By Tamara Merritt
The North’s three premiers re-committed to working together on issues of shared interest, through the signing of a renewed five-year Northern Cooperation Accord this week.
The signing took place on Thursday during the annual Northern Premiers Forum in Hay River, N.W.T., which began on Tuesday.
While the forum between the three territorial leaders takes place annually, Yukon Premier Currie Dixon said that the timing this year was “very deliberate.”
He said the forum allows the premiers to attend upcoming meetings with a unified voice, including the Council of the Federation where premiers from across Canada will gather in July, and then a First Ministers’ Meeting with Prime Minister Mark Carney.
“Meetings like this allow us to get the three territories on the same page,” Dixon said of the forum this week. “We’re speaking, understanding where each of us sit and where we have common priorities we can share on behalf of the entire territorial North.”
Some of those shared priorities include Arctic security and sovereignty in the form of federal investment and construction in the North, said N.W.T. Premier R.J. Simpson.
Simpson said it’s important to work together with Ottawa and Indigenous governments to make sure northerners are benefiting from those federal projects, including training northern workers and giving contracts to northern companies.
“We are going to do our best to ensure that any dollar that can stay in the territory will stay in the territory,” he said.
The Northern Premiers Forum took place the same week that federal Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson announced in Yellowknife that the federal government wants to designate two projects, the Mackenzie Valley Highway in the N.W.T., and the Grays Bay Road and Port in Nunavut, as projects of national interest.
Nunavut Premier John Main said other topics of mutual interest discussed during the forum were health-care infrastructure and building up the North and Arctic security.
“There’s a lot of value in the conversations that we have and the information we are able to share amongst each other,” Main said.
The three premiers also discussed the Arctic offshore moratorium on oil and gas licensing, the RCMP and future of contract policing in the North, and changes to the Inuit Child First Initiative and Jordan’s Principle funding.
Simpson said those federally-funded programs are “vitally important,” and that Ottawa’s cuts to Jordan’s Principle have had a negative impact.
Overall, the three territorial leaders reiterated the importance of collaboration between the three northern governments and the impact it will make moving forward.
“The point of these meetings is to ensure that as northerners, we’re all aware of what’s going on in each other’s territories,” Simpson said. “We figure out how we can work together, how we can use our unified voices to advance the interests of the North.”
Write to Eilís Quinn at eilis.quinn(at)cbc.ca
Related stories from around the North:
Canada: Int’l arctic cooperation needs to continue despite rupture with Russia: Canada’s GG,The Canadian Press
Finland: Russian cyber attacks, espionage pose growing threat to Finnish national security, Yle news
Norway: Norway expels 15 intelligence officers at Russian Embassy, The Independent Barents Observer
Russia: Russian Arctic rescue exercise attended by observers from Iran and Saudi Arabia, The Independent Barents Observer
