The decision involved a gay refugee to Canada and a straight woman who met in university overseas, became close friends and had a baby together. The man, identified only as AP in court documents, moved to Canada and obtained protection based on his sexual orientation because he faced persecution in his home country, which was not identified in court documents. The pair spoke every day and made plans to meet up and travel abroad together.
AP and AM travelled two more times together: once while AM was pregnant, and another time when their child turned two.
Subscribe to our PDF edition.
Friends and family viewed the pair as a couple. Still, neither AM nor her parents knew that AP was gay. AP regularly sent money back home to support AM and their child. Hoping to live together as a family, the pair eventually decided that AP would sponsor AM and the child to move to Canada. At that point, AP finally came out to AM.
Despite the disclosure, they both agreed to continue with the process. Their case hit a roadblock once it reached immigration officials in Canada. When they appealed their case over two days at the Immigration Appeal Division IAD , a tribunal that adjudicates immigration decisions, AP explained that he felt love for AM and was committed to both her and their child. He also provided evidence of other mixed-orientation couples. Despite this, their case was again shot down. The IAD was not persuaded that a gay man and a straight woman could "meet the sexual component of conjugal partnership.
In truth, its roots lay much deeper in the troubled history of contact between Inuit and the white arrivistes from Europe. In Cape Dorset, qallunaat first came in significant numbers around , first bringing religion, then trading posts, then law enforcement and bureaucracy. The Hudson's Bay Company set up in , soon drawing hundreds of Inuit into the fur trade. But in , when prices plummeted for white-fox furs, the most coveted pelts, so did Inuit fortunes. People were eating dog food to stay alive. The Mounties radioed for a massive food airlift, and urged Inuit in far-flung seasonal camps to move to Cape Dorset, close to food and health care.
It was then, in the words of Mary Simon, president of the advocacy organization Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, that "the colonization process evolved to the point where our people expected things to be given to them.
LGBT rights in Canada - Wikipedia
While the shift increased Inuit life expectancy from 35 in the early s to 66 in the late s, the transitional period sapped all manner of Inuit self-reliance, replacing it with shoddy government homes, abusive residential schools and social-assistance cheques. Generations since have been raised to sentimentalize the past and expect little of the future, a recipe for the cultural disorientation and undirected anger that breed violence. For Ottawa, the relocation tidied up the North, sweeping a scattered population into pockets suitable for social assistance, health care and all the other stuff of Canadian governance.
It also helped to satisfy four distinct quandaries: a series of court decisions beginning in the s that ruled Canada was responsible for the welfare of its aboriginal peoples; a long-standing policy of assimilating aboriginal people into mainstream culture; a burgeoning desire to open the North to mining; and the need to solidify Canada's international claims to Arctic sovereignty.
Throughout the push into settlements, however, the federal government systematically excluded Inuit from decision-making roles. Their fates would be sealed in faraway offices, without consent or consultation. Finally, Inuit Tapirisat of Canada was formed in to lobby for Inuit rights. By , it had submitted a land-claims proposal to the federal government demanding a vast tract of land and mineral rights under Inuit title, along with the creation of a new Inuit-dominated political entity called Nunavut. After 17 years of grinding negotiations, prime minister Brian Mulroney signed those tenets into law with the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement and the Nunavut Act.
A few years later, Mr. About a year after its formation, Jim Bell, the conscientious editor-in-chief of the Nunatsiaq News who is not an Inuk , wrote that Nunavut was a "made-for-failure territory" — overburdened with bureaucracy, paralyzed by an inadequate budget, destined to be a political basket case into the foreseeable future. More than a decade later, "I can't be anything but pessimistic," Mr. Bell said recently.
The only thing Nunavut has been successful at doing is creating a space where Inuit identity can be expressed.
But it is not meeting the basic needs of the population right now. A bloody seal lay outside his bungalow, its whiskers dangling with icicles. Inside, the year-old man sat at his kitchen table, leaning his right ear toward a radio blasting the CBC hourly news and looping his thumbs around a twine belt holding up ragged trousers. Ningeosiak was born in a remote hunting camp at a time when Inuit still relied on dogs for transportation and snow for shelter, and firmed up those hands over decades of hauling seal and slicing beluga muktuk.
In , University of British Columbia social work professor Frank Tester surveyed 91 homes in Cape Dorset to glean the human toll of housing shortages and overcrowding.
Gay in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada
Some issues cited were obvious, such as cleanliness, privacy and sleep. Others were not. One in four brought up anger. About one in five said depression and violence. Tester noted that at times one woman a week was being removed to a shelter in Iqaluit. At Mr. Ningeosiak's house, his adult children sleep on two couches in the front room.
His grandchildren sleep on the floor. When they wake up, they watch television and fight.
Start Online Dating In Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada
Ningeosiak said. When we were out on the land, this didn't happen. Iqaluit is Nunavut's boom town, its big smoke, its metropolis. The airport hums all night. Big banks, absent from most other hamlets, line the main drag. In a new and welcome development, Iqalummiut can even buy double-doubles.
And yet, here in Nunavut's bridge to modern Canada, one in five houses is overcrowded and one in 10 families use their living room as a bedroom. Hundreds of homes need major repairs. The government of Nunavut is working on it: The town is filled with welding sparks, hard hats and the growing steel skeletons of sturdy apartment blocks. But Iqaluit's residential boom is outpacing the construction boom — its population has nearly doubled, to 7,, since it officially became the capital in and professionals from all over the country started coming to seek high-paying government jobs. That invasion ramped up the already-existing tension between Inuit and newcomers.
Despite a mandate to fill 85 per cent of government jobs by with Inuit, the rate has languished around 50 per cent for a decade, because Nunavut's education system cannot produce enough qualified candidates. Redfern, the new mayor, is perhaps the most prominent critic of this broken system. At the time, she was bemoaning her chances of ever holding public office in her home territory.
Born in the North to an Inuit mother and a father who had immigrated from England, she went through grade school in Ottawa before going on to law school and becoming the first Inuk to clerk for the Supreme Court of Canada. She doesn't speak Inuktitut fluently, and her southern education is treated suspiciously up here. This discourages some youth from seeking education away, even as dropout rates at home sit at 75 per cent.
Those who do graduate receive an education that falls well short of standards in the South. Thanks to an unofficial policy of "social promotion" that grants students passing grades regardless of academic performance, graduates can possess both a high-school diploma and functional illiteracy. Last autumn, one non-Inuit family in Cape Dorset was planning a move to Ontario because the hamlet's high school didn't offer a single university-recognized course.
And yet education is what Nunavut arguably needs the most. Half of the territory's population is under 25, with a birth rate that leads the nation — a demographic crush of ignorance and incompetence that could hamstring the territory for decades. Nunavut's political culture is overtly populist but deeply conservative. There is a strong resistance to change, and reverence for all things traditional. Encouraging young men to hunt is a popular remedy to virtually every social problem, though one might question the encouragement of gun use in such a violent climate.
The majority's views on women's roles, abortion and gay marriage hark back to an era before the suffrage movement. Elders are the ultimate authority, their wisdom unquestionable as an oracle's. Such a culture can become incapable of identifying its core problems, let alone addressing them.
For example, the territory introduced a suicide-prevention plan only last year, even though the crisis was well documented at the very outset of Nunavut. Two people involved with the process said it was impossible to convince Inuit leadership that Southern solutions such as increased mental-health services and providing training in suicide intervention were viable solutions to a uniquely northern problem. Even Nunavut Health Minister Tagak Curley, one of the original Inuit activists, told The Globe and Mail, "Suicide isn't such a big problem any more" — a statement in plain contradiction of the facts.
One of Mr. Curley's colleagues, Justice Minister Keith Peterson, is far more forthcoming. He sees all the suicide death notices more than since , speaks with the shattered families and talks openly about the plight of Nunavut's youth. Peterson said. Nor does he have the money to find out. Earlier this year, Mr. That means cuts. Big ones. But the rink is tilted against him. In a series of investigations, federal Auditor-General Sheila Fraser has revealed the extent of Nunavut's bureaucratic dysfunction: In one recent audit, her office found that its public service limps along with 23 per cent of its positions unfilled, and a hiring process so sluggish it undermines the most basic functions of government.
Redfern said, bumping along Iqaluit's icy roads in her Ford pickup one afternoon. It will give us a leg up only if we use it properly — if we decide to embrace self-improvement, education, good governance. So far, we haven't. By day, Iqaluit can seem downright sleepy. Locals sit for hours in warm hotel lobbies to pass the time.
- fucking gay escort Mascouche Canada?
- adult gay dating Saint Joseph Du Lac Canada.
- most popular gay dating sites Montmagny Canada.
- The trials of Nunavut: Lament for an Arctic nation.
- Navigation menu;
- Premium Service Designed For Gay in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada And Their Admirers?
The half-dozen restaurants here keep such irregular hours that it's a gamble to try to find breakfast on a weekend morning. We don't have the big-city crime issues. Our stuff is self-destruction. That's what makes the detachment a perfect place to break in fresh-faced Mounties such as Constable Shane Pottie, a year-old Nova Scotian nearly two years out of training, who patrolled the capital city on a recent Friday night. His shift began at 9 p. For an hour, he crisscrossed town waiting for a call, slowing down on each five-minute pass to idle around a knot of kids playing road hockey late into the night.
But after that, the whole city seemed to erupt. Over the next few hours, Constable Pottie would kick in two doors, wrestle several drunkards to the ground, track footprints at a break-in scene outside a school, help process 15 prisoners, continually dodge the widening river of urine forming on the floor of the detachment's lock-up and save an infant from falling out of her mother's amauti a Inuit parka with an extra-large hood designed to carry a baby. He was on his way, deking around the hockey boys again, their little bodies now steaming in the minusdegree night.
Then the dispatcher crackled again: "Detox male now has a knife and is threatening people. City scenery blurred past: unsteady drunks milling around the four main bars, the dim orange lights of an entire grid run on diesel generators, dinged-up cabs delivering intoxicated people or their intoxicants.