Aspirations of the North

The Lac de Gras staking rush has quickened a largely unpopulated and undeveloped area to life after Dia Met Minerals and BHP-Utah Mines announced that the 160-ton sample from their find contains gem-quality diamonds. Share prices of the region’s players immediately took off. Should a discovery be proven economic, says diamond expert Christopher Jennings, a new town will spring up and Yellowknife, the nearest metropolis, “will be the supply centre.”

Meanwhile, Minnova Inc., which owns the Izok Lake copper-zinc deposit, also north of Yellowknife, sees the Northwest Territories as a frontier to place its bets. The challenge, says President David Watkins, is to develop infrastructure and train personnel.

Companies that have a stake in the North are studying the aspirations of the aboriginals there. Nickel giant Falconbridge Ltd., for one, plans to have a largely native workforce for its Raglan sulphide nickel deposit in the Ungava region in northern Quebec. “The people in the North want tax revenue and jobs,” says Jennings.

For thousands of years, the people of the North have lived from the land. Now, a new generation of aboriginal entrepreneurs is trying to strike a delicate balance between the profit motive and protection of their traditional ways of life.

The emerging business leaders know it is imperative they be involved in the apparently inexorable spread of the modern economy. “If you can’t turn the tide, at least try to direct its force and impact.” That is the dominant attitude among mainstream aboriginal leaders.

Just as Canada’s natives are calling for recognition of their inherent right to self-government and pushing for settlement of age-old land claims, so too are they working to develop an autonomous economy that will be less reliant on non-native governments, money and resources. Albert Diamond, president of Creeco, a $100-million-a-year northern Quebec holding corporation with subsidiaries such as Air Creebec and The Cree Construction Co., is acutely aware of the challenge.

Diamond’s major concern is to get more Crees into skilled jobs and management positions in Cree-controlled companies. His preoccupation is shared with a majority of aboriginal business people across Canada.

Only one of nine pilots at Air Creebec, for example, is native. None of the 17 accountants working for Cree businesses is Cree. Of 32 nurses, only one is aboriginal.

Over the last few years, native consulting firms that offer courses on band management and business practices have emerged and there is now a university native management program.

The Canadian Council for Native Business, funded by the country’s corporate community and the federal employment and immigration commission, operates an internship program that places natives and Metis in management positions across the country.

Finding the much-needed capital to create the aboriginal companies that will hire native people, however, is another matter.

Capital is hard to come by because there are few northern financial institutions and there is a lack of sympathy to the special needs of remote native businesses. Reliance on governments is high.

But businessmen like Leo Hardy, chairman of the Metis Development Corp. (MDC), want to correct that. “We’re shopping for our own venture capital,” he explains. “We’re preparing for the ongoing development of the North, but at our pace and on our terms.”

MDC is a major economic force in the western Arctic, with such projects as an office complex and other real estate, an oil drilling company, office and building supply companies, a cable-TV operation and a joint venture that is buying up all of the fishing lodges on Great Bear Lake.

Shares in MDC — founded about 15 years ago — are widely held by the Metis people of the Northwest Territories.

To foster homegrown businesses, MDC is in a joint venture with the Denendeh Development Corp. to set up the Aboriginal Capital Corp., which will lend money for project startups or business expansions to Dene and Metis in the western Northwest Territories.

The venture is partly funded by the Canadian Aboriginal Economic Development Strategy, which administers federal funding programs.

Aboriginal businesses are young. About 80% of existing businesses were started within the last decades, according to Ron Jamieson, a Mohawk of the Six Nations Reserve who is president of Aboriginal Investment Services and vice-president of the Equion Group.

Increasingly, the engine of Northern economic growth is the local or regional native-development corporation. And the accent is on nurturing long-term sustainable development projects.

If they are to attract partners and investment in a serious way, however, they must be at arm’s length from political considerations, says Tony Reynolds, assistant deputy minister at Industry, Science and Technology Canada in charge of aboriginal economic programs.

Nunasi Corp., for example, was created in 1976 by the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada to manage the funds expected from the settlement of land claims. It has since evolved into a thriving business concern for the 17,500 Inuit of Nunavut, the proposed new 2-million-sq.-km territory in the eastern Arctic. Among Nunasi Corp. holdings are the profitable Iglu Hotel in Baker Lake and the largest barge service in the North, Norterra Inc. The latter is a joint venture with the Inuvialuit Development Corp., which acts on behalf of the 2,500 Inuvialuit of the western Arctic.

Nunasi and other corporations — such as Creeco — are big believers in joint ventures and the pooling of resources in order to be more effective and successful.

— Southam News, with files from T.N.M. staff