We’ll win back our Nunavut customers, NTCL says

In 2009, NTCL promised a more timely and cheaper delivery would result from its use of this new $14.6-million, 12,000-tonne barge to carry dry cargo north from Vancouver. (FILE PHOTO)

A “new and improved” NTCL plans to win back Nunavut business in the coming years, the company’s president said this week.

The marine transport operator, whose Nunavut service has shrunk to just a few contracts in the Kitikmeot region, says it has invested in a major management overhaul – including the addition of its new president, Bill Duffy, who joined NTCL last September.

“This is a turn-around year for NTCL,” Duffy told Nunatsiaq News. “We’ve spent a tremendous amount of time preparing to get back into the Kivalliq region.”

In 2010, some sealift customers in the Kivalliq received their shipments as much as a month late in 2010 because an NTCL-owned barge failed a Transport Canada inspection.

NTCL has been losing contracts in the Baffin and Kivalliq regions for many years, with the company seeing a significant drop in Nunavut customers after it closed its Churchill terminal in 2003.

Since then, NTCL has been shipping out of its Hay River hub to communities in the western Arctic — and hopes to gradually move back east.

“I can certainly acknowledge the issues we’ve had in the Kivalliq region,” Duffy said, “but we’ve made a conscious decision not to return until we could ensure the type of service that meets our standards.”

Since 2010, Duffy said the company has completely replaced its management team, hiring people with strong experience in marine shipping and putting them under the same roof in the company’s Edmonton office.

“We had to take some serious looks at out cost structure,” he said. “We’ve expended a great deal of capital to ensure [our fleet] performs at the standard we expect them to.”

Three of the company’s 24 barges operate in the Arctic; one was making was scheduled to make a fuel delivery in Cambridge Bay this week; another will visit other Kitikmeot communities in mid-September.

“We’re leaps and bounds ahead of where we were in 2010,” Duffy said. “So far the season is going very well.”

But the 2011 season was hampered early by a minor delay, he said, when buoys were deployed in the McKenzie Delta later than expected.

A handful of barges are also said to have broken away from their moorings in May as a result of early ice break-up in Inuvik.

So the company will have its work cut out for it when the Government of Nunavut launches the tendering process for new five-year sealift contracts early this fall.

But Duffy says the company plans to focus on community re-supply and offering the best price and a long history.

NTCL is going into its 76th year.

The company was purchased in 1985 by Norterra, owned 50-50 by the Inuit of Nunavut through Nunasi Corp. and the Inuvialuit of the western Arctic through the Inuvialuit Development Corp.