Inuit leaders meeting with federal cabinet ministers on Arctic foreign policy

President of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Natan Obed, joins Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as they co-chair the meeting of Inuit-Crown Partnership Committee in Ottawa on Thursday, May 9, 2024. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick)

OTTAWA -

Inuit leaders met with federal cabinet ministers on Friday to iron out the final details of their submissions to Canada's Arctic foreign policy.

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly attended the latest Inuit-to-Crown partnership committee meeting. In June, Joly said Canada was readying an Arctic foreign policy to prepare for a more tense period in international relations.

Natan Obed, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, which represents Canada's 70,000 Inuit, said the hope is that the policy will inform and help shepherd Canada's relationship with Inuit toward international partners.

"We are not a nation-state per se, but we are an essential partner of the government of Canada in its Arctic imagination," Obed told The Canadian Press.

"We are the basis for Canada's sovereignty of the Canadian Arctic."

Obed said Inuit and Global Affairs Canada have been exchanging drafts of the policy throughout the summer and into the fall.

He said it is important for Inuit to have clear language around Inuit Nunangat -- an Inuktitut-language term which encompasses the geography of the four Inuit regions in Canada, which are Nunavut, the Inuvialuit region in the Northwest Territories, Nunavik in northern Quebec and Nunatsiavut in northern Labrador.

"So even the terminology gets the government of Canada away from, say, 'the Arctic' or 'the North,' meaning territorial North," Obed said.

He said adding such terminology avoids excluding Nunavik and Nunatsiavut in any of the Arctic policy conversation because those regions fall below a certain latitude.

Obed said there are also several domestic priorities he'd like to see included in the new policy, including a commitment to not only bolster infrastructure within communities, but to work with communities to bolster Canada's defence infrastructure.

"The very act of building our communities and ensuring that our communities are sustainable is a part of Canada's defence strategy," Obed said, adding those domestic considerations should be foundational in any foreign policy.

"We need to do more in our communities for equity. We need to build infrastructure."

Another item on the agenda was the development of a federal Inuit education policy.

While education programming falls under provincial and territorial jurisdiction, Obed said a federal policy would help set the stage for reimagining how education is accredited and delivered in Inuit communities.

He pointed to the land claim agreement in Nunatsiavut, which enshrined the right of Inuit there to take over the education system in their communities from the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, if they so choose.

Obed said the limiting factors are the resources to deliver education -- especially in Inuktitut -- and for the prerequisites and outcomes to be recognized in other jurisdictions, like post-secondary education.

"It will be very difficult to move from the status quo model of provinces and territories. But just like, say, official language status -- we know that through legislation and policy you create these windows of what is possible and what isn't," Obed said.

"We would like to open (those windows) a bit further for the way in which Inuit children are educated, the way in which accreditation works for teachers and for how course curriculum can be reimagined."

He also said they'd need funding behind it.

"We know our educational outcomes are unacceptable in relation to those in the rest of the country, and we know that status quo isn't going to get us to where we want to go," Obed said.

"What Inuit say we want is somebody who is ready to meet the world as an adult, but also has the core competencies within the community in which they live that the education system helped build within them.

"We want a world-class education, but we also want a specific education."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.