Partisanship gets in the way of parliamentary committee, leading to in-depth answers from northern business leaders
The menu served Wednesday by Nunavut MP Lori Idraut and other members of the House of Commons Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee was a menu of lightly grilled executives seasoned with political rhetoric.
However, the results were not very satisfactory.
The committee convened the heads of Canada’s North and Calm Airlines, Northwest Corporation, and Kimmich Cooperative to attend the meeting. The institute is studying how well Nutrition North, a federal program that helps northerners pay for food, is working.
Idlaut, an NDP member of the committee, was furious with Northwest president Dan McConnell and demanded to know his salary and the average salary for Iqaluit NorthMart cashiers.
McConnell dodged the question and said the answer was not immediately available but was included in an internal circular posted online. He agreed to provide it to the committee later.
By the time Mr. Idraut’s second round began, she had the information. Presumably after some nimble NDP official looked into it and texted her in time to drop her difficult question.
McConnell’s salary is $3.9 million, according to Idolout’s website. The average annual salary for a cashier is $37,000.
“Basically, your salary is 98 times the employee’s salary,” Idraut said triumphantly. She said she didn’t want Mr. McConnell to just hand over his salary to the committee in writing after the meeting and get away with it.
Committee Chairman John Aldag gave Mr. McConnell the opportunity to respond to Mr. Idraut’s statement.
“That’s fine,” McConnell said quietly.
However, for the executives who were called to the committee, it was a hot topic.
Last year, another parliamentary committee asked executives at Canada’s largest grocery store chain what they were doing to help, when the same committee adopted Mr. Idraut’s motion last month calling on executives to appear in court. It looked like it would be a similar confrontation to when I asked for an explanation. Customers in view of rising food prices.
But apart from Idraut turning Mr McConnell’s income into a national business, the questioning at the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee was mild, with MPs refusing to talk about Northern meat and potatoes. Instead, he used the appearance of executives to score points for his party.
Conservative MP Bob Zimmer talks about how the federal carbon tax is impacting transport and food prices in the North while marching to leader Pierre Poièvre’s slogan ‘Abolish the tax’. I picked it up.
And Liberal MPs stressed that transit agencies in the territory are exempt from the government’s carbon tax and urged Mr McConnell to explain how his company would pass on the Nutrition North subsidy to customers. I asked calmly.
Liberal MP Marcus Pawlowski said the company, which essentially has a monopoly in parts of the Northern region, charges whatever it wants and uses federal Nutrition Northern funding to inflate its profits. I asked him what was holding him back.
McConnell hit Pawlowski with a softball, saying, “Given our relationship with our customers, we’ve always taken a balanced approach to passing costs on to consumers.”
The Northern Nutrition Program is an important federal program that impacts the daily lives of Northern residents. It is good that the Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Committee is investigating whether the public money used to subsidize food prices is being used effectively.
But if lawmakers put their partisan agenda aside, they could get more steak and less excitement from the rare opportunity to question the business leaders at the center of the issue. .
