EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
Would you tell Nunavut’s young children or families to that camera why you won’t lower the prices for those products that, in my view, don’t weigh a lot?
They are a pretty light product, yet you mark them at least almost twice the amount of southern prices. People are crying everyday that they can’t afford to buy Pampers.
I think both of you deserve to explain to the young families that they have no choice but to buy these products from your shops.
The Walmart comparison is a good one, Mr. Curley.
They’re the largest, most dominant retailer in the world. They have extreme purchasing power that far supersedes our company.
So comparing us to them, in total we’re a $1.6 billion company. I forget where they rank. They’re dominant.
So that’s the fundamental element.
Secondly, Walmart has a distribution system that’s extensive because of their number of stores and operations in tight geographical areas.
They don’t have the freight percentage costs that we do.
Thirdly, Walmart, overall, their operating expenses on a dollar of sales are far more efficient than ours, but that’s us versus Walmart. That’s the business model reality.
As for those prices, we have revealed our cost structure in the document I presented.
Having said all of that, sir, our job every day is to look at our customers and be capable of looking them in the eye and telling them that we will strive to do a better job.
I don’t have an answer for you today, sir, but that is our goal, to lower prices.
We will take a look at the Pampers. Also, by the way, sir, we have worked with our vendors aggressively where we can to get what we call discounts and promotions.
So frequently, where we can make the deal with those vendors, we put Pampers and some of the products in some of the communities you named on sale for our customers.
That’s the job we do. Can we do better, sir? Absolutely.
Mr. Morrison: Mr. Chairman, a very difficult question.
Just a point of correction, in Rankin Inlet, the local Co-operative is the Kissarvik Co-op. Arctic Co-operatives is a service federation.
The prices that are established at the community level are the local Co-op prices.
Co-operatives are a business and when they are selling products at the retail level, they have to be able to charge an appropriate margin on that product to pay the bills.
If they don’t, the business will fail.
I am very pleased to say that the Kissarvik Co-op is doing exceptionally well in recent years after a number of years of difficult times.
The Co-operative must balance the pricing that they charge for various types of products and certainly some products are more contentious than others. Certainly the Co-operatives have made commitments that they’re going to keep prices of some products lower because they are so very important to people.
I can’t tell you right off the pricing structure that is used in Kissarvik Co-op, but I know for products like children’s products, they strive to keep the prices as low as possible.
I am very proud to tell you that through our affiliation with Co-operatives across the country, Co-operatives have introduced to Nunavut a complete line of children’s disposable diaper product called Simply Kids, which is a much lower cost but a high-quality alternative to the very expensive brands that are available in other parts of the country.
Choices are available.
You are correct in your comment that a case of Pampers is light, but it’s a very bulky item.
If you look at transporting paper products, Pampers, paper towels, toilet tissue, by sea, you would think that it would be a great deal cheaper, but the cost of shipping a shipping container is essentially the same if you have 10 pounds in it, 10,000 pounds in it, or 20,000 pounds in it. You fill the container. So if you’re filling your containers with Pampers or paper towels, you’re paying an exceptionally high freight rate for those products.
When you have lots of bulky, large items, you drive the price up.
So it’s an important process that retailers go through to marshal their product to make sure that they are maximizing the weight in containers to keep the freight rate as low as possible.
I would love to be able to tell you that we have a perfect system in place, but our purchasing is imperfect in terms of volume of product, not jut weight but the volume.
So we certainly strive to manage freight, but freight is a major component of products and it becomes all the more important when a product is bulky and light.
Thank you for explaining that, but we would appreciate it if that can be occasionally reviewed. People are hurting in Nunavut.
I think the patronage that the citizens give, even those who are on the safety net programs, most of all these funds go to either one of you.
So whether they would be on income support or whatnot or unemployment insurance, many of the products they buy come through you and they deserve some break from you guys once and a while.
What I want to say and the last point, Mr. Chairman, is that we also have in Nunavut a very large number of people in need, particularly the homeless as well as people who have no place to eat, or occasionally there are some places where they go for a soup kitchen.
Would it be possible to increase your charity contribution to allow for a contribution towards in kind for those kinds of products for individuals who need them? Also, could you explain to the committee what type of charity contributions you normally support in the locations where you do business with, particularly in Nunavut?
Mr. McMullen: Thank you Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Curley, we give donations of all kinds.
We are often approached by a variety of organizations, from sports organizations to food banks, and our store managers have the discretion to give to the various charities and other institutions.
So our policy is not universal. We count on our store managers, in this case, to be connected to the community and sense where the highest need is.
We certainly do provide products for food banks on a regular basis.
Where there are higher needs and we are approached by the community organizations, we are certainly willing to donate.
Mr. Morrison: Mr. Chairman, local Co-operatives are strong supporters of their communities, whether it is community groups, sports groups, schools, organizations, whether it’s for compassionate purposes. I believe the Co-operatives are leaders in the work that they do in their communities.
An example of the types of things that Co-operatives have recently implemented is the new Co-operative system aluminum can recycling program, where Co-operatives across Nunavut are investing thousands and thousands of dollars and our partners are investing thousands and thousands of dollars on reclaiming aluminum cans using our distribution network to transport the product to the south.
In the entire process, Co-operatives have designed a program where community groups will participate in the program and they will receive contributions for their participation in the program.
So I believe a very important role the Co-operatives play is this new aluminum recycling program, which we have tremendous support from many different areas on the program.
But I think the most important contribution the Co-operatives make to communities is returning their profits to Co-op members.
As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the Co-operatives in Nunavut, the local Co-operatives returned $7.4 million in patronage refunds just in 2010. $5 million of that amount was in cash.
And that is to ordinary consumers, people on social assistance, or people who are struggling to survive. If they bought at their local Co-operative, they shared in those patronage refunds and those cash.
Co-operatives are committed to their communities. Because Co-operatives are locally owned and controlled, the net savings or the profits stay in the community and are available to the individuals who support their Co-operative.
Chairman: Ms. Ugyuk.
Ms. Ugyuk: Thank you.
When the Nutrition North Canada Program started, we were told that we were going to be seeing savings and more transparency from the vendor, freight, and the landed costs.
We were going to see how much was being subsidized.
I think it was him who asked you, “Can you show us how many… ?” You said that there are 4,000 products on the No. 1 and No. 2 lists in 65 stores in Nunavut. You said it was too many.
Can you do one community, like an end community, and show us the basics, the vendor price, the freight price, and what the consumer is actually saving?
If you just focus on… .
Taloyoak, where I come from, is an end community. It’s one of the last stops for the plane because it’s the furthest in the Kitikmeot. We usually have the highest freight rates in the Kitikmeot from southbound vendors.
If the Northern Store can show the consumers in Taloyoak, just one community, not the whole of Nunavut, how Nutrition North is actually helping the consumers.
Just use one community instead of 65 communities. That’s my question.
In your community, as in all of our communities, we have identified this price savings from before Nutrition North and after. We put the sign program on, we put up the eligible products that all are on Nutrition North, and if you look in your store, the price decreases should be there.
If you look at our signs in Taloyoak, the savings are like 4 cents and sometimes 3 cents, but if we look at Cambridge Bay or Gjoa Haven, it’s a little bit more.
The consumers were told that they were going to see the transparency. I don’t see that from Northern, if they’re saying that we’re saving 4 cents on bread or milk.
Mr. McMullen: I’m sorry, what community?
Ms. Ugyuk: It’s Taloyoak.
Chairman: Go ahead, Mr. McMullen.
In Taloyoak, Beatrice milk, for example, has been reduced 70 cents. The yoghurt has been reduced 40 cents. If I quickly add up some of these price reductions, it’s in the neighbourhood of a 6 percent price reduction overall.
That’s the information that we did communicate and that’s the information we said we would communicate.
I’m sorry but I don’t have the subsidy rate for your community.
The difference between the communities is every community has a different subsidy rate from INAC, so that will explain some of the differences. For example, in the sheets I passed out, subsidy rates vary from $1.80 in Iqaluit to $1.10 in Cambridge Bay. Every community has a different subsidy rate that was provided by INAC, so some of the differences you’re going to see are directly related to the differences in the subsidy rates.
Ms. Ugyuk: When the question was asked earlier by…
… Mr. Elliott.
I’m getting tired. He wanted to see the… .There are 4,000 items on the No. 1 and No. 2 lists, and how much we were saving under the food subsidy program.
You said you couldn’t do that. It was too big. Can you try with just one community instead of the whole of Nunavut?
It’s a point-of-sale system where we would have to go through… . We don’t buy products for one specific community, we buy it for all, and then all of the factors that go into a price in a community, the electricity, how much we pay a year, staff costs, all of those differentials on a line-by-line basis, given all of the variances and influences on the cost structures and all of the items in the cost, we would not be able to do that for a specific community.
We can do it in the aggregate. We can tell you in a community what we do overall, which we have provided, but we wouldn’t break it down on a line-by-line basis by community.
First of all, our cost of goods in each community is competitive knowledge, which we would want to retain.
But secondly, the difficulty in the process, the way everything piles up into a store in terms of the cost, we don’t have the point-of-sale system that would allow us to break down on a line-by-line basis the cost of the goods sold. Again, because of the number of vendors and the number of transportation corridors and routes to get the variety of products to one community, we don’t have the capability to break that down and present it to you.
Ms. Ugyuk: I think, as consumers, we were expecting to see huge savings and with the Nutrition North Canada Program, the way I understand it after listening to both of you, it’s going to cost more for Nunavummiut to buy locally.
The transparency part needs to be explained more to the consumers and I think it’s the stores’ job to show it to the consumers.
We were expecting huge savings, but we’re now told that because things cost so much, there is not much savings there from freight, from the vendors, from trucking.
It’s frustrating as a consumer and I think the stores need to educate their communities. Before, Inuit just took what was there, but now we’re more educated. We want more for our dollar like you guys.
So things need to be explained to consumers.
The communication process for Nutrition North Canada should have been much more explicit from the outset.
I think one of the major things that we did talk to INAC about is the food mail subsidy was already in place with a budget of $60 million.
The Nutrition North Canada Program came into place with essentially the same budget minus the $2.5 million that’s going to Health Canada. So actually, in terms of the money that was available from that broad perspective, it might even be less
The retail companies that I’m aware of never came out and said it’s going to be huge savings.
Actually the only company that publicly stated before the rates were out was the North West Company and we said in the neighbourhood of 5 to 7 percent. And that’s what we stated.
There is no other claim by us that it would be more than that.
Also what’s important is it’s just not the subsidy rate changes because, as Mr. Morrison has said and I will repeat, some communities got higher subsidies, some people got lower subsidies. We went back to INAC and said, “This isn’t right. You should change.”
They took some of our suggestions, but at the end of the day, the retail community said, “We already have $60 million funding in food mail. It’s not going up in Nutrition North Canada.”
We think, at least the North West publicly stated, it’s probably a 5 to 7 percent increase.
So because of the subsidy changes in some communities and because of our negotiations with the freight rate companies and vendors, Cambridge Bay is slightly over 7 percent in price reduction, as an example.
So we delivered almost in a vacuum because we didn’t know what the rates were going to be and we were asked by the federal government, “What’s the rate decreases going to be? What are the costs decreases going to be?” We were asked that in November before we even had the rates.
So our claims, and not to contradict you, I mean the expectations were high and we told INAC, “You’ve got to get out there and communicate before the May 1 date.”
As Mr. Morrison stated, we found out when you found out what the rates were going to be.
We lobbied in a good sense of that word “lobbying” for more communication.
I had communication the weeks prior to the announcement with the assistant to the minister saying, “Please come out and explain this.
We think it’s important.” So the expectations that were built weren’t us building them.
We were very forthright and honest in terms of what we knew, what we didn’t know, and our expectations that they would be in the 5 to 7 percent neighbourhood.
That’s what we figured from guessing to a large degree what was going to happen with rates. Anything we said in the marketplace, we have lived up to or exceeded slightly.
I’ll be very short.
Minister Curley and I were just whispering here.
Really, it does seem like this whole Nunavut Nutrition North Canada Program, there should have been a lot more consultation. What we wanted was involvement from Nunavutmiut before a program even came out.
However, they came out with this program and you guys were part of it and bought into it.
Yes, it somewhat benefits Nunavut but it could have been done a lot better and I think there could have been a lot more input.
Hopefully, moving on from this day, that will happen through information and that we work with you and the advisory board listens to the public.
Mr. Chairman, I’m just going to quickly not directly talk about Nunavut North, but it is something directly said by Mr. McMullen in his opening comments and that is in regard to employment at the North West Company.
You state that you employ 670 local people, beneficiaries, which is very good. I’m not quite sure what percentage of employment that is overall in Nunavut, but I think it is very good.
In regard to that, it would be interesting to know what percentage of those people are in management or senior management roles and what the North West Company has for any programs or plans or policies to do any training and put people in senior positions.
I would ask that maybe Mr. Morrison also comment on that at the same time.
The simple answer is we don’t have enough Inuit people in our management ranks. Actually we have created a position this year.
It’s called the administrative management position. And I will now solicit your help. This can be recruitment session.
We have designated that we want to hire locally for the administrative management position in our store, meaning an Inuk.
We want that because that position deals with the community the most in our financial service business, in our customer service business, and in our front-end business.
We provide training for that position.
We are committed to increasing the number of local residents involved in our management group.
We have a number of communities in Nunavut that we are looking for people for that specific position.
I think that in the next week or two, you will see ads also congratulating people who have been working with us who have been promoted into positions in Nunavut. We need to increase our management not because anyone tells us to, but because it’s the right thing to do.
It’s a small population. There are not many people who have expressed, even when we’ve had jobs open, an interest in retail, but that’s similar in the south.
Retail is not a field that attracts a lot of people. We have to work hard, but we can do a better job in the north and particularly in Nunavut. We’re wide open, we have wide open positions now, we encourage people to apply, and we’re committed.
As I said, we have created one position. It’s one of the four key positions in the store, by the way, and reports directly to the store manager, and we would like to hire locally.
Mr. Morrison: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Training and education development of employees in the north is a key priority of Co-operatives in the Arctic. We are absolutely not satisfied with the level of development that takes place at the local level. Co-operatives have a number of training programs for the development of individuals in operational, technical, and administrative positions.
We also do a great deal of development at the leadership level, boards of directors, but we’re not satisfied that enough is taking place.
We’re most disappointed with developments that have taken place through some of the federal government employment training programs. Previous programs of the Government of Canada provided for the development of individuals who were employed so that individuals could receive training to move to positions of greater responsibility.
The new programs that the federal government has are strictly related to unemployed people. So when you have an operation or a system like the Co-operative system where you have a retail store, a hotel, fuel distribution, cable television, or construction and heavy equipment, you have an opportunity to move individuals from entry-level positions to higher level positions. Unfortunately, the programs that exist today do not provide support for those particular programs.
We are lobbying the federal government to try and change those programs to allow us to develop more individuals. However, to date, we’ve not had any success.
I note that Mr. Peterson earlier talked about the Poverty Reduction Strategy and certainly we are very committed to poverty reduction. One of the challenges that we face in the north is we have difficulty recruiting people. We have a really hard time recruiting people, particularly in entry-level positions.
I believe that many residents in the north are caught in a difficult spot. If they are receiving income support, to enter the workforce in an entry-level position, they can’t afford to go to work.
So we have employment, we have jobs, we have lots of people that we would like to hire, but we have difficulty finding people who are able to enter positions because of their personal situation.
I encourage you, in the poverty reduction plans, to examine those kinds of questions and try to find a solution so that people who are unemployed or unemployable, as standards define it, we can find ways to create employment for them.
Co-operatives are a very large employer across the north in many different sectors of the economy and the commitment of the Co-operatives is to hire locally. We’re not exactly where we want to be. There is a lot of development, but we’re committed to working in that area and not just at entry level but at all levels of the process.
Hon. Daniel Shewchuk: Just quickly, I thank you both for your answers and your commitment to further that ahead. As you say, we’re facing it in the Government of Nunavut too in the recruitment of people. However, there are wills and ways of trying to make that better.
In both of your situations, I think it would be helpful to have managers or senior managers shadow or internship under existing managers that eventually those people will take over and run those stores, but thanks for your commitment.
I have been sitting here for a few hours now; it’s gone on six hours, I think.
I’m quite interested in the discussions and all of the questions, but I find myself thinking or feeling that we have the wrong people here.
I appreciate that you are trying to answer some of the questions, but we need certain other people here to answer the detailed technical questions.
What I find interesting here is that just about everybody says that the Nutrition North Canada Program is a wonderful new program, it’s far superior than the Food Mail Program, but the people who aren’t saying that are the people who are going to the stores buying the food.
They are the ones telling us, as MLAs and ministers, that they can’t afford to buy food.
I know you guys talked about how you price everything, your markups, you pass on subsidies, and all of that, but I guess I’m worried.
If the people who are actually going into the stores in Nunavut are saying that there is something wrong with the Nutrition North Canada Program, are we missing something as politicians, as retailers, and as officials in Ottawa?
When I go back to Cambridge Bay, to my riding, people will ask me, “What did you learn from these two days?”
What can I tell them, from your perspective?
I know you have been working with the program for a few months now. I wonder if either one of you could care to help me provide some information to my constituents.
You guys get better as the day goes on in terms of questions and we’re winding down here, but I’m worried about the conspiracy over here because you guys keep on talking and I think there are going to be more questions.
But anyways, the most important thing here is the expectations. What a great question. The expectations were extremely high and Mr. Peterson, I would say that’s fundamental, the expectations of this great program and it’s going to lower prices dramatically, and that’s why I stand by my gun.
What I could interpret without full knowledge was we would be able to offer it in price decreases of 5 to 7 percent in a perfect world, without all of the commodity prices going up. So now with the status quo, we would be able to offer prices 5 to 7 percent and we have delivered to that.
How do I help you going back to the community?
Sir, we want to have a good image in the community. We want to be seen as passing the subsidy on to the consumer and we are, so we’re not getting our full bang for the buck.
We put effort into it and I’m not saying it’s onerous; it was work, but we do work of this kind every day. That’s who we are as businesspeople and that’s what we expect.