Made in Nunavut: An Experiment in Decentralized Government.

• Author: Brock, David M.
• Position: Book review

Made in Nunavut: An Experiment in Decentralized Government, Jack Hicks and Graham White, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2015, 375 p.

When Jack Anawak publicly spoke out in 2003 against a Cabinet decision to transfer public service positions from his community of Rankin Inlet to Baker Lake, he was a minister in the Government of Nunavut (GN). His statement was a clear breach of the convention of Cabinet solidarity; Anawak was subsequently stripped of his ministerial portfolios and removed from the Executive Council. I was then in my first professional job, working in the GN's Cabinet office. The incident remains, for me, a live example of Canadian constitutional conventions applied and debated in public. It is also a striking example of two decades of political quarrels in Nunavut over the policy of 'decentralization'.

Nunavut's decision to organize its territorial government with a "radically decentralized or deconcentrated organizational model" is this book's "central theme" (12). How decision makers and administrators arrived at and implemented this political and administrative arrangement is described in considerable detail. It is brought to life by examining debates over the promise, design, cost, application, and evaluation of decentralization. What results is really the most comprehensive documentation to date of the creation of a new territorial government in Canada's eastern Arctic.

The story unfolds chronologically. It begins with the closing phases of negotiating the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (NLC A), which included Article4 to establish a public government for all residents of the eastern Arctic rather than a self-government only for Inuit, and runs through 2014 with the most recent available statistics on the GN public service. Approximately 20 pages are devoted early on to terminology and a survey of the comparative literature on deconcentrated public administrations; however brief, this overview sets a crucial context for the reader to understand how politicians, bureaucrats and eventually consultants could themselves interpret, reinterpret, and sometimes misinterpret what is 'decentralization'.

Fully 50 per cent of this book is devoted to the period 1993-1999; that is, after the signing of the NLCA through until the opening of the GN. It was during this time that political and bureaucratic actors--occupying committees, offices, secretariats, divisions, and commissions--did research, wrote reports...