Disappointed that Santa didn’t bring you $500,000 to start your own business?
Cheer up! In lieu of Santa, the Yukon Economic Development Fund (YEDF) is accepting applications until January 15.
Don’t worry that you lack a big nation-building idea. In the old days, governments focused on major strategic projects such as cross-Canada railways or massive northern hydro dams. Nowadays, the recently released YEDF annual report shows no idea is too small: one business group got a $1250 grant to take foreign consuls general to lunch.
Your business idea doesn’t even need to be fresh. YEDF will help you compete against existing Yukon businesses. I spoke to one downtown business person, whom I am not naming to protect their future grant applications from annoyed YEDF officials. They were vexed to see competitors get grants for new equipment from YEDF. Examples of recipients in competitive markets include heat pump installers, tourism activities, greenhouse fruit and vegetables, bushplane services, daycares, catering, campgrounds and heavy equipment. Like Russian arms dealers in Africa, YEDF will even support both sides in a competitive battle; two Yukon drone companies got funding.
Nor do you need to feel tied down to the Yukon. YEDF is also keen to help you explore global markets. In addition to website and digital marketing grants, YEDF paid for nine groups of Yukoners to go to conferences and trade shows from Victoria to Paris. It also paid for leasehold improvements on a shop in Skagway.
Reading the YEDF list evokes the reaction you may remember from Christmas morning, when Santa brought you a snow shovel and gave your sibling a set of Apple AirPods Max wireless surround-sound headphones (2023’s hottest gift, according to Rolling Stone).
However, we shouldn’t criticize the recipients. It is a time-honoured principle of capitalism that if the government is giving away money, the private sector should accept it. Many of the companies on the YEDF list are among the most dynamic and successful in the Yukon.
Instead, ask yourself what you could do with $500,000.
If you’re having trouble brainstorming, here are a few ideas to get you started across three categories: “useful,” “fresh,” and “meta.”
In the useful category, the YEDF list is surprisingly light on businesses that address all the crises being declared by other government departments. There is only one hydro project in the last two years, for example. This was money to help with permitting and design for the North Fork Hydro project near Dawson. This is useful for the proponents since, according to YESAB’s website, there are plenty of other government departments erecting permitting pylons for North Fork to stickhandle around.
Now that Yukon Energy’s priority projects in Northern BC have become entangled in years of transboundary governance negotiations, the Yukon will need power projects in the Central Yukon. With YEDF’s help, you could be CEO of Drury Lake Hydro Ltd!
I only see one housing related project on the list. Your concept for a housing co-op or tiny-house community could be next.
And as for the health-care crisis, the list includes things like land-based retreats, healing camps, dental 3D printing machinery and a “Hollistic Health Fair.” But I don’t see any doctor’s offices getting money to expand equipment or hours. If a convenience store is sufficiently strategic to receive $103,426, then it would make sense for a doctor’s office too. The new government walk-in clinic has channeled the spirit of Big Bank customer service from the 1970s and is only open 9am to 12pm and 1pm to 4pm. So a health care business based on the idea that people get sick after 4pm would tick the “innovative” box for YEDF.
In the fresh category, I suggest picking one of the ideas that got funded. Then, depending on your management style, gather the staff around the whiteboard or get a napkin at your favourite tavern. Next, think how you could dial that idea up to 11. For example, when I read $14,028 for a new door for a Cessna bushplane, I thought why not $500,000 for the business plan and testing of one of those new low-carbon hybrid airships? You could quit the day job and instead fly equipment to remote mines and float with high-end tourists over migrating caribou herds.
Picture yourself as CEO of Yukon Airship Tours and Heavy Lift Inc.
For something meta, how about getting a government grant to start a business that uses ChatGPT tools to fill in applications for government grants? The Yukon’s grant-industrial complex would be so much more efficient if proponents could hire your robot to go through the thesaurus and come up with creative ways to restate on every page how the application meets the grant program’s criteria.
Some old-school purists may object that the business of government is public services not peanut-buttering government cash across every business sector. However, this point of view falls victim to a Yukon version of that game theory classic, the prisoner’s dilemma.
It may indeed be optimal for Yukoners overall if the government focused its money and attention on housing, health care, addictions and climate, and not on subsidizing business groups to take consuls general to lunch. However, free money is on the table for you and your competitors. If you don’t apply, you know they will. And there’s a decent chance that they will get the money, since the approval rate last year was 59 percent. If you don’t apply, then at chamber-of-commerce meetings you’ll be in the embarrassing position of having to admit that you invested your own money in your business. Everyone will think you’re a chump. You should apply too.
So start thinking big. Or small. You can download the application form at yukon.ca/en/edf. The deadline is January 15.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist, author of the Aurore of the Yukon youth adventure novels and co-host of the Klondike Gold Rush History podcast. He won the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist.