Power is her business

It takes two kinds of non-stop energy to run Iqaluit’s popular Qikiqtani Dry Cleaning and Laundry business.

The first is the grueling labour, often seven-days-a-week of it, put in by owner Pitseolak Shoo and her three employees.

“There’s lots of physical work,” Pitseolak says while hauling a heavy load of wet laundry out of a washing machine and dumping it into a plastic tub.

When there’s work to be done, Pitseolak does it. She has a laundry contract with the Baffin Regional Hospital that requires daily deliveries and there’s no time to waste. Like a lot of hard-working small business owners, Pitseolak talks while she works and scurries around her small plant as if her body has become part of the machinery.

It’s the kind of business that the Nunavut government says it wants to see more of: owned 100 per cent by Inuit, and staffed 100 per cent by Inuit.

“It’s always hard to be a good boss, because it’s very stressful work. But I’m happy,” Pitseolak says.

The second form of non-stop energy is the kind you buy from the Nunavut Power Corp. – electricity. That’s what drives the $170,000 worth of dry-cleaning and laundry equipment she bought in 1996, the year she launched her business.

There’s a big tumbling machine for chemical dry cleaning, washers, dryers, industrial-strength clothing pressers, and coin-operated machines for customers who don’t have washing machines at home. When they’re running, the air gets hot and the noise is so loud you have to shout to make yourself heard.

Right now, she pays 25.9 cents a kilowatt-hour to keep them going, about $1200 a month, for a total of $14,575.70 in power bills last year. That amounts to 39.1 per cent of her total utility costs.

But the power corporation’s recent rate request would double those amounts.

Right now, rates in each community are based on how much it costs to generate power in that community. That’s why Iqaluit enjoys the lowest community power rates right now: it costs less to generate and sell power in Iqaluit than anywhere else.

But the NPC’s favoured new price-scheme would change all that. They’re proposing a territorial-wide rate plan for all of Nunavut.

In Iqaluit, that means small business people like Pitseolak would, according to the power corporation’s estimates, see their power bills rise by 106.8 per cent.

“When I saw those power rates, I was very scared,” she says.

So on Nov. 30, Pitseolak went to a public hearing in Iqaluit held by the Utilities Rates Review Council to ask people what they think of the power corporation’s request.

She told the URRC that the power corporation’s actions have already raised her annual power bill by 10 per cent, even without a rate increase.

That’s because, when was she was setting up her business in 1996, there was a device called a “three-phase transformer” sitting attached to a pole in front of the Navigator Inn, across the street from her business. So she made sure that she ordered machines driven by three-phase motors.

But just before start-up time, the power corporation removed the three-phase device.

To compensate for that problem, Pitseolak was forced to buy another device, called a “phase converter,” to power her machines, at a cost of $15,000.

“I already know what it is to lose money to the power corporation and I really don’t want it to happen again,” she told the URRC.

She also told the URRC that if the NPC’s proposed rates are approved as is, her $1200-a-month power bill will go up by at least $1,176 a month. She says that would have a serious effect on her operating costs and on her bottom line.

For now, Pitseolak isn’t sure how she would cope -raise prices perhaps, or even lay off staff. All she can do now is wait.