Health committee  Thank you for the question. I would hate to refer you to somebody else, but the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs is responsible for the infrastructure needs of communities. I'm only going from memory, but I think in terms of answering a specific percentage, it might be

Health committee  Thank you. I'd be very happy and actually proud to also respond in terms of the work we have been doing within the base of our programming in first nations and Inuit health branch. I've done a quick calculation. We spend about $150 million annually in four programs alone that a

Health committee  I believe the programs you're talking about, in terms of interventions of mums who've already had one baby and then preventing further ones, describes very well the mentoring programs we've been implementing with our FASD funding in first nations and Inuit communities. In this co

Health committee  Certainly the Canada prenatal nutrition program is very much concerned with the nutritional adequacy of mothers. So there is encouragement around breastfeeding; there is the provision of food. We had mentioned the example in Nunavik; char and caribou are provided to mothers throu

Health committee  Thank you very much. As you may be aware, the government has recently moved forward with the renewal of the aboriginal diabetes initiative. This is a strategy that puts resources into first nations on reserve and into Inuit communities and attempts to bring awareness and offer p

Health committee  The information I have in front of me is mostly related to diabetes in international examples. But the link to obesity is clear, because when you're looking at preventing diabetes, as my colleagues across the way have indicated, you're looking at healthy eating and physical activ

Health committee  Our prevalence rate--I think we're saying three to five times--is about 15%. Yes, it's probably lower among the Maori. There are many different factors at play with the Maori. There is much more integration with New Zealand society. The culture is much more accepted. There are

Health committee  Yes, Health Canada FNIB does have a relationship with the food mail program, and I'm not aware that it was removed from any communities, so that is something I'll have to check on. The role we play there is to provide guidance on nutrition and, for example, which foods to includ

Health committee  Yes, there has been. We are in the process of finalizing the evaluations of those projects. One of the major lessons from them is the work we need to do at the retail site in the store with the public coming in to buy the foods in terms of education, reading labels, and giving id

Health committee  Yes, Mr. Chair, I had hoped to add something to the list of requests. If you didn't study this, would you have missed the boat? If I may, from a first nations and Inuit perspective, I think the committee really needs to look at the issue of food insecurity, particularly for fir

Health committee  All right. I would just say on the labeling that we have—I'll follow on from Mary—an approach in terms of the first nations and Inuit as well in labelling for literacy purposes. In terms of direct resources on reserve, there are a number of programs that are aimed at this at di

Health committee  I will refer specifically to aboriginal people in remote regions. I will ask my colleagues to discuss isolated communities in general. Let me give you an example. We have information about the Nunavik region, which is an Inuit region in northern Quebec. We've set up projects whe

Health committee  My understanding is that they're additive, that's correct. So it's 22% overweight and 36% obese.

Health committee  I think I commented on that in my opening remarks, that we don't have the kind of population-level representative data that we would need. We are aware that first nations are looking at a public health surveillance approach, and we're interested in working with them on that.

Health committee  Yes, they did.