Nunavut MP places consultancy firm in trust

Nunavut MP Lori Idlout has distanced herself from her stake in an Indigenous management consultancy firm that has received $1.5 million in federal contracts since her election five years ago.

To do so, she created a trust for the firm — a legal arrangement that can hold an asset while a politician is in public office. The politician will not receive an income from that asset, nor can they sell it.

“The reason that I created the trust agreement is so that I could separate myself from what’s going on with NVision,” Idlout said at an event in Iqaluit Tuesday morning.

“I did it voluntarily. It was something that I chose to do because of scrutiny I was receiving from certain other parties.”

Idlout did not say who this scrutiny was coming from, and did not answer any more questions.

Idlout filed the disclosure of her stake in NVision Insight Group and the resulting trust July 16 to the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, according to the commissioner’s registry.

This was three months after she left the NDP in mid-March to join the Liberal party, which — along with several other MP floor crossings and byelections over the past year — helped Prime Minister Mark Carney achieve a majority government.

Since September 2021, NVision has received 18 contracts. Of those, two came after she crossed the floor, with the most recent one — dated July 3 and worth $165,000 — being the most expensive since her election.

Nunatsiaq News reached out to the ethics commissioner and Bob Zimmer, the Conservative critic for Northern Affairs, but did not receive a response on Tuesday morning.

— With files from Mosha Folger