Chapter 4: Categorizing the Data -- 1970s Documents -- 1982 Northwest Territories

4.3e

Categorizing the Data -- 1970s Documents -- 1982 Northwest Territories

   This document is the third big-book Canadian document, an outlier to the 1970s set but a document that establishes Canadian Territories’ First Nations “public” education policy production. Yukon produces a policy document in 1987 that essentially takes a public policy approach to the issue of First Nations’ control over education. The 1982 policy is noteworthy because it mimics Hall-Dennis and the Worth Report in style. Entitled Learning: Tradition and Change in the Northwest Territories, the NWT document may be assessed as a forward-looking document for the 20^th century, one of the most change-making ones, with similar impact for the territories and First Nations/Metis/Inuit as there was for Quebec with Quebec’s Parent Report. It would seem that the design of the document was perhaps influenced by Ontario’s Hall-Dennis which would have been a primary reference document because the committee was doing its research five years prior to the completion date of 1982. What the document does in great measure is assess the problem of equity in the Northwest Territories between the west and the east. The east is primarily Inuit with the west containing the territorial capital and Ministry of Education. The plan put into place involved the forming of divisional boards covering a number of communities underneath them in an umbrella arrangement, the most significant board being formed, the Baffin Divisional Board of Education. Even as the 1982 document was appearing, rollbacks in federal funding were impending due to the beginning of the recession increasing through the 1980s and producing downsizing and cutbacks. By 1988 the recession was noted and British Columbia was responding to the impact of such a recession on public education in its Sullivan Report. Notwithstanding, what the 1982 Northwest Territories document changed was substantial. The 1994 document People: Our Focus for the Future redirected the costs of division boards into a plan emphasizing local community networks. The 1982 document included fundamental changes to Education Act legislation bringing it up to date to better meet the needs of Indigenous Northwest Territories Canadians. 

   In terms of the aforementioned, closing out a review of the data set at this point on the Northwest Territories 1982 document is fitting. I argued in my Master’s thesis that educational policy played a substantial role in division, that in effect the costs of education under a decentralized divisional plan were not sustainable as the recession in the 1980s caused the federal government to change the funding formula for the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, reducing the amount available to cover their “public” education. The eastern half of the Northwest Territories had a very small tax base on which to support public education where division offered the possibility of more direct control over education for the Inuit. Although it may be a matter for debate and disagreement, it is perhaps the case that the division of the Northwest Territories in 1999 was a response in part to the problem of funding education when there is no tax base. The remedy was the division of a huge land mass and this bureaucratic adjustment may be one of the biggest restructuring examples responding to the costs of education ever carried out in a western democracy. What the 1982 document may have done, is to put in place all the required characteristics by which such a response – territorial division – would be mounted and facilitated to its possible completion (the issue of division was put to plebiscite and the decision to form Nunavut almost failed), by the federal government. The 1982 document presents the matter of representation in education policy making and planning, an ideal resulting from representation through a legislature (formed in the Northwest Territories in 1975). The contrast was the response in 1994 to recession experienced through federal transfer payment adjustments and a radical re-evaluation of education spending. This contrast in policy documents was examined in my Master’s thesis in 1998. This research raised the matter of Canadian trends in education policy as explored through the territorial public education documents of the 20^th century. Is the decline of the welfare state reflected in legislation across the provinces and territories or is this a simplification in terms of describing ‘declines’? The research on the Northwest Territories, just in terms of the divide between the two policy documents I considered, the 1982 compared to the 1994 policy, provided a springboard into reviewing post-1983 Canadian public education documents(where Goulson’s list stops paradoxically) against a long list of historical 20^th century documents.