EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
We’ve got a contract with the airline, so we know what it’s going to cost us per kilo to get the product here. So when it comes in the door from the airport, we receive it, check it off the waybill to make sure that we’re getting the number of boxes because the waybill tells you how much they bought; they don’t always know what’s in the boxes.
So you check off your waybill and make sure you’re getting what you’re being charged for, and we always had to do that.
We don’t expect a cheque from INAC to do that because it’s the way we have always done business.
So that we can do the end-of-month reporting, we have to do something else because we’re required, at the end of the month, to account for products or product categories on a very detailed reporting list. I think there are 180 categories.
We have to put on our month-end reporting the invoice number from the supplier. If we’re ordering from wholesaler X, we have to put in his invoice number, and then we have to put in the air waybill number that it came on.
It would be overwhelming at the end of the month if you left everything to the end of the month to do. So what we do to try to lessen the confusion at the end of the month is when the stuff comes in the door, we photocopy the invoice and we photocopy the waybill because INAC is going to want a copy of those, and we mark on the waybill what invoice number it pertains to.
Generally there is one invoice per waybill and it’s easier if that’s the case, but we have to match these things up. So if we’re getting supplies in from 10 different suppliers, we’ve got 10 different invoices, 10 different waybills, we match those up and cross reference them, do our cost landing, and put that in the file so we’ve got it for the end of the month.
The end of the month is when the fun begins and that fun is not in our back office or grocery office anymore.
That’s up in the front office where most of the paperwork gets done because you have to account for products or product categories.
Let’s say that there’s a line for broccoli.
Okay, we’ve got to go through our invoices. We’re not going to get broccoli once a month; we’re going to get it once a week, so we’ve got to look for four invoices that have broccoli on them. Maybe the first week we got 10 kilograms of broccoli.
Maybe the next week we got 13, and so on. We’ve got to find all of the broccoli and add it all up, put in the total number of kilograms on the master reporting list, but then we’ve got to list the four invoice numbers that we got the broccoli on and the four waybills that we got the broccoli on, and so on, for bread and for all sorts of other categories, too many categories, in my opinion, and then we total all of that stuff up.
Category 1 stuff has to be kept different from category 2 stuff because there are two different subsidy rates.
So everything gets totalled and the final total of kilograms gets transferred onto what looks like a very simple reporting sheet and it is, but the amount of paperwork that goes into getting the data to put on that sheet is enormous.
There’s paper all over the place and a stack of papers for one month that’s probably that high.
So we have to submit the claim form, which is again a relatively simple form, it’s a page, but we have to submit all of the backup as well, the summary for the broccoli form let’s call it, with all of the other categories.
These have to be submitted by email to their claims processing office, but then they want this stack of papers that is invoices and waybills as well.
So we have to either scan it and email it to them or photocopy it and mail it to them.
I have suggested to them that they could accomplish the same results… .
First of all, there has to be an element of trust involved in this. We have to sign an agreement with INAC in order to participate in the program. This agreement is written the way most of these agreements are, in legalese, but basically what it means is, “We’re going to tell you the truth.
We’re not going to lie, cheat, and steal your money.
And we’re going to give you the right to come in to our store at any time and audit our books, look at any of our waybills, any of our invoices that pertain to the Nutrition North Canada Program.”
So I have suggested to them, “Instead of these stacks of paper going to the claims processing office, why not just come in and audit us.
Audit us as many times as you want.”
These are all new requirements that were not there under the old Food Mail Program.
Do I like doing it? No. Do I have to do it?
Yes. So am I doing it?
Yes and I can do it but it’s very costly, as I mentioned in my introductory remarks.
The other thing we have to do is in the middle of the month, there’s a list of a number of items and this list is a number of pages long.
It’s not quite as bad as the length of it makes it look because we don’t sell all of the products on the list, but we have to go through that list and it’s called a consumer price list.
I think it’s between the 15th and 20th of the month, we’ve got to go through our store and we’ve got to list the retail selling price of all of the things on that list that we sell and submit that also to INAC.
What INAC didn’t seem to realize is that, and probably this doesn’t happen out in the smaller, more isolated communities but it happens here, there is somebody from Statistics Canada that comes into our store every month and goes around and does exactly the same thing.
They’re in there doing price checks and writing down the prices of not every item in the store but important items and certainly the items that would make up the Canadian food basket kind of thing. So this is a duplication of effort.
We can do all of these things. We have learned how to survive in business by doing what’s required of people that we have a contractual relationship with, but it’s taking way more time than we had ever expected.
We get paid a $340 administration fee for doing this and that doesn’t cover very many hours.
As I pointed out to the people from INAC, figuring out how much this costs us is not just as simple as saying, “Well, okay, you’ve got this person doing it. Take their salary, divide it by the number of hours in the week and you come up with their hourly rate.” It’s not that simple.
We certainly do our best to employ and you know we employ lots of local people, but sometimes we have to hire a professional from the south to fill a certain job. So add on to his hourly rate his housing subsidy, his transportation subsidy to get him here, his holiday travel, because you’re not going to have employees if you don’t provide some of these things, so this makes an employee’s hourly rate fully loaded when you add in all of these things.
It’s fairly different than you might think if you were to simply look at his paycheque.
So these costs are way higher than we expected and the danger is if they don’t modify the program, we will have to tack that on to the cost of food, thereby negating one of the purposes of the program.
We have discussed this. We had a visit from the INAC people last week. They’re what I call the frontline people, the people who go out there and talk to the retailers.
They’re sympathetic to it.
They have never done this program anywhere else in Canada either, so they’re getting used to it while we’re getting used to it.
They have suggested that after a few months, they might be able to lessen the paperwork burden.
We’re going to not lose track of that comment and remind them of it because the amount of paperwork that is involved is simply outrageous.
I understand a lot more now about how painful and complex the feds can make it for the people of the north that they’re supposed to take care of.
One of the other parts to that are obviously the air carriers. Do they have to go by the complex kind of compliance requirements as well or are they doing a similar thing that they did? They have an extra airline now.
I know you’re not in that field, but I’m just wondering whether or not they have to abide by the similar kind of tracking system that you are allowed to do. I’m sure you would have some knowledge on that as well. Thank you.
Mr. Harper: I haven’t really thought about it too much from their perspective. Probably, and I’m making some assumptions now, I would suspect that their paperwork requirements on it have gotten less rather than more because they don’t have a contract with Canada Post, which I understand required very detailed reporting. So they don’t have a contract with Canada Post.
First Air has a contract with Arctic Ventures, First Air has a contract with the North West Company, and Canadian North has a contract with Arctic Co-operatives.
So the paperwork that I see from them is the same as I would see if I was ordering a box of bolts or something that’s not getting a subsidy because now the airlines have nothing to do with administering the subsidy. So what I see from them is simply a waybill when I get the goods and an invoice at the end of the month or whenever they send them out.
What they do in their head office, I assume that they have probably a more detailed statistical tracking method so that they could push a button at any time and find out how much cargo Arctic Ventures shipped in the last 12 months, for example. I’m sure they have some detailed in-house stuff that makes it easier for them to do their business and to plan for the future of their business, but I’m not privy to what it is.
I just see waybills and invoices from them.
My next question has to do with the external advisory board, even though the terms of reference appears to be quite broad.
As a merchant and retailer, do you actually feel they have the power and authority to recommend or approve changes that are needed or are they merely, in your view, passing the advice on and relying on INAC people to either accept it or recommend it? What I’m saying is: do they have any teeth at all to make the kind of changes that northerners would expect to improve the program?
Mr. Harper: Very good question.
So the question as to whether the advisory board really has any teeth, no and that’s why they’re advisory and there’s no requirement for INAC to take their advice.
However, if they listen carefully to the input that they receive, if they fulfill their mandate by doing what’s necessary to hear community concerns, business concerns, and your concerns, if they get out there to the communities and have hearings or sessions in which they can hear what those concerns are, in other words, if they do their job in a responsible way, then they should have some moral clout. If they show themselves not to be a frivolous committee that doesn’t… . If they take their job seriously, then I think they have some moral clout and INAC will hear them at least.
The danger with any advisory board comprised of mostly ordinary people from ordinary communities is that if they don’t understand or if they don’t come to understand the program inside out and everything about it, then they will be at the mercy of INAC itself and be listening to INAC instead of you, me, my competitors, large and small, and the consumers.
And I have seen lots of committees in the north that were kept in the dark as to important information that they should have had access to and simply became puppets of the very organization that they’re supposed to advise. So I ask you for the information, I get the information, and then I give it back to you as a recommendation. Well, that’s going to be a recommendation that you can live with because it’s really your own recommendation.
So they’re going to have to not make themselves beholden to INAC for the information that they receive. They’re going to have to talk to people, retailers, consumers, and yourselves.
In that way, they can, in a sense, have some teeth because they can have some moral clout in that the recommendations they bring to INAC will be real and substantive.
Hon. Tagak Curley: Thank you. My second point to the advisory committee is: are you aware of whether or not their expenses are covered through the budget for the Nutrition North program? We all know that it’s $60 million.
Are they paid from a different pot of money? I’m not sure if you have that information or not, but hopefully they’re not paid out of the same fund for Nunavut subsidies.
Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Curley. Mr. Harper.
Mr. Harper: I’m sorry, Mr. Chairman, but I do not have that information and I don’t know the answer.
My last question, really, for now. I think that the two days that we had with a group of people, including you, is very helpful to us and I think it brings a much clearer understanding of exactly what Nutrition North is actually trying to achieve and also how it’s structured. We obviously didn’t have some of the information and so on prior to these hearings beginning mainly because the feds refused to appear before this Committee of the Whole.
Again, it is regrettable.
If there’s anything that we could do for Nunavutmiut, do you have one or a couple of points how, in a way, we should… ? What should they be in your view?
Certainly we will communicate, no doubt, and pass around all of the proceedings, the Hansard, and so on. There is one way that we could do it. I think that if we find a common ground, it would be good to pass a motion in the House urging the federal government to improve the whole system.
Would you have in your mind exactly the type of idea that we could possibly include?
Mr. Harper: Well, a couple of things. I think it’s important that you eventually meet with the advisory committee and establish a good rapport with them because that’s one way of making your ideas heard. I know it’s difficult when it’s a federal program and not one that you’re directly involved in administering and one in which you had little or no input in designing.
I don’t expect you to take every comment that I have made and adopt it. Some of my comments are totally the opposite of what you heard from the North West Company and Arctic Co-operatives. So you will probably want to deliberate behind closed doors on where you want to go with these.
Do you want to take the middle ground?
I think it’s important that you support small community-based businesses.
I know we have all recently just finished negotiating our arrangements with our air carrier of choice. If you eventually accept my proposition that it was better when at least everybody paid the same rate for their freight, I would hope that if you think that has some validity, you would make that known to INAC and to the advisory committee in some way.
I am realistic in that I know the North West Company will always have better buying power at the wholesale level than I will because of their volume.
Arctic Co-operatives will as well on behalf of their members, but we did have a level playing field for 35 years or more for the transportation component of it.
I think INAC will find that it’s very difficult to administer fairly 26 different subsidy levels in Nunavut and how many others in Nunavik and the northern parts of the provinces because it’s not just Nunavut involved here.
So they have a lot of different subsidy levels to eventually adjust, to monitor to make sure they’re fair, to make sure, if possible, that the cost of food has not gone up because that was never the intent of the program.
So they might be persuaded eventually that it might be better if everybody was paying the same rate. That would involve a major modification to the program as it now stands, but I personally think it would be worthwhile.
I would certainly hope for a recommendation from you to make the paperwork less onerous because first of all, it’s a bit of a nightmare for everybody involved. I think Mr. Morrison mentioned yesterday that there is too much paperwork.
They’re finding it’s much more than they had anticipated and I certainly am. Every other small business is. I would hope that there would be a recommendation from you and also from the advisory committee that this paperwork burden be reduced.
How you get that message through, I’m not sure, but I would hope that those would be a couple of the messages.
I know we have talked about sealift and those issues, which aren’t part of Nutrition North Canada right now but are certainly part of getting food and other necessary products into people’s households on a cost-effective basis.
I now will recognize Mr. Taptuna.
I thank Mr. Harper for being here.
It gives us a better understanding on his perspective of the role the smaller businesses that are operating within the north here.
Now, the total budget for Nutrition North Canada is around $60 million and on top of that, there is an additional allotted amount between $15 million and $20 million and that is to assist in the transition of the program.
In your opening, you indicated the amount of paperwork and the amount of financial reporting and the reports that you have to make available to INAC to claim the subsidy.
You indicated it was $340 per month. I agree with you, that is a very small amount.
In fact, I don’t think that’s even enough to have a hotdog party for six kindergarten students. So I agree it is very small.
With the $15 million and $20 million budget that has been allocated on top of the $60 million, is there any mechanism there from INAC where a small northern merchant or retailer can actually apply to increase the $340 per month to do all of the reporting?
Mr. Harper: I don’t think that there’s a formal mechanism, but when we have talked with INAC, again the frontline people, and also the other night with the director general responsible, we have been asked to track our costs, and we were doing that already, but to keep a detailed outline of our costs and to justify any increase that we might end up negotiating.
But I don’t know of a formal mechanism.
We have been assured that they would consider a change to our contract.
We did budget for more, but the amount we would actually need is even more than that. $340 is the maximum allowable per month for a business or for a store, so they capped up at the maximum of $340.
It will be through discussions and if they are willing to amend our contract, then we will be able to increase it because we have a contract that we had signed and $340 was the maximum we could get.
That’s the best I can do on that question, Mr. Chairman.
I thank the witness for his response.
On top of the $60 million budget for Nutrition North Canada, I’m sure the amount allotted can be used for assisting the smaller retailers in the transition period, as stated by INAC. I’m sure that there are going to be some opportunities there to bring that forth to the external advisory board to make sure that… . The intention here is to get nutritious food to Nunavummiut at a subsidized cost and at an affordable cost, and we intend to do that.
I’m sure we’re going to be pushing this forward with the external advisory committee.
The Food Mail Program has been in place for a long time, a lot of years, and it just so happens that Canada Post is no longer handling it and they’re possibly going on strike tonight.
So what’s the coincidence there?
But in any case, I’m sure this government and the MLAs here are going to be lobbying for a better way of getting nutritious food costs down to our Nunavummiut.
I think one of the things that we’ve got to look at is the amount allocated for transition. That’s between $15 million and $20 million.
At this time, Mr. Chairman, that’s more or less a comment and most of my questions I had previously have been answered, so I don’t have any more questions.
Point taken. Mr. Ningark.
I thank Mr. Kenn Harper for making a presentation. Mr. Harper, you indicated that there’s an influx of paperwork. Every time the product is delivered to your doorstep, you’re expected to do a lot of paperwork and on top of that, you’re only paid about $340 a month.
You also indicated that you want us to make a recommendation, but in order for us to do that, we need you to tell us what you want us to do in this regard.
So do you want to increase that $340 plus lessen the paperwork? What can you tell us? You, as a retailer, know that we have to keep track of paperwork of transactions for every item brought to your doorstep and sold, and so on.
So what do you want us to do?
You, I, and the government know, regardless of what is going up, there has to be paperwork for your own use, for keeping your inventory, for the month-end report, for the year-end report, for taxes, and so on. How would you propose that this all would lessen the paperwork? Tell us what you want us to do.
Mr. Harper: I don’t object to doing the paperwork if it’s useful paperwork, but I think, as in the mid-month price checking, it’s a duplication of effort that other branches of government already do, although, if I think outside the perspective of Iqaluit, it may not be being done in those communities. In fact, I’m sure it’s not being done with the same regularity in those communities as it is being done here, so there may be some value in it.
In terms of the detailed categorization of items we get in, I don’t know if it’s important at the end of the year to be able to know how many kilograms of broccoli the people of Iqaluit ate or that the people of Pond Inlet ate. It might be, but I can’t imagine why it would be.
My recommendation, I suppose, would simply be that the paperwork be streamlined. They do have the right to audit us and get at all of that paperwork in any case.
I have asked them, for example, on the month-end detailed paperwork, “Why do you need to know what waybill the broccoli was delivered on?” I can’t imagine why that’s important to know.
It might be one thing to see the invoice to prove that I bought broccoli, but I wouldn’t buy broccoli and leave it in Ottawa.
What’s the importance of seeing that waybill number, four of them, one for each week? What’s the importance of photocopying that waybill and sending it to Ottawa to the claims processor?
If they think that I was buying broccoli but not shipping it to Iqaluit, come in and audit the books. I just don’t see the need for some of this detail.
I suppose my recommendation would be that you ask that INAC justify the level of detail that they’re asking for in their monthly reporting from the retailers. If it can’t all be justified or the justification is a little bit iffy, just streamline it and to use their powers to audit the retailers on a regular basis to come in and see that we’re doing what we undertook to do. They can come in at any time.
They can move into my store and live there if they want and do this day and night. They have that right under the participation agreement that we signed.
I suppose if you’re asking me to recommend what your recommendation should be, it’s to make sure that the paperwork is meaningful and that the retailer be reasonably compensated for the additional cost of fulfilling reasonable reporting requirements.
I have Ms. Aariak.
Hon. Eva Aariak (interpretation): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also thank Mr. Harper for taking the time to present his views in front of the committee. He has clarified a lot of things that we weren’t aware of, especially in regard to smaller retailers and the challenges they face.
(interpretation ends) The question I have is yesterday the official from the North West Company, in terms of transparency of the subsidy, showed us a sample of the changes, the lower costs of food items that are incorporated in the stores at the North West Company.
Is Arctic Ventures doing a similar type of transparency action so that the consumers will know to what level some products are at lower prices now?
Chairman: Thank you, Ms. Aariak.
Mr. Harper: Well, we’re doing our best to do so, but we don’t have all of the resources that a company like the North West Company has. They come in our store and do price checks to see what we’re charging for things and we go in their store and do the same thing.
The Nutrition North Canada Program has a signage component, so we have signs up in our store advertising which products are brought in under the subsidy program.
Our pricing is on the shelves, but I don’t think we have sort of before and after pricing and I find before and after pricing to be kind of unreliable. To me, it doesn’t prove anything.
Who’s to say what the price of an orange would have been before the subsidy?