Almost two years ago I covered a story where Town Council initially denied a request from EGT-Northwind to cut the price of dumping 250 truckloads of steel from the Tuk Island rehabilitation project, then after hearing concerns from the employees of EGT-Northwind, reversed the decision and allowed the company to deposit the waste at $500 a load, half the usual price.
At the time, Northwind Industries’ vice-president Fred Bailey explained the plan was a workaround for ExxonMobil’s internal environmental rehabilitation rules — by getting the town involved, the contractors could operate on the local environmental regulations, which were far less complicated than the oil company’s international standards.
What made the decision so urgent was the the steel was found unexpectedly and the work season was drawing to a close. Bailey told council, “If it doesn’t go that way, the work just won’t get done. They’ll just say, ‘Well, we’ll just leave it all up here and it can sit for another 30 years.’ They’re just trying to facilitate how to get as much work as possible out of the budget that’s been given to them. If we go to (ExxonMobil) and say we don’t have enough money to do this, they’ll just say don’t do it.”
In other words, ExxonMobil wasn’t willing to pony up the extra $125,000 to clean up its own mess and passed that back to the taxpayer. Not wanting to be the ones left holding the “you lost work because of us” hat, town council did the only thing it could.
Thanks to Covid-19, ExxonMobil’s gross profits for 2020 were a mere $30.9 billion, a 42.47 per cent drop from the year previous. They’ve since rebounded to a $64.2-billion windfall in 2021 and $91-billion this year, so hopefully executives remember the sacrifice we made here in Inuvik to save the global oil industry.
This sarcastic anecdote and Statistics Canada housing figures just released showing that more than half the homes in the NWT were built in the 1990s or earlier demonstrate how the North is hindered in economic development by its territorial status. Without the ability to raise capital, there are far too many logistical cracks to make things as simple as fixing your house worth trying, never mind starting a business.
A simple example: You‘re a producer in Inuvik. You have a customer in Yellowknife. How does your product get there? Your only option is airfreight, which means tacking the additional shipping costs on to the final product. It doesn’t matter how often you flash “Buy Local” in front of someone alongside a hefty bottom line — they’re going for the bargain every time.
It’s not rocket science why the Beaufort Delta has stronger economic ties to Whitehorse — a road is in service at least half the time. Before we can even begin to talk about sustainable economic development in the NWT, we need a logical and reliable road network.
How do we pay for that? The Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk highway — which isn’t even paved — cost nearly $300 million. We’re looking at billions just to get started. The ExxonMobil example shows we can’t count on the resource industry and no federal government is going to incur nine-digit deficits on our behalf. It would be electoral suicide.
It’s time Ottawa set the North free.