Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Nov. 1st, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Okay, thank you, Ms. Simon.

Just a very brief response, Chief Dumas, and then Ms. deGonzague.

Go ahead, Chief.

[Chief Arlen Dumas]

Thank you very much.

I think anything is possible. I think the most important step is essentially to talk with the communities first and perhaps find other creative ways to deal with the issue; but more importantly, you need to discuss the issue with the communities. For instance, we are fortunate enough at the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation to own our own airline. As the chief, it is my interest to provide the best service to my people; therefore, if I had an arrangement with whomever to provide this service, I would guarantee that my community members were to receive the best possible prices for their food.

I guess when you take a look at the North West Company, that's one of the contentious issues here. How are we going to monitor them, how are we going to police them, how are we going to do all of these things? I can guarantee that what they will do initially is that they will meet those prices. However, they provide credit to community members, to our people, at a 28% return. So they're going to sell those groceries at whatever that rate is, but they're going to recoup those costs. How do you police that?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Unfortunately, we'll have to leave it at that. We are well over time here.

[Chief Arlen Dumas]

Mr. Chair, just one more....

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Yes, I understand, Chief. Okay, you have ten seconds. Can you get it out in ten seconds?

[Chief Arlen Dumas]

Yes, totally, ten seconds.

Sir, I guess the other thing to consider is the cost of the freight subsidy and then the costs of the long-term health issues, such as renal failure, and all of those things. So we have to find that cost-benefit analysis, and that's a huge issue.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you, Chief Dumas.

Thank you, Mr. Lévesque.

Ms. Crowder, you have seven minutes.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Thank you.

First of all, I want to thank all of you for coming.

I think the testimony we're hearing today is disturbing on any number of levels. I was just making a list of all the things people have talked about. I haven't captured them all, but they include lack of community process, concerns about controls over pricing, culturally appropriate decisions, storage issues, concerns around the advisory board, concerns around the inability to consistently access country food, and commercial packaging and labelling. The list is huge.

I only have seven minutes, as you're well aware, so I'm going to start with two questions. I'd like one to go to Chief Dumas and one to Ms. Simon.

Chief Dumas, I understand from Grand Chief Evans' presentation that your community is one of those that are now going to be excluded from the process. Can you tell me a little bit about the process that led to your exclusion, or how your community was involved in being dropped from the list?

[Chief Arlen Dumas]

It was done unilaterally, I guess. There was no consultation, no input.

Actually, my community, the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, called Pukatawagan, has a rail link, but a few of our satellite communities that are farther out on the land have no access; they're fly-in.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Help me understand this. The decision was made unilaterally; people did not come to your community to talk to you about how people were going to access food.

[Chief Arlen Dumas]

That's right.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

There was no two-way dialogue—

[Chief Arlen Dumas]

No.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

—no discussion about how you were going to meet your community's nutritional needs?

[Chief Arlen Dumas]

No, not all, and there was actually no information that the food mail program was going to be tendered, if it was at all.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

To your knowledge, is there any appeal process? Is there any way for your community to say wait a minute, we don't want to be excluded from this list?

[Chief Arlen Dumas]

I'm hoping that we'd be able to determine that here today and that we have opened up some dialogue so that those questions can be answered and we can deal with them.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

How was your community notified that it was excluded?

[Chief Arlen Dumas]

It wasn't.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

It wasn't notified?

[Chief Arlen Dumas]

No.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

So just, one day, the subsidy stops.

[Chief Arlen Dumas]

That's right.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

What a terrible way that is to make a decision. I'm sorry; that's my inside voice.

Ms. Simon, I've had the great privilege to visit many communities in the north, and as a southerner—I'm from Vancouver Island, and we're of course not included in this program, nor should we be—I was shocked at the prices. We took photographs of the prices so that we could come south and tell people what it's like for people.

What were the problems with the existing program, in your view, that resulted in this wholesale change?

[Mary Simon]

One of the things we heard from the people was that there wasn't enough transparency. Many people didn't know what was and what wasn't subsidized. There wasn't enough information going to the consumer about how this food mail program was benefiting the people at the community level and how much of it was going to, let's say, Canada Post and how much of it was going to other handlers of the food mail program.

That kind of transparency didn't allow people to really know how much savings there was in relation to their own costs. But all of a sudden you can see now that they've arbitrarily, I think, taken certain things off the list, even before the program actually starts. For instance, tea is on the list, but coffee is not, and there are a lot of coffee drinkers up north. Pampers are no longer on the list.