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A little more than 10 years ago, on the eve of Nunavut's creation, officials from the territory-to-be arrived in Ottawa asking for more money from the federal government.

In their PowerPoint presentation – the details of which were reported in The Globe and Mail, sparking a furious bout of newspaper-bashing in the Far North – officials outlined some of the challenges the new territory would face.

A third of the residents were on welfare. Suicide, teen pregnancy and substance abuse rates were far above national averages, per capita income was far below. Housing was in desperately short supply.

The new territory would generate, at best, only 10 per cent of its revenue; 90 per cent would have to come from Ottawa. The federal government's cost-per-person in Nunavut was therefore estimated to be about $21,700 in 1999 dollars.

A decade later, not much has changed, except that Nunavut has come into existence.

For example, it was estimated that in 1996 about one-third of the Nunavut population was living on social assistance; a new report, just released, says the figure is about 50 per cent.

The same report, echoing what was said a decade ago, reports that “there is a crisis in mental health across the territory, evidenced by desperately high suicide rates and rampant drug and alcohol abuse.”

The report could have added that smoking rates are in the epidemic range of about 70 per cent (compared to 18 per cent for the Canadian population at large), with devastating current and future consequences outlined in an excellent series of recent articles by Andrew Duffy in The Ottawa Citizen. The recent report was done by North Sky Consulting Group of Whitehorse at the instigation of the Nunavut government itself. That took guts, for which the government should be commended, since how often does a government give outsiders full access to information with a mandate to consult citizens about how they feel?

Guts aside, the results were bleak. Respondents told North Sky they were still proud of Nunavut's creation, but the “government is not meeting that vision.” More shockingly, the report found that, pride in Nunavut aside, “people told us that, in their opinion, things were better with the Government of the Northwest Territories;” that is, before Nunavut's creation as a separate territory.

In fairness to Nunavut, pass around an open microphone to Canadians in any province and into it will pour a litany of grievances, woes and disappointments. Name any government, anywhere in Canada, where the majority of people admire governments or think they even occasionally get things right. Griping is a Canadian pastime.

Still, the picture North Sky paints isn't pretty, nor was one offered in a report of Nunavut education by Judge Thomas Berger, who said the territory was passing through a “moment of crisis.”

The Inuit of Nunavut are moving slowly and with great difficulty from what the North Sky reports calls a “subsistence” economy of living on and from the land (and sea) to a wage economy. Many Inuit are not prepared for this by way of formal education, which is one reason for the dashing of the dreamy hopes at the territory's creation of Inuit taking most of the civil service jobs.

North Sky's report, while valuable, focuses mostly on government, because government dominates the territory – but therein lies the territory's core problem, one the report scarcely mentions.

There is a tiny non-governmental sector in Nunavut, for the understandable, if alarming, reason that there are not many methods of earning income in a private wage economy. It might be that decades from now, minerals, oil and gas could open economic opportunities, but these largely are prospects over the horizon. Art, mining and fishing provide income – the Harper government's investment in a port on Baffin Island could widen fishing opportunities. Tourism will always offer wonderful prospects, but limited ones owing to climate.

A weak private sector means a huge public one, and also a degree of unwelcome dependence on government assistance, part-time jobs, contracts and programs.

Given the territory's challenges/problems, and limited capacity to raise revenue, it's no wonder the cry is up for enhanced federal transfers of money.

It's the same cry that was heard just before Nunavut's creation.