A bold risk

The Government of Nunavut’s heavily subsidized workers aren’t likely to be too happy about their employer’s new staff housing policy when they read about it for the first time.

But in the long run, they might just learn to love it. In the long run, those who respond to the GN’s incentives — which include a yet-to-be-announced assistance program — will move into various forms of homeownership, which could include ownership of condominium units, townhouses and even co-operative housing.

This will benefit employees in two ways.

First, instead of paying rent to a landlord, homeowners will make mortgage payments to a bank that, in effect, are payments to themselves, thereby increasing their own wealth.

Second, GN employees will acquire more independence from their employer, and gain the freedom to switch jobs without having to worry about losing their housing. That’s just one of several reasons why having one’s housing tied to one’s job is, in the long run, not a healthy state of affairs.

And in the long run, the new staff housing policy is good for the public and good for the territorial public service.

Right now, the GN is a revolving door, staffed by too many itinerant cubicle-workers who never seem to stick with their jobs long enough to learn anything useful. A policy that encourages more GN workers to become homeowners could help turn that around, because the financial commitment required by homeownership usually turns into a long-term commitment to one’s job and to one’s community. It will help the GN develop a mature, experienced — and more competent — public service.

Having said that, it’s fair to point out that the GN’s high staff turnover rate is attributable to many other factors too, such as low morale produced by abusive managers, the botched implementation of decentralization in some communities, and competition from other government and quasi-government employers. These are all preventable problems that the GN must also deal with.

But fostering more homeownership among GN employees is still a necessary element in the development of a strong public service, and this policy ought to promote that.

The policy is good for communities, too, especially the big three regional centres, where the GN will entirely withdraw from the provision of staff housing. It will help Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay evolve into tax-based communities, giving their community governments more financial independence and giving their elected councils an opportunity to mature politically.

The policy is also good for the economy, because it will subject property developers to the discipline of the marketplace. In the long term, they’ll have to take more risks and become more entrepreneurial.

Many GN staff now live in housing complexes that were built under uncompetitive, no-risk, negotiated lease agreements that, in some cases, are costing the GN far more than the buildings are worth. In one of her reports on the GN’s finances, the Auditor General of Canada highlighted one such lease, for a building that cost the government a 50 per cent premium.

That particular building contained office space, not staff housing, but there are many office-apartment complexes in Nunavut where the GN has inherited similarly uncompetitive long-term leases from the Northwest Territories, many of them sole-sourced, and signed under dubious circumstances.

But in the three largest communities, property developers will soon have to market their projects to consumers, not to GN bureaucrats and politicians. It will get a lot harder for developers to sign over-priced, politically tainted lease-back agreements with the GN for staff housing, a prospect that promises to reduce corruption and sleaze.

The GN’s new staff housing policy is a bold risk — but it’s a risk that just might pay off in the long run. JB