Baffin Fisheries improves financial, legal training for board members

“It’s my job to put myself out of a job,” says the interim CEO at Baffin Fisheries, Chris Flanagan, during a panel presentation at the Nunavut Trade Show on Sept. 19, while speaking about the company’s Inuit employment targets. (PHOTO BY BETH BROWN)

One year after launching an internal audit of its operations, the Baffin Fisheries Coalition is now doing financial training and legal orientation for new board and committee members.

“We had an audit, we increased the board to 10 members,” Chris Flanagan, the interim CEO for the Inuit-owned company, told delegates at the Nunavut Trade Show this past Sept. 19 in Iqaluit.

The company now has money to hire financial experts to help management staff, Flanagan said.

“Hopefully this will be a good start,” he said.

These activities followed a lawsuit in 2017 that the company filed against its ex-CEO, alleging fraud, embezzlement and the diversion of about $1.4 million worth of company money into a huge house located in the small town of Winterton on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula.

Those allegations have yet to be proven in court.

At the same time, the company cut ties with a construction company that was building an office space in Pond Inlet for Baffin Fisheries and the Mittimatalik Hunters and Trappers Organization.

“We had a half-built building in Pond Inlet,” Flanagan said, adding that, with help from a community construction team, the building opened in June.

Flanagan’s remarks came in response to a question from Iqaluit Mayor Madeleine Redfern, who asked how Baffin Fisheries is working to provide “governance training” for board members to ensure they are capable of overseeing staff.

“Governance helps ensure that our organizations don’t have these issues: financial losses, mismanagement,” Redfern said.

“Community members want to know that BFC is dealing with that, because we want to ensure that all our organizations that manage multi-million dollar resources do well.”

Profits, quotas and training

Baffin Fisheries is now looking at how to develop a larger inshore fishery, such as the fishery that has operated in Pangnirtung for many years.

While there is “huge potential” in the inshore fishery, Flanagan said the cost of air cargo is always a concern for fishery development projects in Nunavut, because flying processed product to the South eats into profits.

On the economic development front, Flanagan’s presentation described how, as a 100 per cent Inuit-owned company, Baffin Fisheries is committed to reaching 75 per cent Inuit employment for all levels of the company.

This year, the company was able to reach that benchmark for crews working on board its fishing trawlers.

But it’s training, in part, that will make those targets happen, Flanagan said.

Also speaking as a panellist, Randy Pittman of the Nunavut Fisheries and Marine Training Consortium said marine training for Nunavummiut needs to happen inside the territory.

“They shouldn’t have to go south for it,” he said.

The Iqaluit marine school is currently expanding to the Northwest Territories and Nunavik “based on success in Nunavut,” he said.

Instructors led as many as 70 courses in the North this year.

“If a ship comes up here, then Nunavummiut should be on it,” Pittman said, adding that it’s going to take a few generations to develop a marine workforce in Nunavut.

The marine school also trains people for work as tourism guides, processing-plant workers, and crew on commercial cargo ships.

“These are good paying jobs,” he said.

On the lobbying front, Brian Burke, the executive director of the Nunavut Fisheries Association, is working to get a larger quota for Nunavut fishers in adjacent offshore waters.

The fisheries association is pushing for sunset dates to be set on quotas that are now held by non-Nunavut companies.

“It can’t hold on forever. The southern players can’t hold onto their allocations forever,” Burke said. “It becomes a business decision for them as to when they make that sale to Nunavut.”

While provinces to the south of Nunavut hold quotas of at least 80 per cent for fisheries within their adjacent waters, in Nunavut quotas for some species are below 50 per cent.

Redfern asked Burke if the fisheries association is working with the federal government to make sure that Nunavut’s fishery is treated as an issue of Indigenous agency over natural resources.

“Unfortunately, the Nunavut land claims agreement provides for a Nunavut fishery. It doesn’t provide for an Inuit fishery,” she said. “Ideally, they should be one and the same.”

On the same day as the panel presentation, Qikiqtaaluk Corp. announced that its subsidiary, Qikiqtaaluk Fisheries Corp., is now 100 per cent Inuit-owned.