When it’s too costly even to be poor
TheGlobeandMail.com – Opinion/Editorials
Sep. 12, 2016. Editorial
Two weeks ago the gargantuan cruise ship Crystal Serenity dropped anchor near Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, and disgorged hundreds of passengers into the tiny hamlet.
They picked up soapstone sculptures, soaked in a little Inuit culture, and in some cases, a daily newspaper reported, popped into the local food market to gawp at prices.
That’s right, inflated grocery costs in Canada’s North have become a tourist attraction. It’s not uncommon to pay $9 for a box of cereal or $24 for a kilo of bell peppers.
Indeed, a new study shows that feeding a northern family of four costs twice as much as further south. In some cases the food budget is gobbling up fully half of disposable family income.
There is no cheap and convenient way to get fresh vegetables, meat and staples to many parts of the north; if there’s no road or rail line, flying becomes the only option and planes are expensive.
But the federal government has a subsidy program to offset some of the costs of bringing a litre of milk to a store shelf north of the tree-line.
In 2014, the Auditor-General took a look at it, found the $60-million program lacking, and concluded that common sense wasn’t being used for actual need.
The Aboriginal Affairs department promised action, but clearly more needs to be done. The advocacy group Food Secure Canada recently partnered with researchers from a quartet of Canadian universities to take a snapshot of food prices in three remote Ontario reserve communities.
They found food insecurity is rampant; people are being gouged by retail monopolies; not enough communities meet eligibility requirements; and there is deficient transparency in terms of data collection. The good news is that this should be relatively easy to fix, and the current federal cabinet is clearly well-intentioned when it comes to aboriginal policy.
All that’s needed now is for some of that political will to be directed at the problem. If we are going to incur the considerable expense of subsidizing life in remote northern communities – and evidently we are – let us at least do a competent and effective job of it.
< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/when-its-too-costly-even-to-be-poor/article31838978/ >
Tags: economy, Health, Indigenous, participation
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While reading this article there were two things that mainly stood out to me. The first is how insanely expensive all of their necessities are which is leading them to be a tourist attraction, and the second is that they are lacking $60-million in order to fund their program to make the changes they need.
Every town looks to be a tourist attraction for some reason or another but when it comes to being an attraction for something as horrendous as paying $24 for a box of cereal, that is not right. I started to think about it and I realized something for thousands of years the indigenous people of Canada lived with a local diet, although it may be hard and it is not a solution they could relearn what about provisioning with locally available resources. As I said this is not a solution to their problem but it may help in the long run. As for the $60-million they would need in order to get their program running the government should be focused on helping these people. They cannot actually be okay with having places in our country being tourist attractions for the wrong reasons like that. The thought of having to pay that much makes me ill. I am grateful for what I have but that needs to change.