ArticleGossip leads to firing of GN worker
“Nunavut is the most racist place I’ve been to”
GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS
Harbir Boparai was fired three weeks into a contract with the Government of Nunavut in Panniqtuuq. He believes senior GN officials were acting upon rumours circulating in the community. (PHOTO BY GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS)
Harbir Boparai
A former Government of Nunavut worker of South Asian descent alleges his human rights were violated this summer when a senior GN bureaucrat fired him on what he believes are racist grounds.
“Nunavut is the most racist place I’ve been to,” says Harbir Boparai, a 22-year-old university graduate who was born and raised in Vancouver.
This past summer, Boparai, who holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of British Columbia, was hired by the GN’s Department of Economic Development on a four-month contract. His job, based in Panniqtuuq, was to do work on a new banking system for Nunavut, and other projects.
About three weeks after his contract started, the GN’s assistant deputy minister of economic development, Rosemary Keenainak, ordered that his contract be terminated.
Documents that Boparai obtained under the Access to Information and Privacy Act suggest the GN did this in reaction to malicious rumours circulating around Panniqtuuq.
At the time, Boparai was staying with another Panniqtuuq man who is also of South Asian descent, and to whom Boparai is not related. But some gossiping Panniqtuuq residents falsely believed that Boparai is a relative of his former housemate, and that his housemate conspired to get his friend a government job.
“I believe it [my firing] is racially motivated, because we’re both brown-skinned men,” he said. “If you see two brown guys living together, the perception is that they’re related. That’s the perception of the town,” Boparai said.
“When it affects your employment, when people higher up are using this as an excuse to terminate you, that’s unacceptable,” Boparai said.
An e-mail written by Keenainak to Boparai’s supervisor, Rueben Murphy, appears to support Boparai’s allegation. The e-mail suggests those rumours are the source of a complaint that someone made to the office of Premier Paul Okalik, and to Panniqtuuq MLA Peter Kilabuk.
And they suggest that Keenainak may have then acted upon pressure exerted by the premier’s office.
“This office is getting complaints thru the premier’s office and the local MLA about the hiring of Harbir. The complaint I got today was that he [Boparai] just got off the plane a few weeks ago and was able to get a job with EDT, thru someone he knows and lives with (people are saying that Harbir is [name deleted]’s brother-in-law.),” Keenainak said in the e-mail, dated July 26, 2004.
Boparai says he was the only employee in his division with a university degree in economics. He also says he was hired because he was the only qualified person available for the job.
Two Inuit from Panniqtuuq were hired at around the same time, under similar circumstances, Boparai said, but their contracts were not terminated.
“If I was Inuit, this would have never come up,” Boparai said. “If an Inuk moved in with another Inuk, would it be a problem then?”
The office where Boparai worked is called the Division of Economic Development and Innovation. Its employees are supposed to provide the GN with strategies and policies related to job creation and economic development.
But Boparai says the decentralized office suffers from severe staff shortages that seriously hamper its work. Last summer, four full-time positions were vacant.
“We are facing serious capacity issues and the input from these casual hires will contribute significantly to some of our priority work areas,” says a fax that Murphy, the director of that division sent to Human Resources Minister Louis Tapardjuk on July 8.
Despite those staff shortages, Keenainak went ahead and ordered the termination of Boparai’s contract.
Boparai filed a grievance through the Nunavut Employees Union. Doug Workman, the president of the NEU, said the grievance has been sent to arbitration. That means the union and the government will agree on an arbitrator, who will then hold a quasi-judicial hearing to decide the issue.
Besides violating his charter-protected rights against discrimination, Boparai says the government is also breaking its own rules of employment.
“They’re willing to violate their own hiring policy,” he said. “Nowhere... does it state you can fire a non-Inuk to replace him with an Inuk. You can’t do that.”
After the grievance was filed, Boparai’s supervisor wrote a letter to the union, saying the dismissal was based not on Boparai’s race, but on “public perception.”
“Mr. Boparai’s casual employment was terminated on the basis of the perception of fairness by members of the community,” Murphy wrote in a draft version of the letter, dated Aug. 23, 2004.
“... We, as a representative of government, have an obligation to hire on the basis of fairness and equity. If the community feels, however inaccurately, that this process is not fair, then we are obliged to ensure fairness and equity. This was the case with Mr. Boparai’s casual employment.”
Boparai also plans to seek compensation through the federal Human Rights Commission, who he believes will take up his case as a violation of his rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
A GN spokesperson for the department of economic development, Karen Kabloona, said the government will not comment on Boparai’s case because it is an “employer-employee issue.”
The job was eventually re-advertised, and Boparai applied for it again, but he says the GN never contacted him.
Boparai has since moved to Toronto, where he hopes to start a computer technology business.
Related editorial article
EditorialThe GN: a haven of racism and incompetence?
The most despicable aspect of Harbir Boparai’s untimely dismissal from the Government of Nunavut, of course, is the strong and well-substantiated suggestion that he is a victim of racism.
But his short, unhappy sojourn in Nunavut also raises many more serious questions about whether the premier, the cabinet, and the Nunavut government’s senior managers are even willing and able to do the basic work of government.
Boparai has already produced enough evidence to suggest that Nunavut’s cabinet ministers and senior civil servants have little or no interest in ensuring that the territorial government is staffed by competent people. His evidence suggests that their only real concern is the manipulation of public perception, through cynical pandering and lying.
First, the allegations of racism:
Boparai, who is of South Asian descent, asserts that he is the victim of malicious, racist rumours that circulated among some Panniqtuuq residents after he was hired for a short, four-month term position. At the time, he happened to be staying with another man who is also of South Asian descent.
The rumour-mongers assumed that the two men were related, and that Boparai’s housemate somehow conspired to get his friend a job. This is the kind of crude racist stereotype that non-white immigrants to Canada have endured for many, many decades: let one of them into the country and they’ll bring all their relatives. Right?
It’s not the government’s fault those rumours arose. That, unfortunately, is human nature.
But the government, by its own admission, chose to act on them. And that makes the Government of Nunavut a party to a racist act. In accepting those racist rumours as being worthy of action, the GN, from the premier’s office on down, has validated them.
The government, of course, claims otherwise. In documents acquired through the Access to Information and Privacy Act, government officials say that Boparai’s contract was terminated to ensure “fairness and equity.”
But when Boparai re-applied for the job afterwards, no one at the GN responded to him. Why not? This, after all, is a young man with a university degree in economics seeking a job with the Department of — guess what? — Economic Development.
It’s also worth noting that for the short time he was there, he was the only person in his division who held a degree in economics. Meanwhile, two Inuit hired at around the same time, in the same manner, and under similar contracts, were allowed to keep their jobs as project managers. Since the only discernible difference between them and Boparai is race, the logical conclusion is that racism was the only relevant factor in their decision.
The documents show that the premier’s office was involved in the decision to get rid of Boparai. They also suggest that Human Resources Minister Louis Tapardjuk may have been involved too.
Why? It’s highly unusual in any government, even the Government of Nunavut, for cabinet ministers to become directly involved in the hiring of low-level government workers. This evidence suggests that there is a willingness by elected politicians to interfere with a public service that is supposed to be non-political. That, in turn, suggests a short, slippery road to the grossest forms of corruption in government.
It happens that the premier, Paul Okalik, and the assistant deputy minister who ordered that Boparai’s contract by terminated, Rosemary Keenainak, are from Panniqtuuq, the community where Boparai worked and where the malicious rumours arose. Was cronyism or nepotism a factor? We don’t know. But because of the actions of their respective offices, that question is now out there.
It is also the case that the Department of Economic Development and Transportation is one of many departments that have been carpet-bombed into near-total dysfunction by the GN’s badly-implemented decentralization policy.
The innovation division, where Boparai was to have been employed, suffered from at least four longstanding full-time staff vacancies. “We are facing serious capacity issues...,” his supervisor said in an e-mail to the human resources minister on July 8.
That is a comment that could be made about many parts of the GN, especially those divisions whose employees are supposed to generate the vital information the territorial government needs to make good decisions on behalf of Nunavut residents.
The Bureau of Statistics, for example, has now evaporated. The GN ordered that the office be moved to Pang, and every single employee refused to move. There is now one lonely manager there, charged with the thankless task of rebuilding the entire bureau. Similarly, the wildlife division, which was decimated by a forced move from Iqaluit to Igloolik, has never recovered. That division still consists of a mostly empty office, staffed by ghosts.
Despite all this, the Nunavut government still pretends that economic development is one of its major priorities. The Nunavut government still pretends that capacity building is a major goal. The Nunavut government still pretends that it is committed to human rights.
We now know that none of that is true. The least that they could do is stop lying about it. JB
The person who got fired is a friend of mine and I have permision from him to post these articles. He wants to know if anyone in the Toronto area knows a lawyer who will be willing to take his case pro bono.
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