The dysfunctional dog team

Imagine this: you’re the owner of a huge dog-team. It’s made up of 19 slavering, ill-fed canines.

When you chose this team you did not choose well. There are four or five smart males, and a couple of fairly smart females, but they’re outnumbered by those who aren’t fit to run any more: a couple of old dogs too feeble to pull their weight, a collection of scrawny ones who let the others do their work for them, and three or four who spend way too much time with their snouts stuck in their owner’s beer keg. Worst of all, there’s no boss dog big enough to keep them in line.

It’s been a bad year and you’ve got enough meat to feed only four or five of them. But their whining drives you crazy so you toss your meat at them anyway.

After a short, loud, free-for-all, it’s over. The smart ones get enough to take the edge off their hunger. The small stupid ones get nothing. Tails low, the losers cower at the edge of the circle, whimpering, yelping, nursing dark thoughts of revenge.

That, in a nutshell, is how the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut functions during a budget session, especially a capital budget session, when MLAs get to snarl at each other over those highly-sought-after building projects and the highly-sought-after ribbon-cutting extravaganzas that go with them.

Meanwhile, the thing that causes most of that conflict went mostly undebated. And that’s the Government of Nunavut’s worsening financial state. As a result, the GN continues to get no direction from the legislative assembly on public policy and continues to flail about in all directions with no clear priorities.

The GN’s brainiacs now figure on spending a whopping $990.7 million by the financial year ending April 1, 2006. Based on past annual rates of increase, you can count on the GN’s annual budget to soar past the billion-dollar mark by 2007. Compared with the $610 million of spending projected in 1999-2000, that’s a lot of cash.

Yet it’s never enough. Based on the incessant complaints from MLAs, about infrastructure deficiencies in their communities, it’s not even close to being enough. Though the whining of MLAs is sometimes irritating and ill-informed, it rests upon a core of truth. Water and sewage systems in many communities are falling apart and pose a huge potential environmental liability. Aging schools and nursing stations are in need of upgrades and replacements. The shortage of social housing units is, all by itself, setting off a social disaster.

And those are only the infrastructure requirements. The GN’s year-to-year program budget for basic operations and maintenance is also strained to the limit.

You would think then, that in addition to thinking up new ways for the GN to spend money, MLAs would also sit down and think up some new ways to save money. If that’s too hard, they could at least show some appreciation for the need to do so.

Among other things, that means evaluating all government programs to figure which ones work, which ones don’t work, which ones should be kept and which ones should be dumped. Given the low quality of work that emanates from many GN employees, there’s no doubt that such an evaluation would turn up a lot of expensive mush that could be squeezed out of the system. The Department of Finance did conduct a “program review” exercise within the life of the last government, but that work appears to have vanished into the ether.

It also means setting priorities: making hard political decisions about what the GN will do now, what it will put off until later, and to root out policies that either contradict one another or don’t reflect reality, such as its approach to the fishery.

The Nunavut Economic Forum’s recent 2005 Economic Outlook report pointed this out, but it doesn’t look as if anyone’s paying much attention. Keith Peterson, the MLA for Cambridge Bay, made a brave but likely futile attempt to point all this out, beginning with the lack of priority setting, in a series of member’s statements made throughout the session.

But no one took him up on his offer to discuss the Nunavut’s biggest underlying problem. It’s a lot more fun, apparently, to fight, yowl and whimper. JB