The cheque, please

Last March, the federal minister of finance, Ralph Goodale, announced in his budget speech that his government will spend $90 million on economic development in the three territories over the next five years.

That works out to about $6 million per territory, per year. Not much, especially when you compare it with the $66-million proposal for an economic development agreement that Nunavut submitted to Ottawa in December of 2002. But we’ll take it all the same.

There’s just one problem: as of this week — seven months later — Ottawa had not actually released the money.

Instead, the federal government got Larry Bagnell, the parliamentary secretary for DIAND, to ask a bunch of questions. The Nunavut Economic Forum, a 38-member coalition of Nunavut organizations, got the job of answering them.

This week, the NEF’s president, Monica Ell, presented Ethel Blondin-Andrews, Bagnell’s replacement, with the fruit of their labours.

Guess what? It’s another document! This one is called “Qanijijuq,” or “Preparing for the Journey.”

No, it’s not a how-to manual for would-be tourists. It’s mostly a list of answers to Larry Bagnell’s questions.

And pretty much all of those answers regurgitate information that’s already contained in other documents, such as the Nunavut Economic Development Strategy, the Conference Board of Canada’s work on Nunavut’s economy, and various other materials in the public domain.

If Bagnell was so curious, you’d think he could have found some underworked sluggo at DIAND to dredge up the answers. Better that than dump the work onto the Nunavut Economic Forum, forcing the organization’s employees to divert time and resources from the job their supposed to do.

The next time Ethel Blondin-Andrew comes to Nunavut, she’d better come with a cheque, not another list of questions that have already been answered many time before. JB