By Tim Querengesser

In September 2008, Up Here explored Nunavik Inuit's long-standing demand for an apology and compensation following the government cull of sled dogs during the '50s and '60s. Last week, a former Quebec judge recommended they get just that.

As reported in Nunatsiaq News, retired superior court judge Jean-Jacques Croteau has recommended Quebec and Canada owe the Inuit an apology and compensation. Hired jointly in 2007 by the Quebec government and the Makivik Corporation to hold an inquiry into the killings, Crouteau released his final report last week. It concludes that at least 1,000 dogs were killed, many by bullets and some even by being gassed.

As Up Here's story -- "What happened to the dogs?" -- documents, an RCMP investigation into the killings concluded there was no policy to eliminate sled dogs, but rather that RCMP officers killed them because they were diseased, hungry, or dangerous in settlements. On this point, Crouteau hasn't disagreed; in an interim report release some time ago, he supported this finding.

Yet, as Nunatsiaq News reports, Croteau's final report argues how changes to Inuit life, brought on by federal and provincial government policies of relocating people to settlements, was what created the problem of diseased or vicious dogs. He said the entire society suffered as a result of the killing of the dogs.

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