GUEST COLUMN (March 09, 1992)

The Northwest Territories government is preparing to take a proposal to Ottawa for the conversion of all territorial mineral and petroleum rights to the use of the northern peoples.

“We get most of our financial support from the federal government,” Territorial leader Nellie Cournoyea said in an interview. “We don’t have a resource revenue base that we can tax or make revenue from. The territories is still very undeveloped. The resources are there but undeveloped.” Officials said later the annual $50-million revenue from the Norman Wells oil field alone would cover the government’s current deficit.

Fiscal projections for 1991-92 show more than 85% of government revenue comes from southern Canada in the form of grants and transfers.

“The north and the people of northern communities are now in the middle of a long period of transition,” a government report states.

“At this stage, however, the transition is not successful and the modern north is largely a welfare economy’.”

This is what Cournoyea wants to change when she meets federal officials this month.

“We don’t have jurisdiction over minerals, oil and gas,” Cournoyea said. “We feel that if we’re going to be a government . . . the people have to make those decisions as they plan for overall priorities.”

Cournoyea, a political activist and broadcaster from the western Arctic, took over the government leadership after last November’s territorial election. She was energy minister in the previous legislature and is familiar with the resource potential she wants to control.

At 51 she is the first woman and the first native to lead the government. She is known to everyone by her first name — northerners call her “Nellie” with affection and without inhibition.

The Yellowknife government is unusual. There are no political parties, no official opposition and the legislature operates by consensus — the process by which Cournoyea was chosen leader.

Eighteen of the 24 seats in the legislature are held by Metis, Dene or Inuit, the largest aboriginal majority since the seat of government was established here in 1967.

The federal government has turned over many of its responsibilities to the Yellowknife administration but retains some influence through a commissioner who represents Ottawa in territorial affairs.

Cournoyea, a longtime supporter of autonomous government and a negotiator on the successful Inuvialuit land claim in the Mackenzie Delta, believes the revenue problems of her territory are approaching a crisis.

She has already indicated there will be substantial cuts throughout her administration when her first budget is produced.

As well, decentralization programs are scheduled to move bureaucrats out of Yellowknife and into villages and hamlets.

“We have a mix of various agencies and boards and a multitude of community groups that are set up that really don’t report to a community responsibility or accountability,” Cournoyea said of the decentralization initiative. What the new territorial leader is looking at is a major restructuring of government spending at a time when — like every other Canadian jurisdiction — there is no more money.

A study of the government revealed that there are too many bureaucrats concentrated in Yellowknife.

“Community governments are under used in the north,” the report concluded. “The territorial government should transfer more responsibility and resources to communities in the area of providing services to people.’ ” This is exactly the way Cournoyea wants to reform the system. — The Vancouver Sun