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NUNAVUT
Nunavut homes are overcrowded, food insecurity is high, jobs are scarce, and young people are turning to suicide.

Sounds familiar, but this is the way young Frobisher Bay residents creating a report for Maliiganik Tukisiiniakvik described life here in the 1970s. For Joshie Teemotee Mitsima, who helped create the report as a summer student in 1979, little has changed.

This is the second instalment of a three-part feature on the challenge of staying fed in the territory.

"If you're a young Inuk in one of the communities that didn't get the government centres, you're still stuck in Frobisher Bay in the '70s," Mitsima said. "Maybe 10 people got the jobs out of a community of 300 or 400. The rest have to grapple with welfare. Eighty per cent of Nunavut, outside of the bigger centres, probably relies on welfare still."

The Katitseeyeet report was a lightly-disseminated investigation of life in Frobisher Bay funded by the federal Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Mitsima's brother Jamesie Teemotee, for many years the executive director of Maliiganik, and a team of 10 used the funding to try to understand what causes suicide, which was 50 times the national average at the time.

"We knew the young people, they were our friends, relatives, our peers. We wanted to find out why they were committing suicide. Maybe the real reason is that it's very hard to live in the North," Mitsima said.

"If you were on welfare, it was difficult because like today, our houses were very crowded," he said. "If you got welfare, you'd have to feed the whole household. Your food would go very quickly if you were on welfare, just like today. Even the people who are working today are struggling with food, almost the same way the people were struggling then when they were on welfare."

Contrary to public perception, prices have actually gone down since 1973, but a large gap remains between the North and southern Canada.

The report's authors, using figures from Frobisher Bay, recorded the 1973 and 1979 costs of bread, milk, butter, potatoes, ground beef, sugar and wieners, and the cost of a meal that included hot beef, soup and coffee at the Continental restaurant. Included in the report is a 1973 Continental take-out menu, which Nunavut News/North has compared with a 2012 Navigator Inn menu.

When adjusted for inflation, a comparison of prices in 2012 to the 1973 prices (in 2012 dollars) recorded in the Katitseeyeet report shows four staples - bread, milk, hotdogs, and potatoes - have actually gotten cheaper over the years.

Milk saw the biggest decrease at 52 per cent, hotdogs went down by 31 per cent, potatoes by 22 per cent, and bread by 15 per cent. The cost of ground beef went up 17 per cent from 1973 to 1979, but today's price is the same as in 1979. The cost of butter has gone up dramatically, 48 per cent since 1973.

While prices have gone down for some of these staples, any savings pale in comparison to what could be saved if one shopped in Ottawa. The gap between Nunavut's capital and the nation's capital has narrowed since 1979 - adjusted for inflation, Ottawa prices have jumped dramatically since then - but there's still a large gap.

Only bread and milk are within 20 per cent of what Ottawa residents pay; butter costs 30 per cent more, hotdogs cost 52 per cent more, ground beef costs double, and potatoes at Iqaluit NorthMart are almost triple the price at an Ottawa Metro store.

Although the prices for some grocery staples have gone down in Iqaluit, restaurant prices (again, adjusted for inflation) have gone up dramatically since 1973. A cup of coffee went up 52 per cent, and ordering a hot beef sandwich or fish and chips costs 55 per cent more today. But the cost of a hotdog at the Navigator is more than double what it would cost at the Continental in 1973, and the soup of the day more than tripled.

Except for a cup of coffee, everything else we compared is more expensive today in Iqaluit than at the popular Zak's Diner in Ottawa's Byward Market.

Mitsima believes that if Nunavut wants to solve its food security problems, it needs to stop relying on southern solutions for a Northern problem. He criticized the approach of stocking fridges across the territory with perishable fruits and vegetables, the products subsidized under Nutrition North.

"That's a southern virtue," he said. "By the time you get an apple to Grise Fiord, it's rotten. But when you're from Toronto and you come North and you see these Inuit in poor health and suffering, you want to give them vitamins and nutrition. We're imposing southern values still, just like back there (in the '70s)."

A move away from southern values might do the territory some good. A 2007 McGill University study of 50 Iglulik residents found that those who hunt regularly were almost all, at 86 per cent, considered food secure.

"Those who regularly hunt were also significantly less likely to have to cut or skip meals due to lack of food, eat less, or not eat for a whole day compared to non-regular hunters," study authors James Ford, Lea Berrang Ford, Celina Irngaut, and Kevin Qrunnut wrote. "For example, no regular hunters reported not eating for a whole day compared to 41 per cent of non-regular hunters."

Even non-hunters relying on traditional diets were more likely to be food secure.

"None of those who obtained more than half of their food from traditional sources reported going a whole day without eating in the last year," the authors found, "compared to 47 per cent of those who eat half or less."

Unfortunately, not everyone can rely on traditional food sources. Most of the respondents - 64 per cent - were considered food insecure, and those struggling the most were those obtaining their food from stores, and women, who are more likely to go hungry to ensure their children and other family members have food.

"Lack of money, price of store food and other commodities, and expense of hunting were identified as major constraints to being food secure," the authors wrote.

Michael Qappik of Iqaluit has joined the small number of hunters selling country food at the monthly market in Iqaluit.

"I want to help some of the people and help myself at the same time for gas money and some food, too," Qappik said. "It's very expensive to be a hunter these days. Everything is expensive, the snowmobiles, the boats, the rifles, the bullets, and the clothing we have to use when we're out there. At the same time, we have our regular bills to pay."

For many, like Israel Mablick, who moved his family from Pond Inlet to Iqaluit to look for work, hunting for food is simply not an option.

"I can't afford to get a snowmobile, so I can't go out," Mablick said. "I don't even own a rifle. If I owned a snowmobile, a rifle and qamutik, I would go. If anyone else I know is going, I'll ask them, and if I'm lucky they'll say yes."

The Government of Nunavut agrees country food is a way to reduce food insecurity, as discussed at the first meeting of the Nunavut Food Security Coalition June 26 in Iqaluit. The government is using public funds to support the Country Food Distribution Program, which gives hamlets access to funds to purchase, store and distribute country food to Nunavummiut.

Mitsima would also like to see more government investment in other programs - such as removing airport landing fees and reducing the cost of icebreakers - that, in his view, would help feed the poor majority, not the working minority.

"Don't try to feed the one person in 10 working in the community; feed the nine starving people," he said. "The one working person can afford to bring in their own fresh vegetables if they have to. Sell the food for the poor who are in Nunavut."

• In part three of Feeding Nunavut, Nunavut News/North will examine the struggle to find solutions to Nunavut's food insecurity as part of a web of intermingled issues, including poverty and education. To contribute to the discussion, e-mail us at editor@nunavutnews.com

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