Kotierk’s Nutrition North review puts onus on Ottawa to act
After two years of examining subsidy program, it’s time for Liberal government to move ahead with reform
Dan Vandal, left, is the former northern affairs minister who launched an external review of the Nutrition North program in 2024. The government picked Aluki Kotierk, centre, to conduct the review. It’s now up to Arctic and Northern Affairs Minster Rebecca Chartrand, right, to decide if and how the federal government will reform the food subsidy program. (File photos by Daron Letts, Jeff Pelletier and Jorge Antunes)
There’s more food for thought in Aluki Kotierk’s review of Nutrition North than expected, given how little was said in the year she was working on it and the fact it was submitted two months late.
But now that it has been published on the government’s website, the pressure shifts to Arctic and Northern Affairs Minister Rebecca Chartrand to move forward with a long-awaited, slow-going reform of the subsidy program that helps northerners with the high cost of groceries.
We’re quickly approaching the two-year mark since former northern affairs minister Dan Vandal announced in October 2024 an external review of Nutrition North. It was the Liberal government’s response to criticism that the $163-million program that subsidizes nutritious food and essential items in 124 northern and remote communities — including in Nunavut and Nunavik — wasn’t working.
Back in 2024 — with an election looming in 2025 — it felt like that external review might have been the government’s attempt to buy more time and prevent the controversial issue from blowing up.
In February 2025, the government appointed Kotierk, a former Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. president, as a special representative to the minister of Arctic and northern affairs, and gave her the task of conducting that external review.
Her March 31 deadline came and went, and there was no report. Finally, in May, she submitted her review to Chartrand.
In the 15 months Kotierk worked on the review, she couldn’t be reached for interviews about it. And the Arctic and Northern Affairs Department didn’t make her available to explain her work to the media. That didn’t inspire much confidence in the process or what the end result would look like.
But Kotierk put some interesting ideas on the table. She suggested that Nutrition North should subsidize all grocery items. Currently, Nutrition North subsidizes only nutritional foods.
A spokesperson for Chartrand confirmed the department’s interpretation of the report is the same — Kotierk’s call for Nutrition North to subsidize “all items” means an expansion of the program to cover food that’s not considered nutritional.
To make the case, Kotierk points to discrepancies like the fact Nutrition North subsidizes one type of pasta but not another — depending on the shape of the pasta.
Kotierk also suggested parliamentarians require an evaluation of food insecurity every three years.
Her review gives the government something to chew on.
Nearly two years have passed since Ottawa announced its plans to reform Nutrition North, yet nothing has changed.
Back in 2024, it seemed like the external review was to be the centrepiece of the government’s approach to reforming Nutrition North.
But in recent months, while waiting for Kotierk to submit her review, the government seemed to downplay its significance, perhaps signalling it didn’t have high expectations for it.
In 2026, whenever a Nunatsiaq News reporter asked about Kotierk’s overdue review, Chartrand or her office have played up the other parts the government’s review — the government’s own internal evaluation, grants it provided to researchers to study food prices, and a food sovereignty summit the government held in Ottawa in March.
After nearly two years getting input on how Nutrition North works — or doesn’t — it’s time for the Liberal government to move forward with the reform of the program that it promised.
You claim the report is now available to the public, but you don’t provide a link.
I could not find it, so I could not read it.
https://www.nutritionnorthcanada.gc.ca/eng/1781709808624/1781709823117
This was embarrassing to read.
The Nutrition North program has a few flaws, it’s not perfect, it just needs tweaks,the last program years ago and Canada post ran it, they charged the program a fortune to run and administer it, nobody was happy, when Leona was mp she hired a consultant group with northern experience to review the whole program, one of the major problems with the program is the NWC and Arctic coops administer it for themselves, that’s where it went off the rails and the very few southern independent suppliers don’t have the buying power or the volume to make deals with the airlines like NWC has it’s on airline so they benefit from paying their airline the huge subsidy rate Arctic coops benefit from having all their current stores and volumes to negotiate favourable rates for themselves, do they pass this on to consumers you be the judge, also the current items being subsidized are very good and the prices reflect it in most cases,yes the item list should be expanded and the few southern suppliers that try to compete have to deal with the federal civil servants who cause a paper nitemare.who themselves do not understand the norths lifestyle and transportation issues, and where is that useless Nutrition North board who have no accountability to northerners, put actual living breathing people that live in the north and spend their money in northern and coops and small independents not political favouritism. And tweak the current program and listen to Northners.
“Put some interesting ideas on the table”? I agree with your point that the onus is on the federal
Government to act and I’m glad to see you holding their feet to the fire on this in Nunatsiaq News. Your “interesting” uncritical overview of Ms Kotierk’s report stands in awkward contrast.
It’s fitting that the NN editorial is shallower than the report given the low, low quality of the report and the report writer and the corresponding level of quality of the article and the article reporter.
One obvious outcome, the reports are an accurate echo of Canada and the path it is heading
I wonder if this was done on purpose in sattire.
Fact check Nutrition North subsidy covers more than Healthy Foods …so if that is in the report as the author of this says …its a joke report amazing how little education on this program. Diapers, Laundry Detergent (some) basic examples. Introduction of a freight subsidy on water would be money better spent.
https://www.nutritionnorthcanada.gc.ca/eng/1415548276694/1415548329309
15 months to come up with “subsidize all groceries”. That took 15 months? How much money was wasted on this brilliant piece of Captain Obvious?
Shameful.
We will probably never know, but I suspect she wrote most of this report after the deadline had passed.
Can we please stop electing and appointing people like this, it’s a waste of money, time and resources, it also makes things more difficult and it’s so damaging for the long run.
The RHF is pleased to announce Aluki Kotierk as co-chair of the National Advisory Committee on Indigenous Education (NACITE), alongside co-chair Dr. Annette Trimbee.
I think it would be good for southern institutions to do reference checks before appointing people to important roles, another wasted space here.
I disagree. I think it would be a mistake for the Feds to move forward now. Let’s just say it out loud: the expectation is that Nutrition North results in grocery prices equal to the south and anything else but that will result in touting it another failure. IMO the expectation people have for this program is completely unrealistic.
i’m old and I used the Food Mail Program before Nutrition North. Both programs have one thing in common. Most people using the programs saw them as being created by southern bean counters who knew nothing of Arctic life.
What did the Feds do? They (with hindsight) wrongly chose Aluki to head a review of the program. Aluki’s mandate was: “…to evaluate the program’s effectiveness and propose actionable improvements by consulting directly with Indigenous organizations, retailers, transportation providers, and relevant federal government departments.”
From her report, it’s quite clear she consulted nobody. She dropped the ball entirely.
So, now what? Again, a major complaint against the program is that it is out of touch with the people it serves. Meanwhile, absolutely nothing has been done to fix that situation.
Whatever the Feds do short of providing Walmart grocery prices in the Arctic will be seen as a certain failure. Even though it is Aluki’s failure, people are already starting to forget this all started with her. The fact remains, no groups were consulted and as a result, the reviews mandate was not met. This is now on the Feds to fix and consult the people and groups involved. Otherwise it’s just another program made by bean counters.
I see no other options here. The Feds are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
What report did you read? The one I read did not have much to justify the pun “food for thought “. If anything it was starving for any real ideas or solutions.
What review? What is posted on the federal website was a student’s homework that was well past due and they just had to submit something so they wrote a personal essay with zero data, zero actual information, zero analysis and zero competence.
She obviously didn’t do it and had to submit something. The Northwest Company and ACL are laughing in her face.
How the Canadian Gov’t even accepted that report is beyond me.
She has once again embarrassed our Territory.
Uujuuq! Uujuuq! This is not a report—it is an emotionally charged editorial based on personal lived experiences, not sources and research. This would likely be graded an F at any college or university. How much money was paid for this “report” again? Can we get a refund?
The report provides no information about how the program is being run right now. No information about NWC, Arctic Cooperatives, the independent stores across northern communities. It makes me wonder if she left her living room at all to come up with this report. The fact that over the past years that NWC has been benefitting from the Nutrition North program they have been able to purchase North Star Air and receive 100% revenue from northerners and the federal government. ACL is part owner of Chrono Aviation Group, therefore also benefit from owning a portion of an airline.
No information about how the mining companies in the north provide assistance to communities in terms of food. How the independent stores across the north provide food support the their customers.
The frivolous report does not provide any real recommendations that would benefit the many communities it is meant to benefit.
The headline and the article should reflect that absolutely nothing in the sham report gives any incentive to change anything about the Nutrition Noth program
Aluki, you “strongly recommend that Canada support legislation that establishes a guaranteed livable income.”
Have you ever worked in management, in a retail store? Particularly in Nunavut, prices are set to keep most customers alive while extracting as much disposable income as possible.
If the income in the community rises, so do the prices. There is nothing to be gained by leaving money in the pockets of your customers, unless there is real competition.
Your recollection of good time and food don’t tell the whole story. You wrote about a time when there was aluminum foil and soup packages, so probably after 1950 and stores.
But what about the years of starvation that proceeded the 1950s.
Presuming 2 young Inuit women came to North America in about 1500, with some young men, and soon thereafter they each had 2 daughters (and some sons), and that that subsequent generations each produced 2 daughers at 20 year intervals, Inuit population would have reached 1 million women by 1900 if no one starved to death. Today there would be 256 million Inuit women. Clearly, the land has not been capable of feeding the growing population. Periods of death by starvation have always been with us.
The true message in your grandmother’s story is that everyone needs to have a usefully role in society. Today we have an economy that extracts the wealth from the land and the sea, and sends it elsewhere. Inuit get almost nothing of the eventual value. Until the procuce of the north is kept in the north so northerners can add value to it, northerners will continue to live in poverty.
Why don’t we ship soapstone south for others to carve? The same logic applies to iron and gold and uranium and nickle, and char and turbot.
We need to start small, own the material, own the production, own the transportation, and become self sufficient again, by doing the work and producing things of great value that we can trade for what we want to buy,
The alternative is to remain a colony.