiences in evolving relationships with aboriginal peoples in all areas, including legal rights and regulations, as well as co-management, governance and constitutional issues. Some legislation is currently before the Russian parliament (State Duma) that addresses the status and special needs of the northern "small peoples," though the fundamental question of land rights remains unresolved. As well, the Soviet system had enforced a state of over-dependence, so its sudden collapse left a vacuum. Introducing market relations is therefore a big leap posing special difficulties for remote northern regions, which is aggravated by Russia's deep budget problems. Kuramin left little doubt that more financial assistance is required to support Russia's northern peoples' transition to life in self-sustaining and self-governing communities.
The situation of the Russian Saami population in the Murmansk region has been of particular concern, though, like the Russian Inuit, this impoverished minority is at least fortunate to have kinship ties beyond Russia's borders - in this case, with the larger Saami populations of the adjacent Fenno-Scandinavian region.204 In 1992, Russian Saami were able to join the Nordic Saami Council, which was established as one of the first international indigenous organizations in 1956, received NGO status within the United Nations in 1988, and is now one of the three aboriginal "permanent participants" in the Arctic Council. In the fall of 1996, Murmansk also hosted the Saami Assembly for the first time.
Committee members who visited Tromsø in northern Norway and the Nordic capitals heard from leading representatives of the Saami Council (including its president, Leif Halonen), and members of national Saami parliaments and other Saami organizations. Members were also briefed about the work of Norway's Saami Rights Commission. Many of the concerns expressed about environmental and social impacts, struggles for legal recognition of land, resource and political rights, have parallels with those of indigenous peoples in Canada's North. However, in general, Canada was seen as ahead of the Nordic countries with respect to recognition of aboriginal claims (with Russia having the most catching up to do). The Saami parliaments remain rather weak consultative organs, and assimilationist policies, notably in Sweden, have made it more difficult to obtain legal and political recognition of distinctive status. Saami representatives therefore see the benefits of increased international collaboration as including the opportunity to learn from the experiences and advances of Canadian indigenous peoples.
A critical note on furthering international cooperation was nevertheless injected during the Committee's visit to the Indigenous Peoples' Secretariat in Copenhagen, ironically by the Secretariat's Canadian executive secretary, Chester Reimer. The Secretariat, funded by Denmark since it was established under the AEPS in 1993, faces an unclear future as it becomes absorbed into the new Arctic Council structure. Mr. Reimer worried that Canada might not sustain the leadership it had shown in establishing the Council, now that there were more rumoured cutbacks in Canadian funding for Arctic programs. In effect, just at the point when the institutional vehicles for circumpolar cooperation have been put in place, there is a risk that the resources will not be forthcoming to produce on the real dividends for which northern indigenous peoples, especially, are looking after their long participation in negotiations with officials of the Arctic states. Indigenous organizations do not want to come away from the process with few concrete benefits to show their people in the many small communities across the Arctic.
In Chapter Three, the Committee recommended that broader representation would be desirable for Canadian aboriginal peoples' organizations within the Arctic Council. While that formal standing is important, it is perhaps more important that indigenous peoples' representatives have opportunities to exert influence at the early stages of policy development - i.e. within the domestic milieu - which may then lead to the international discussion table. It is also important that Canadian indigenous groups be supported in establishing more intensive and local-level alliances with other circumpolar indigenous peoples, on such issues as sustainable community-based development, so that the democratic voices of the Arctic's original inhabitants are increasingly heard at every level where decisions are taken that affect the region's future.
Accordingly:
- Recommendation 31
The Committee recommends that the Government take steps to deepen the democratic involvement of representatives from all of Canada's northern indigenous peoples in the elaboration of policies on circumpolar sustainable development. To that end, we recommend that an aboriginal contact group be established to provide regular advice to the Ambassador for Circumpolar Affairs on issues pertaining to her mandate and that of the proposed Circumpolar Affairs Division in the Department of Foreign Affairs. To promote indigenous peoples' participation in the development of international sustainable development policies for the Arctic, the Government should support expanded international linkages through existing Canadian-based aboriginal organizations, and should also pledge stable, long-term material support for the Indigenous Peoples' Secretariat within the Arctic Council.
Involving Northern Regions and Representing Public Interests
At the very least, it is necessary to ensure that northern leaders participate fully in consultative, cooperative and strategic decisions which control their economy.
The South must let go of its desire for control of the North and learn to be partners with northerners in managing northern affairs.
The Arctic is not only the concern of aboriginal peoples; it is our concern as well, firstly because this is a global issue, and secondly, because Arctic issues are just as important to us here, in what is called the South, as they are to the people living in the Arctic. . . . If you really want a foreign policy for the Arctic, all Canadians will have to consider that part of the world as one of strategic importance to Canada. [47:25]
The primary thrust of this chapter has been to advance the role, so often suppressed or ignored in the past, of indigenous peoples, as part of the future agenda of circumpolar sustainable development cooperation. There are, however, several other very important democratic elements that must be taken into account in building policy approaches that are fully participatory, public-interested and accountable.
First, the contribution of non-aboriginal residents of northern regions to circumpolar initiatives also needs to be recognized and affirmed, with northern communities being encouraged to work together as a whole to play a larger role in developing policy alternatives that can best meet their needs. In that sense, a more democratic Arctic foreign policy cannot be delivered from the outside, but must grow out of the increased capacity of these communities to exert political control over future development.207 Flowing from that, the Committee is encouraged by a circumpolar movement of "decolonization" that seems to be taking place, accentuated by, but not limited, to the political awakening of aboriginal peoples. Based on what we have heard and observed, this new northern consciousness, as former Yukon premier Tony Penikett described it to us, is transforming both the process and the content of international activity and policy formation. Nongovernmental organizations, some with transnational memberships and operations, are also increasingly engaged at the circumpolar level, notably around issues of the environment and sustainable human development.
Already in 1994, Nicholas Poushinsky had told the parliamentary foreign policy review committee that "the notion of independence and self-determination needs to be built in if we're going to understand and develop a realistic foreign policy. . . . northern initiatives in circumpolar foreign policy have happened irrespective of the disinterest of federal Foreign Affairs. . . there are circumpolar health initiatives, circumpolar education and the Northern Forum that have been developing."208 Northern communities have themselves been pursuing international links through an expanding range of functional and subnational channels - the East/West Air Routes Consortium, the International Association of Mayors of Northern Cities, and the Winter Cities Association International are among examples. At a higher level, territories and provinces have been making connections abroad related to their significant polar interests - for example, the NWT government's establishment of a liaison office in Russia's Sakha republic (Yakutia); Manitoba's concern for the future of Churchill as an Arctic port and for the preservation of Hudson Bay polar bear habitat; and Quebec's interest in relations with the Nordic countries and Siberia. In developing a responsive, democratic approach to circumpolar foreign policy development, the federal Government should be acknowledging and encouraging these existing interests and initiatives by other actors and levels of government, and taking care to avoid any duplication or perception of asserting control.
As we noted in Chapter Three, in connection with its bid to be included within the Arctic Council, only Alberta and the Yukon are at present members of the Northern Forum. The NWT, which has its own substantial relations with other circumpolar regions, is considering the value of joining.209 We observed a keen Russian and Nordic interest in developing more links of this sort with Canada. The Northern Forum will next meet in Yakutsk, in Russia's far northeast, where the NWT firm of Ferguson, Simek, Clark has earned a circumpolar reputation for its construction of a model "northern village." In Helsinki, Committee members also met Dr. Ekaterina Balaganskaya of the Northern Forum Academy, an arm of the forum located at the University of Lapland Arctic Centre in Rovaniemi, who was eager to expand Canadian contacts. Whatever the specific vehicle or sector of activity, the goal should be to create increased opportunities for people in Arctic communities and regions to connect with each other around mutual circumpolar interests, using both private-sector contacts and the appropriate political channels that are closest and most accessible to the people.
In his submission, the Forum's Alaskan executive director, Stephen Cowper, also stated that the participation of political entities below the nation-state level may be critical to the implementation of eventual circumpolar agreements in such areas as environmental protection and sustainable development. He added that:
Our interpretation of current events is that in most nations, political power is migrating away from the center and towards regional and local governments. For obvious historic reasons, many of our members react strongly to any hint of a return to the days of northern colonialism, when our territories were for all intents and purposes ruled from the national capitals. (. . .)
A true Arctic policy cannot be made without the participation of entities which represent all of the people who live in the Arctic. Participation by all Arctic regional governments being impractical, the Northern Forum provides a direct link to each of its governments, which in turn provide a link with the people. [Submission of 3 December 1996, p. 4-5]Beyond maximizing northern-based involvement, whether official or nongovernmental, in circumpolar policy development, the Canadian public interest as a whole must be affirmed, as was pointedly raised with the Committee, by, among others, Paul Painchaud, quoted at the beginning of this section. We believe that the most democratic and efficient way to do this is through optimum utilization of existing parliamentary channels, whose explicit purpose is public agenda-setting and accountability. Indeed, the serious attention shown by this Committee, and also by the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, attests to the role that Canadian parliamentary representatives can and should play in furthering circumpolar cooperation objectives that are in the interests of all Canadians. The Office of the Circumpolar Ambassador and other parts of government working on international Arctic issues should look to Parliament as an ongoing national forum that can both generate public awareness of the stakes for Canada and broaden the process of public policy deliberation.
At the international interparliamentary level, a specific vehicle which deserves recognition and strengthened support is the Standing Committee of Parliamentarians of the Arctic Region, to which we have already referred in regard to both strengthening Arctic Council representation and encouraging action by circumpolar governments on the important resolutions from SCPAR's second conference held in Yellowknife just over one year ago. The first Parliamentary Conference on Arctic cooperation was arranged through the efforts of the Nordic Council, the regional organization of the five Nordic countries, and took place, with Canadian participation, in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1993. That produced a recommendation to establish a standing committee of Arctic parliamentarians, for which the Nordic Council would accept responsibility and support the work of its secretariat. SCPAR began activities in September 1994.
Currently, the Arctic Committee's membership consists of: three representatives from the Nordic Council (two of whom, Birgitta Dahl, Speaker of the Swedish Parliament, and Jan Syse, member of the Norwegian Storting, met with Committee members in Stockholm and Oslo respectively, while the third is SCPAR's chairman, Geir Haarde of Iceland); two members of the Russian Duma; one member of the European Parliament; one U.S. representative (Senator Murkowski of Alaska); one Canadian representative (The Hon. Clifford Lincoln, MP, who testified to the Committee on the results of the Yellowknife conference and who spoke on behalf of SCPAR at the inauguration of the Arctic Council); and one representative each from the Saami Council and from the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. SCPAR's secretary is Guy Lindstrom, who is also secretary general of the Finnish delegation to the Nordic Council, and who persuaded the Committee during meetings at the Finnish Parliament in Helsinki of the seriousness with which our European counterparts take the parliamentary dimensions of circumpolar policy formulation and implementation.
SCPAR has shown how even a small group of engaged parliamentarians can provide a good deal of creative spark and impetus around a circumpolar public-interest agenda - by advocating multilateral cooperation and institution-building (e.g. through the Arctic Council); by keeping a watching brief on Arctic environmental security and sustainable development concerns; by spurring governments to respond more vigorously; by acting as agents of political accountability; and by facilitating policy-oriented exchanges among officials, aboriginal peoples' representatives, NGOs, and interested publics. As SCPAR's next conference after Yellowknife will be held in Russia, Canada's parliamentary representative, Clifford Lincoln, attended a preparatory planning meeting in Moscow in March 1997. However, Canada's participation to date has remained somewhat ad hoc, and kept going in the above case through a very small amount of interim support from the Canada-Europe Parliamentary Association. We would therefore like to see a more stable and substantial arrangement put in place to promote increased, regular involvement by Canadian parliamentarians in the continued development of important circumpolar parliamentary channels, which have so far had to rely on Nordic Council leadership and support.
In sum, Canada should be out in front on issues of circumpolar public interest, as much through stimulating indigenous, interregional, nongovernmental, and interparliamentary connections, as through the efforts, which we fully acknowledge, of a few senior Arctic officials responsible for intergovernmental negotiations. These are, of course, necessary, and often sensitive, and hence confidential. But that diplomatic thrust needs to be accompanied by a growing, democratically responsive public dimension in circumpolar foreign policy development and cooperation.
Accordingly:
- Recommendation 32
The Committee recommends that an explicit goal of federal Government circumpolar affairs policy should be to facilitate community-based, local and regional-level contacts, in close cooperation with provincial and territorial governments and their Arctic constituencies, as well as in ongoing consultation with indigenous peoples' organizations, the private sector, and NGOs working on circumpolar sustainable development issues. A concerted effort should be made to avoid duplication of initiatives, while at the same time assisting coordination among the various Canadian actors working towards common circumpolar objectives.
Recommendation 33
The Committee recommends that the Minister of Foreign Affairs table in Parliament an annual statement by the Ambassador for Circumpolar Affairs briefly outlining the Government's circumpolar sustainable development initiatives, and stating results achieved and expected. The statement should be referred to this Committee and should also be scrutinized by any other standing committee with an interest in circumpolar issues, notably those related to the environment and sustainable development and aboriginal affairs.
Recommendation 34
As a means of increasing public feedback and accountability with respect to Arctic sustainable development issues, the Committee recommends that the Government support stronger Canadian participation in the continued development of circumpolar interparliamentary channels, in particular through the important work of the Standing Committee of Parliamentarians of the Arctic Region.
189
"Canada, Arctic Peoples, and International Affairs", Behind the Headlines, Vol. 45, No. 6, July/August 1988, p. 2.
190
The Polar Regions (1996), p. 143.
191
Special Joint Committee, Proceedings, Issue No. 36, 9 June 1994, p. 28. See also the similar appeal made by John
Amagoalik (current head of the Nunavut Implementation Commission and sometimes referred to as the "father" of
Nunavut) - "Northern Peoples and the Formulation of Foreign Policy in the Arctic," Lamb ed., Northern Foreign
Policy for Canada (1994), p. 184-86.
192
Peter Jull, "Canada, Arctic Peoples and International Affairs" (1988), p. 3 and 10.
193
This was beginning to be recognized already a decade ago: Cf. Gordon Robertson, "Nunavut and the International
Arctic," Northern Perspectives, Fall 1987.
194
Rudy Platiel, "Inuit Endorse Gender-Equal Legislature," The Globe and Mail (Toronto), December 1996; "Equal
Seats for Women, Men Eyed for Arctic Legislature," The Toronto Star, 18 February 1997. However, a plebiscite may
be held to determine if there is majority public support for this proposal. On the larger issues of territorial
government restructuring, in discussions surrounding the division of the NWT the federal Government has
indicated that it would like to see the "inherent right of [aboriginal] self-government . . . find expression primarily
through the public government and be implemented in partnership with the federal and territorial governments"
(Address of Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, Ron Irwin, to the NWT Western Arctic Constitutional
Development Steering Committee Conference, January 1995, cited in Kirk Cameron and Graham White, Northern
Governments in Transition, The Institute for Research on Public Policy, Montreal, 1995, p. 81.). The division of the
NWT, spurred by the desire of the Eastern Arctic Inuit for their own self-governing political unit of "Nunavut" was
originally approved by a 56% majority in a 1982 plebiscite, but a new boundary was only agreed in 1992 after being
approved in another plebiscite (this time with a 54% majority). Late that year the Inuit reached a political accord and
final settlement of their comprehensive land claim with the federal Government. In June 1993, with all-party
support, Parliament passed the Act providing for the establishment of Nunavut by 1999. A December 1995
plebiscite then chose Iqaluit to be the future capital by a 60% majority vote. The Committee visited the
headquarters of the Nunavut implementation process during meetings in Iqaluit in May 1996.
195
As the eminent Quebec social geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin has recently written: "Questions may well then
be raised about original, large-scale proposals, such as Nunavik in Quebec, or Nunavut, Inuvialuit and Denendeh in
the Northwest Territories. Northern studies are intimately linked to autochtony . . . .". Already in 1965 Edmond had
advised that "southerners can no longer contemplate policies for the North without really consulting the
indigenous peoples." (L'Écho des pays froids, Les Presses de l'Université Laval, Sainte-Foy, 1996, p. 212.)
196
A useful survey of northern native peoples and their stages of political development is Jens Dahl, "Indigenous
Peoples of the Arctic," in Arctic Challenges (1993), p. 103-27. More in-depth profiles are contained in the Minority
Rights Group Report, Polar Peoples: Self-Determination and Development (1994). See also Chaturvedi, The Polar
Regions (1996), Chapter 6 "Indigenous Peoples: Consciousness, Assertion of Identity and Geopolitical Ferment."
Among the eight Arctic Council states, Iceland is the only one with no significant aboriginal population.
197
An excellent succinct analysis of the historic challenges faced by Russia's northern native peoples is Piers
Vitebsky, "The Northern Minorities," Chapter 5 in Graham Smith ed., The Nationalities Question in the Post-Soviet
States, 2nd edition, Longman, London and New York, 1996. See also, Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the
Small Peoples of the North, Cornell University Press, Ithica N.Y., 1994.
198
Piers Vitebsky, The Northern Minorities (1996), p. 97.
199
Mikhail Gorbachev, then still President of the Soviet Union, attended the inaugural meeting of this association,
which was held inside the Moscow Kremlin. The Committee's meetings in November 1996 included the work of the
Gorbachev Foundation, which has been engaged with Canadian partners in projects directed at northern
sustainable development and improving the situation of Arctic indigenous people, notably the Saami of the Kola
peninsula. See the discussion of Canadian technical cooperation with Russia in Chapter Nine.
200
Piers Vitebsky, "The Northern Minorities" (1996), p. 103. See also Valery Shustov, "Problems of the Indigenous
Minorities of the Russian North Stemming from Industrial Development of the Arctic," translation of text of address
in Russian to the Third Conference of Parliamentarians of the Arctic Region, Yellowknife, 4 March 1996.
201
Grave shortages of food and energy supplies were reported. Vladimir Goman, chair of the Duma Committee on
Northern Affairs (with whom the Committee was unfortunately unable to meet due to his illness) was quoted in one
intelligence report describing the situation as "catastrophic" ("Arctic Exodus," Foreign Report, Jane's Information
Group Ltd., 17 October 1996, p. 7). Although bad weather prevented the Committee from meeting aboriginal and
local government representatives in Murmansk, Finnish experts on the Barents region, who met with the
Committee in Helsinki, gave further direct evidence of extreme hardships, and the need to deal with such basic
issues as a matter of urgency. If people are preoccupied with sheer survival, it will be difficult to see progress
towards sustainable development and democratic stability.
202
Some caution may be advisable, however, in terms of expectations from such agreements. Piers Vitebsky actually
sees the Association of Indigenous Minorities as being in decline from a highpoint in the early 1990s and therefore
puts more store in local level associations. That seems to accord with Oran Young's comments to the Committee
about the difficulty of leaders of larger aboriginal organizations staying in touch with grassroots views. At the
federal governmental level, it might also be noted that the Northern Affairs Ministry, with an almost impossibly vast
mandate but only 300 employees, has also had difficult times during the turbulent 1990s. As Kuramin told the
Committee in Moscow, at one point GOSKOMSEVER was merged into the ministry for nationalities. It was only in
1995 that a Yeltsin decree recreated the state committee, recognizing critical deficiencies to be addressed in
developing a proper framework for northern development policy.
203
Sanjay Chaturvedi points out that Nunavut is of interest to Russians studying regional government in the North and
"provides practical inspiration for other indigenous peoples at least as a precedent" (The Polar Regions (1996),p. 156). The experiences of northern Alaskan natives in local governance and managing resource development
have also been utilized in the Scott Polar Research Institute's impressive Russian program which is developing
projects on sustainable social and economic development for remote regions. See Chapter Nine for further details.
204
Although Committee members were unable to get to scheduled meetings with representatives of the Kola Saami
Association in Murmansk, we did hear firsthand testimony in Helsinki from experts who had recently visited the
region. Professor Leif Rantala of the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, a former general secretary of the Saami
Council, warned that the shortages are such that "the situation is explosive . . . anything could happen." He made a
plea to "please remember ordinary citizens when talking about the Arctic Council," Lieutenant Col. Arto Nokkola of
the Tampere University Peace Research Institute, concurred on the difficulties facing Kola communities (about
10% of the population has left the region in recent years as a result), but also observed that people are getting more
organized locally "trying to create a sort of northern strategy in order to survive." (For additional background see
Nina Afanasjeva and Leif Rantala, "Programme of Aid to the Russian Saami," Saami Council, Utsjoki, Finland,
1993; Rantala, "The Russian Saami of Today," in The Barents Region, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway, 1995,
p. 56-62; Odd Mathis Haetta, The Saami - an Indigenous People of the Arctic, Davvi Girji o.s., Karasjok, Finland,
1996.)
205
In Lamb ed., A Northern Foreign Policy for Canada (1994), p. 82.
206
"The Formulation of a Northern Foreign Policy for Canada: A Southern Perspective," in ibid., p. 187.
207
The promotion of a democratic approach is integrally linked to the ability of people to make development choices
for themselves. Moreover, as Chaturvedi's analysis of Arctic sustainable development shows: "among alternative
models of development, the community-based, citizen-driven approach has the greatest potential for realizing
fundamental changes in the socio-economic, ecological and cultural survival strategies for the circumpolarArctic . . . [emphasizing] localized, participatory economic planning as the most effective alternative to the
insecurity, dependency and vulnerability typically inflicted by large-scale, remote, socially detached and politically
non-accountable economic development." (The Polar Regions (1996), p. 257.)
208
Special Joint Committee, Proceedings, Issue No. 20, 2 June 1994, p. 120f.
209
The regular annual membership fee is US$10,000, but drops to half that amount for regions with fewer than
100,000 population.