It is a great riding.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Minister, for coming here today.
I'm somewhat relieved. Seven minutes goes by so quickly, so I'm glad that my colleague mentioned Canada's economic action plan pre-emptively, because I can focus on an issue that I think is important to a number of committee members' ridings and is very important to mine. It's the Nutrition North Canada program.
I want to acknowledge the hard work of your office and this newly established advisory board in the serious revamping of a program that always had the best intentions but had some serious structural defects perhaps from the outset that prevented it from accomplishing its goals. In a couple of communities in my riding that I worked in before becoming elected, we worked around the program; we simply looked for other options with air carriers and Winnipeg Harvest and the likes to get subsidized foods to particularly vulnerable groups in the maternal and child health program that we established in one example. There have been tremendous challenges, and I appreciate that.
There were a number of problems identified at the time that this program appears to be trying to address, Minister. I was wondering if you could comment on a couple of them. There are six or seven, and I know that time just doesn't provide for it, so I want to focus on the issue of the integrity of the program in terms of eligibility versus non-eligibility. For example, there were some lists of foods or products that were on it. This program, built by northerners and to be overseen by northerners, is going to hopefully work through that.
The second one was the performance of the program in terms of not being measured sufficiently. It's always interesting that in one isolated community, potatoes might cost $13, and in another $18, and one community may be no farther north or south than the other. All that was explained was that it was more expensive to buy the potatoes, but the reason wasn't really identiied. There were program inequities, and you had this flat subsidized rate of 80 cents per kilogram, but that didn't deal with the fact that there are communities where products are much more expensive. Even in my own riding it's much more expensive for a product in, for example, Fort Severn than it is in Pikangikum or something like that.
Finally, Minister, to the extent that my time provides for it, could you comment on the importance of bringing the private sector into this as a stakeholder? They had already been somewhat involved, but I think the perception on the ground in the communities was that they weren't providing a subsidy; however, under this program we appear to be making very stategic partnerships with them that bring benefits that people can actually see. I understand that the program has a mechanism for showing that to the individual.
I'll stop there. Perhaps you can spend the back half of my time. I have a timer, and there are three and a half more minutes. I started it before he would have, so if you could go ahead, Minister, that would be great.