NDP launches campaign to fix Nutrition North

NDP MPs Jonathan Genest-Jourdan, Carol Hughes, Charlie Angus, Dennis Bevington, Niki Ashton and Romeo Saganash, shown here April 2 in Ottawa, say the Nutrition North program needs to be changed so that Northerners can have the same access to affordable, nutritious food as other Canadians. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE NDP)

New Democratic Party MPs said April 2 they plan to again take concrete action to fix the Nutrition North program, “as the Conservatives have failed to ensure that Northerners have secure access to nutritious and affordable food.

“With elders scavenging in dumps to find food, it’s clear that Nutrition North is yet another narrow-minded Conservative policy that has failed northerners,” said the NDP’s Dennis Bevington, MP for the Northwest Territories, at an April 2 news conference in Ottawa.

“While the minister reads the newspaper and ignores the problem, New Democrats are taking action.”

The NDP proposal includes:

• incorporating 50 isolated, fly-in northern communities that are not eligible for a full subsidy under current Nutrition North provisions;

• initiating a comprehensive review of the program with Northerners as full partners;

• creating equitable program eligibility criteria for Northern communities based on their real circumstances; and,

• working with all Northerners to develop a sustainable solution to food insecurity.

The NDP MPs pointed to the recent Auditor General of Canada’s report on Nutrition North, which, they said, found the program had minimal impact on food cost and lacked transparency or accountability.

“Nutrition North program eligibility must be more equitable so that funding reflects real circumstances that northerners are facing so that no Canadian has to go hungry,” said NDP Intergovernmental Aboriginal Affairs critic Romeo Saganash, MP for Abitibi-James Bay-Nunavik-Eeyou, who recently visited Kuujjuaq where he spoke to delegates at the Makivik annual general meeting about the NDP’s call to review Nutrition North.