Tomorrow, Saturday the 25th April, I’ll be at the British Library in London to participate in the 40th annual conference of the British Association for Canadian Studies (BACS). This year’s conference theme is open, and my presentation will focus on land and resource devolution in the Northwest Territories, based on my recent policy commentary for the 2014 Arctic Yearbook.
In that commentary, I argued that NWT devolution won’t live up to its nation-building promise unless it fosters collaborative partnership between aboriginal and public government — but that the signs seemed to point toward quite the opposite. That was last October — and with NWT aboriginal peoples now facing off against Ottawa in court over unwelcome provisions in the NWT Devolution Act, little has changed.