Hon. Dennis Glen Patterson: Honourable senators, I rise to pay tribute to Paul Aarulaaq Quassa, who has had a huge role in the successful negotiation of the landmark Nunavut Land Claims Agreement in 1993 and the consequent establishment of the Nunavut territory in 1999.

Mr. Quassa was born in Manitok, a hunting camp near Igloolik, and raised in a very traditional way on the land. At the age of six, he was taken far away to a residential school in Churchill, Manitoba, where he spent the next 13 years far away from home. Throughout that time, he focused on his studies while working hard to retain his identity as an Inuk.

It was also at residential school that Mr. Quassa and other Inuit leaders who initiated the Inuit land claims movement in the 1970s first met and discussed their dreams of establishing an Inuit homeland carved out of the Northwest Territories. In 1972 he became a land claims field worker in Igloolik and went on to become president of Tunngavik Federation of Nunavut, signing the final land claims agreement.

Achieving the commitment to the creation of Nunavut within the land claims agreement was an exceptional achievement, since the federal government’s comprehensive claims policy at the time did not permit political development to be part of land claims negotiations. Under Mr. Quassa’s leadership, Inuit refused to accept a land claims settlement that separated land rights and political development. Their 25-year campaign involved a strategy to subdivide the Northwest Territories to establish a Nunavut territory with its own public government. This took negotiation, extensive community consultation in both the eastern and western regions of the Northwest Territories and appeals to the Canadian public.

Pivotal developments included two successful territory-wide plebiscite votes in the Northwest Territories, endorsing the principle of division in 1982 and ratification of the boundary for division in 1993. In this connection, I was privileged to have worked very closely with Mr. Quassa in my capacity as a member of the Legislative Assembly and then Premier of the Northwest Territories.

Mr. Quassa has also had a notable political career, having been elected mayor of Igloolik, then being elected to represent his home region of Aggu in 2013 in the Nunavut legislature and then having been selected to be Minister of Education, where he pushed to implement bilingual education in territorial schools in English and Inuktitut.

He was re-elected in the 2017 election and was subsequently selected by his peers to be Premier of Nunavut. Later, in 2020, he was elected as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut.

Having not run for re-election in Nunavut, Mr. Quassa is now elected to Iqaluit City Council and is active as a senior adviser to the massive Baffinland iron ore project at Mary River on Baffin Island, one of the largest employers in Nunavut. He is pursuing his vision for Nunavut: of Inuit becoming self-sufficient and self-reliant through responsible resource development on Inuit lands.

Thank you, Paul, for your great contributions to Nunavut.

Qujannamiik. Taima.