Nunavik, Nunavut food shipments resume

MONTREAL — A truckers’ dispute in southern Quebec that wound down on Tuesday meant many people in Nunavik and Nunavut had to forgo their favourite sandwiches for a while last week.

From October 3-12 some 2,000 Quebec truckers set up blockades at 24 sites throughout Quebec. One blockade prevented any trucks from reaching Val d’Or, the staging point for food mail to the Baffin and Nunavik.

As a result, there was not even one loaf of bread to be found at the Northern store in Kuujjuaq, where more than 500 loaves are usually sold every week.

And in Iqaluit, where the Northern store bakery’s two specialty bread ovens churned out bread all week, the supply wasn’t nearly enough — by the end of a week, the stock of frozen bread dough was running out, too.

“We baked all we had, but we could only bake so much, and the two ovens were going steady,” said manager David Mould. “We used up the last case on Friday.”

Many other smaller communities went completely out of bread or weren’t able to produce enough freshly-baked bread to make a dent in the demand.

On October 8, the Quebec government’s attorney general and trucking companies won an injunction to make the truckers quit their barricades and stop any other pressure tactics for 10 days.

But the two unions that represent independent truckers initially told their members to defy this court order, saying that it ressembled the invoking the War Measures Act in 1970, which gave police and the military special powers of arrest during the October Crisis in Quebec.

The last truckers’ barricades only came down when Serge Ménard, Quebec’s tough-talking public security minister, said that “there will be zero tolerance for roadside intimidation”.

He promised that there would be no negotiation until the barricades came down, and then sent out the Sûreté du Québec to begin arresting protesters.

Although the truckers didn’t succeed in forcing the government’s hand, their protest did manage to cause a huge disruption in the delivery of food to the North.

“It was total, total chaos,” said Rénald Lapierre, chief shipper for Nunavik’s cooperative network, la Fédération des coopératives du Nouveau-Québec.

Every week, the FCNQ sends three truckloads, with 1400 boxes on 28 pallets, to Val d’Or. These trucks carry fresh produce, perishables and frozen goods, all bound for Nunavik’s cooperative stores.

But for a full week there was almost no food sent north. Only one truck with frozen food made it through to Val d’Or on October 3. Another remained stuck in the barricade.

But truck traffic to Val d’Or resumed on October 12.

Lapierre said that, barring more turmoil, co-op stores in Nunavik would be well stocked by the end of next week.

All food mail cargo bound for Nunavik passes through Air Inuit’s warehouse at La Grande. Depending on the weather, Air Inuit handlers said that the three cargo planes that regularly fly the two coasts should be able move out food fairly quickly.

The Northern stores and Arctic Ventures in Iqaluit had already managed to find alternate supplies of bread when it looked as if the protest would move into a second week. By Tuesday of this week, bread was back on their shelves.