Newly published research has concluded that food insecurity in Nunavut grew after a federal program was brought in to fight hunger in Canada’s North.
That’s despite a budget that has increased 65 per cent to $99 million last year from $60 million in 2011. Inadequate access to nutritious food due to lack of money is a major problem in the North, where groceries often cost two or three times what they do elsewhere. Rates of food insecurity are about four times higher than in southern Canada.The federal government has long chipped in for Arctic groceries. In 2011, Nutrition North was instituted by the Conservative government to replace a program that subsidized food shippers.
But in analyzing survey responses from 2007 to 2016 collected by Statistics Canada in 10 Nunavut communities, Fafard St-Germain found those numbers weren’t showing up on the dinner table.