Nunavut wants to control destiny

Paul Okalik, premier of Nunavut, the territory created out of an aboriginal land claim, said he is gaining support from southern provincial governments for a so-called devolution agreement.

He said Nunavut’s hope is to “run our own affairs and control our own resources,” which offer some enticing prospects in oil and gas, minerals and diamonds.

Okalik doesn’t attempt to hide his ambition to keep resource money at home rather than seeing it shipped to the federal government, which then returns about C$800 million a year to underpin the territory’s budget.

Similarly, the Northwest Territories, which receives a similar allocation, has been striving for years to take control of its resources, both land-based and offshore. Under the current financing deal, the NWT receives enough money to “get by. … That’s about it,” said Premier Joe Handley. “We want to control our own destiny (and control) the pace of development,” he said.

Although Nunavut currently has only one operating diamond mine, others are in various planning phases. The region has no current oil and gas exploration licenses and has drawn a blank in five attempts to attract nominations in the Arctic Islands.

The discovered resource inventory is estimated at 6.7 trillion cubic feet of gas and 6 million barrels of oil, with 20 significant discovery licenses in the Arctic Islands and Eastern Arctic offshore covering 850,000 acres, resulting in one unused production license.

Handley’s hope is to retain half of all resource revenues, without that being offset by a cap on federal money received by the NWT.

Both leaders pin some of their hopes on what happened in Alberta and Saskatchewan, two of Canada’s most active resource regions.

They were not awarded control of their resources until 1930, 25 years after they became provinces within the Canadian confederation. They are now major beneficiaries of that control, raking in billions of dollars a year.

—Gary Park