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GN heeds advice in sealift report

JIM BELL

Tom Rich, deputy minister of the Department of Community and Government Services, said this week that the Government of Nunavut is already carrying out recommendations from the Mariport group’s recent report on how the GN handles its sealift responsibilities.

That report, tabled last month in the legislative assembly, found that numerous problems have plagued the system since 2000, when the GN took responsibility for the sealift from the Coast Guard.

One of the biggest was a decision by the GN to decentralize its purchasing system, so that individual government departments, work-sites and hamlet governments were left to make their own sealift orders.

In places where well-organized staff people knew what to do, the system worked.

But the Mariport group found that “many more do not have the requisite knowledge, order late, do not track shipments, do not make themselves available for delivery, and prevaricate over payment of invoices.”

And in some cases, shipping companies had to wait up to two years to receive payment from GN customers, because of lost paperwork and poor financial management.

As well, late ordering means that the GN tends to miss earlier sailings, so that the first ships to arrive aren’t filled to capacity, and that some goods are ordered so late, final sailing deadline are missed and the materials have to be shipped via air freight.

The Mariport group says it’s impossible to say how much these inefficiencies cost the GN, but they say it seems to be “a considerable, but entirely avoidable, fiscal pressure on the GN.”

Rich said, however, that his department expected to hear this.

“We knew that there were issues in procurement,” Rich said.

To fix the situation, he said the GN has already doubled the size of its purchasing staff, and is training staff in how to handle the logistics involved in making sealift orders.

He also said the GN is looking at putting together “buying groups” so that, for example, a group of sealift users in a community can order their goods together.

As for the GN’s recently announced contract with the three shipping companies that have provided most sealift services since 2000, Rich wouldn’t say why the GN chose — in a cabinet decision last year — not to exercise a one-year option on those contracts that would have cost the GN only one per cent more.

He said that’s because cabinet decisions are confidential.

But he did point out that re-bidding those contracts persuaded two shipping companies to offer Churchill-based sealift services for the Kivalliq region.

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