Pangnirtung secures $5.4 M to launch food voucher program
Plan calls for vouchers to be used to help children, teenagers
The Hamlet of Pangnirtung announced it has received $5.4 million for a food voucher program. (File photo)
Pangnirtung has secured $5.4 million from the federal Jordan’s Principle program to launch a food voucher program, the hamlet announced recently.
The money will be used for vouchers to provide children up to age 18 with nutritious meals, baby formula and diapers and other necessary supplies. Families must register in advance to be part of the program.
Registration is at the wellness centre and at Sailivik drop-in centre, according to notices posted to the hamlet’s Facebook page. The vouchers can be used at the Northern Store and at the Pangnirtung Inuit Co-op.
The rollout of the food voucher program started Feb. 16 and vouchers were being given out alphabetically last week and continuing this week, the Hamlet of Pangnirtung posted on its Facebook page.
A schedule for March will be provided to families explaining how the program will continue for the next 14 months, according to the hamlet’s post.
The Inuit Child First Initiative, which supports Jordan’s Principle, is a federal program created to ensure Inuit children have access to essential education, health and social services and products, according to its website.
Jordan’s Principle was named in honour of Jordan River Anderson, a boy from Norway House Cree Nation in Manitoba.
He was born in 1999 with multiple disabilities, but after disputes between different levels of government over who should pay for his care he died at the age of five, according to a federal government website.
Someone please explain to me like I’m five years old how there is so much money flowing through this Territory but so many seemingly need help just to feed themselves?
Some people support their bad habits. Smoking, snuff, drugs, alcohol. High cost of groceries leads to just buying the bad stuff.
The money is wasted on addictions, whether the addiction is one of the big 3 (alcohol, drugs, gambling) or the less obvious like snow machines, atvs, boats, motors, guns, trucks, etc (big ticket items that a lot of people can’t afford but always buy and then can’t afford necessities). Nunavut is a welfare state where the present day culture is to beg for what you don’t have instead of working for it. The sad thing is that it works. There are handouts everywhere you look, and it has led to the current prevalent attitude of entitlement. How can young people be expected to have a good work ethic when there is no appreciable difference in quality of life between the person who busts their ass and works hard and the ones who sit at home on welfare?
This money would give about $3,000 to every man, woman and child in Pang.
Except, most of the money will end up in the hands of a few people who are the ones who benefit from most programs. They have the jobs or the connections that enable this.
Most people in Nunavut are addicts.
They are addicted to one or more of cigarettes, marijuana, gambling, hard drugs, alcohol, pop, junk food.
A full time GN job that makes $90,000 a year you could easily have 60 families live comfortably from this 5.4 Million. That is about 1/5th of the population of Pang that can be supported from this fund alone.
I support my family of 5 with only me working. No we dont have the latest Iphones and video games but we do have skidoo, honda, boat, cabin.
When it comes to jordans principal, no money ever goes to drugs or alcohol. Pang will see how it works. It helps a bunch. The children will be happy. They won’t go to school hungry. Jordans principal is a good organization.
It will help the kids, that’s good, but it will also help spend more on regular earned dollars on strong drugs 🙁
In Nunavut, even social programs have social programs. Canadian taxpayers already give Nunavut residents money to buy food with through income support. Many recipients don’t use it for that, and even let their kids suffer from malnourishment, so then government wrings their hands and gives them food vouchers, in addition to the money they already gave them to buy food.
Why do we have to support people twice? Why are tax dollars intended for food and clothing being spent on addictions, and then when they are, we have to double pay so that they can have food too? Shouldn’t the funding they aren’t spending on food, but are spending on addictions, be withdrawn, and replaced only with food and clothing vouchers?
No Canadian should have to work to pay for someone else’s addictions. And yet it’s the accepted and rewarded Nunavut way.
You can blame the government for introducing Inuit to the bad habits. The white people that forced us into settlements. The men that drugged and supplied booze to us Inuit. Blame the white guys. We didn’t even have currency. Seal meat and berries and water was our currency. Building igloos was our real estate. Everything we did, was from mother earth. Everything we needed, mother earth supplied for us.
Take some responsibility for yourself for once. This pathetic excuse making you do is the reason things will never change.
AMEN!!!
just so you are aware they use this to buy healthy food and they are not supposed to buy junk food and fast food. Money is not given to them its a form of a charge account and every thing that they purchase is listed in the account. If they buy a certain food and if its not on the list they deduct so much off from the next time they get it.
Also it is helping the people who work fulltime jobs a lot of people live off from paycheck to paycheck who have children. Not all people have addiction issues!!!
This Federal Government is sure spending a lot on Nunavut and the north, I’ve never seen so much funding and new funding flowing north like this before.
I’m all for helping people, done it most of my life, its part of life to be able to assist others. We dont appear to have lack of money or income we all have spending issues, live beyond our means.