We’re resolving transparency issues with Nutrition North: Ottawa

Stephen Van Dine from Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development told those gathered at an Arctic research conference in Ottawa Dec. 11 that his department plans to make retailers who receive the Nutrition North Canada freight subsidy more accountable for the money they get from taxpayers. (PHOTO BY LISA GREGOIRE)

Myriam Fillion of the University of Ottawa shared findings from May community meetings in Inuvik where residents said community freezers, with community harvested country foods, would be helpful to solve food security issues. (PHOTO BY LISA GREGOIRE)

OTTAWA — Stephen Van Dine, a high level bureaucrat with Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, braved an inquisitive and somewhat skeptical crowd of academics Dec. 11 to say the Nutrition North subsidy is working, and will get better.

Van Dine, director general of AANDC’s Northern Strategic Policy Branch, was part of a panel of presenters during a topical workshop on food security at this week’s Arctic Change northern research conference in Ottawa.

After repeating five times that, at the end of its life, the cost of the old food mail subsidy had ballooned to $58 million a year, Van Dine quickly “cut to the chase,” and addressed program shortcomings that were raised by the Auditor General of Canada in a report released Nov. 25.

“The auditor general did not uncover any misuse of funds. The auditor general did not point to anyone misappropriating subsidy dollars,” Van Dine told his audience.

“The auditor general made a very clear and factual observation that they were not able to deduce, with absolute certainty, to the extent they were looking for, that we were doing what we said we were going to do, and for that we said, ‘OK. So we’ll fix it.’ And we are.

“We have some transparency issues that we’re working with retailers on, but there’s a lot more we could be doing and we’re going to be getting out in the field in the new year.”

Food in all its forms — from the land, from the store, grown in northern greenhouses, frozen in community freezers, shipped up with subsidies, nutritious, diseased, expensive — was a topic of great interest during this week’s ArcticNet-sponsored northern research conference.

In fact, some suggested that instead of food security, the discussion should be around “food sovereignty” which implies transferring the power to choose, distribute and consume food into the hands of northerners rather than governments and retailers.

Call it what you want: Northerners continue to grapple with the age-old question of how to get affordable food onto their tables and several sessions, which featured presentations from policy makers, program managers and scientists, offered conference participants a wide variety of perspectives on that.

Van Dine said the NNC subsidy is an important link in the chain to help Northerners afford to buy healthy food.

But not everyone was convinced that all the money Ottawa gives to northern retailers to subsidize the cost of bringing nutritious food north is being passed on to the consumer, something the auditor general said was hard to gauge given the current reporting structure.

Annabel Rixen, who is studying the potential impacts of mine closures in Nunavut’s Kivalliq region, said the community members she speaks with think retailers are making a profit off the subsidy instead of passing it on to consumers. Her question was pointed.

“How are you concretely holding store owners accountable in terms of consequences — legal consequences and costs — that they will face if they don’t pass along the savings properly?”

Van Dine repeated, again, the $58 million cost of the food mail program then said he understands people’s doubts and promised that Nutrition North staff will be vigilant in making retailers more accountable for the money they get.

(At $60 million, NNC’s annual budget is roughly the same but it’s spent differently, Van Dine said — the bulk of it on nutritious foods.)

He said current contribution agreements with retailers will be amended and put into effect in April 2015 so that independent auditors hired by NNC will be allowed to “go in and look at the books,” and see more details about the “landed cost” of food items and also company profit margins, something critics have been asking for.

“We’ve already communicated to retailers about the transparency issue. There has to be greater transparency,” he said.

Van Dine added that results of retailer compliance reviews will be available to the public on the Nutrition North Canada website, as they are now, along with any penalties or remediation orders that retailers are given for non-compliance.

But a food subsidy cannot, in itself, solve the problem of food insecurity in northern Canada.

Sara Statham, a Government of Nunavut health department staffer, who sits on the Nunavut Food Security Coalition, presented a number of findings from the Nunavut Food Security and Action Plan released in May, and told the audience of all Inuit jurisdictions, Nunavut has the highest rate of families reporting food insecurity: roughly two out of every three families.

At the same time, the amount of calories Nunavummiut get from country foods has declined to 16 per cent in 2008, as compared to 23 per cent a decade earlier.

Statham talked about the next project the coalition will tackle — a country food safety project which will examine how to get raw and fermented meats to elders and others, who prefer it that way, in a safe manner, for example.

She also did something that many presenters are starting to do at conferences such as these: she identified research gaps and areas of interest where there is no data in the hopes that academics in the crowd might incorporate those topics into their next research project.

For example, most research on food security these days centres on country food and harvesting, she said.

But she and her colleagues would like to know more about store-bought food habits: what foods do people buy and why? What impacts their choices?

Fikret Berkes, a University of Manitoba researcher, said more Inuit are choosing to buy store bought foods because they are out on the land less — and they are not passing on traditional harvesting skills and knowledge to young people to the same degree they used to, he said.

Berkes presented findings from another study released this year by the Council of Canadian Academics called the “Aboriginal Food Security in Northern Canada: An Assessment of the State of Knowledge.”

Myriam Fillion, with the University of Ottawa’s biology department, reported on a two-day community workshop held in Inuvik in May 2014 where Inuvialuit participants pointed to community freezers as a way to store and share harvested foods.

She said people very much supported the idea of community-sponsored harvests — paying hunters to hunt on behalf of the community — inter-community trade of country foods and more community freezers.

Fillion encouraged her colleagues to take up the challenge and research what works and what doesn’t in order to fulfill the needs and desires of local people in the Inuvialuit region — best practices that can be shared with other northern jurisdictions.