It’s about health care, stupid

Did Nunavut cabinet members make a dumb decision in June when they gave the Rankin Inlet health centre contract to a firm that will cost them at least half a million dollars more than the lowest bidder?

Yes – but only if you care about irrelevant issues like financial responsibility, or respect for written rules and policies. Because if you care about the realities of political power in Nunavut, none of the above really matters.

As politicians, Nunavut cabinet ministers know it’s a decision they will easily get away with.

It may be the kind of thing that will one day get them into trouble with the auditor general of Canada, but who cares? Never will such decisions ever get them into trouble with the only people who really matter to them – Nunavut voters.

And even if the whispered, unproven rumours turn out be true about Sanajiit Construction, or its parent company, the Evaz Group, exerting political influence on cabinet to get the health centre contract, that won’t matter either. For voters in the small communities, “local” is the only concept that counts, and if it feels good to them its the right thing to do politically.

So to the untrained eye, Premier Paul Okalik may have looked highly evasive over the past week and a half while fielding questions about it from Iqaluit Centre MLA Hunter Tootoo.

But it’s more likely that Okalik was actually being honest. It’s more likely that Okalik simply can’t explain why cabinet made the decision – except to say that it felt good at the time.

So if it felt good, why not? To explain how many local jobs and training positions the government actually bought with the extra $500,000 they’re spending requires the use of a lot of complicated arithmetic – which never goes over well with voters.

The same applies to the Nunavummi Nangminiqaqtunik Ikajuuti, or “NNI” policy. The NNI, which consists of a set of arithmetical formulas, is equally tiresome to explain to voters.

That’s why no one will ever care whether the government actually violated the NNI policy when it awarded the Rankin health centre job to the Clark-Sanajiit joint-venture – no one will ever do the arithmetic. And if someone else does the arithmetic, most eyes will glaze over before anyone will ever get a chance to understand it.

At any rate, all eyes will now be fixed upon Clark Builders and its smaller “locally based” partners, Sanajiit Construction, owned by the Evaz Group of Grimsby, Ont.

Now that the pressure is on, the two southern, but “locally-based” companies have no choice but to actually hire and train Inuit to work on the Rankin Inlet health centre – that is, if anyone still cares about that issue by the time construction supplies make their way off the barge next summer.

Once upon a time, the stated purpose of building three new health centres in Nunavut- total cost, approximately $90 million – was to somehow improve the quality of health care provided to Nunavut residents.

How naive. As we can all see now, their actual purpose, apparently, is to create three juicy make-work projects for Nunavut’s ailing construction industry.

At least, that’s how it looks. Since 1995, when the planning process began, how much energy has been spent debating the health care benefits of building three new health centres in Nunavut? Almost none. On the other hand, how much energy has been spent debating which companies will get the lucrative contracts to build them?

The same attitude prevails in discussions about the use of medical travel money, whether emergency medical evacuations, or scheduled patient travel.

At one time, these discussions seemed to be about moving sick and injured people to places where they can get health care. As we can all see now, it’s actually about creating make-work projects for Nunavut’s ailing airlines.

For example, Nunavut’s Inuit organizations are pressing the GN to give more medical travel business to Canadian North, which runs a money-losing North-South service from Iqaluit to Ottawa in competition with First Air. In the Kivalliq region, we have been treated to an endless, and often hysterical, chorus of whining about how the big bad GN drove Skyward Aviation out of the region by giving a medevac contract to Keewatin Air.

Officials with the federal government – that would be the body that actually supplies health care money to Nunavut – must sometimes wonder what they were thinking when they ever allowed the northern territories to run a health care system in the first place.
JB