A policy for the past

It’s a virtual certainty that the Nunavut government will soon adopt the draft contracting policy released to the public last month by a joint government-NTI working group set up to make recommendations on ensuring the Nunavut government’s compliance with Article 24 of the Nunavut land claims agreement.

That’s unfortunate, because as it stands now, their proposed policy would do little to encourage the creation of new Inuit-owned businesses in the future. However, since no one within the government of Nunavut or Nunavut Tunngavik seems capable of recognizing its weaknesses, it’s likely that we’ll be stuck with the policy for many years to come.

Why is it an inadequate policy? Doesn’t it provide competitive advantages to Inuit-owned companies, and to companies that hire Inuit?

The proposed new business incentive policy for Nunavut is inadequate because, while it is earnestly aimed at correcting the injustices of the past, it does nothing to anticipate the issues of the future.

For example, the policy seems to assume — against all the evidence — that the construction of capital projects will be a major source of government contracts in the future. It’s understandable why this is so. Many Inuit bitterly remember the 1960s and 1970s, when federal and territorial government contracts to build Nunavut’s community infrastructure went to companies from Quebec and Alberta, and unemployed Inuit stood around watching non-Inuit scoop up the lucrative jobs, apprenticeships, and business opportunities that went with those contracts.

But those days, unfortunately, are gone, and the proposed new contracting policy is simply an out-dated solution to a problem that doesn’t existed any more. The Nunavut government’s capital budget is shrinking. The $55 million worth of capital spending money allocated in the Nunavut government’s 1999-2000 budget represents about a third of what the government of the Northwest Territories used to spend on capital projects in the three Nunavut regions less than a decade ago.

The capital projects of the future — and there will be fewer of them in the future than there were in the past — will not be built by government. They will be built and leased back to the territorial government by private companies. But how can you design a business incentive policy that can be applied to long-term leases and public-private partnerships? The working group’s draft policy does not appear to anticipate these kinds of arrangements.

Second, the policy does not appear to recognize the numerous areas of business that exist outside of the construction industry. For example, how can the point system set out in the proposed policy be applied to things like the procurement of office furniture and supplies? How can the proposed policy be applied to knowledge-based businesses and consultancies?

The proposed new contracting policy released last week is an unimaginative, backward looking document that cobbles together the GNWT’s old business incentive policy with responses to longstanding political demands that Nunavut Tunngavik has been making for years. It certainly promises to strengthen the growing hegemony of NTI’s family of bureaucratic birthright development corporations — but appears to do little for individual Inuit who might one day wish to own their own businesses. JB