Canada’s northern food subsidy Nutrition North Canada: a comprehensive program evaluation

ABSTRACT

Background: Nutrition North Canada (NNC) is a retail subsidy program implemented in 2012 and designed to reduce the cost of nutritious food for residents living in Canada’s remote, northern communities. The present study evaluates the extent to which NNC provides access to perishable, nutritious food for residents of remote northern communities.

Design: Program documents, including fiscal and food cost reports for the period 2011–2015, retailer compliance reports, audits of the program, and the program’s performance measurement strategy are examined for evidence that the subsidy is meeting its objectives in a manner both comprehensive and equitable across regions and communities.

Results: NNC lacks price caps or other means of ensuring food is affordable and equitably priced in communities. Gaps in food cost reporting constrain the program’s accountability. From 2011–15, no adjustments were made to community eligibility, subsidy rates, or the list of eligible foods in response to information provided by community members, critics, the Auditor General of Canada, and the program’s own Advisory Board. Measures to increase program accountability, such as increasing subsidy information on point-of-sale receipts, make NNC more visible but do nothing to address underlying accountability issues

Conclusions: The current structure and regulatory framework of NNC are insufficient to ensure the program meets its goal. Both the volume and cost of nutritious food delivered to communities is highly variable and dependent on factors such as retailers’ pricing practices, over which the program has no control. It may be necessary to consider alternative forms of policy in order to produce sustainable improvements to food security in remote, northern communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Food security
• north
• Arctic
• Indigenous
• community
• food cost
• hunger
• policy

Acknowledgement

The author would like to acknowledge the work of Research Assistants Lisa Semchuk and Andrea Picardo who assisted in the compilation of tables used in the analysis.

Declaration

The views expressed in the following manuscript are solely those of the author. The author has no competing interests and was not contracted or paid by any organization to conduct this evaluation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ INAC, the federal Ministry responsible for the administration of northern food subsidy policy, has undergone a series of name changes. Its legal title is set out under the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Act [50], though from 2011–2015 it was known as Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada. In this paper, the acronym INAC will be used to indicate the activities and publications of this Ministry across these time periods.

² On 18 July 2016, the Government of Canada announced that the list of eligible communities would be expanded by an additional 37 communities [22]. The expanded eligibility list includes a combination of 25 newly-eligible communities (the majority of these are in MB and ON) and 12 communities whose eligibility status has been raised from partial- to full-subsidy eligibility. The changes will came into in October 2016.

³ No subsidy expenditures are reported for Trout Lake and Gametì NT, Black Lake and Stony Rapids SK, and Lourdes-de-Blanc-Sabon QC 2011–2015 though these communities are eligible for partial subsidy [21].

⁴ RNFB cost estimates for Old Crow YT are unavailable for March 2015 [30].

⁵ A recent report estimates the cost of an all-season hunting outfit at upwards of $55,000 [36].

⁶ In Fall 2014, North West Company store closed its doors [37]. For a period of several months, the community had no retail store. Perishable goods were supplied by a local non-profit agency, or by private shipments. In May 2015, a new Arctic Co-operatives Limited store opened in the community [38].

⁷ The introduction to Dargo’s 2008 Food Mail Program Review states that “the author has no vested interest in any organization, airline or retail chain associated with this review” [19].p. [3] A 2001 media report entitled “Last of the Bay Boys” describes Graeme Dargo as a former 10-year employee of the North West Company [46].

Additional information

Funding

The authors have not received any funding or benefits from industry or elsewhere to conduct this study.