Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Feb. 25th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Blaney, go ahead with your question.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

My last question is around the government regulations. You talked about that being one of the challenges. Can you speak a bit more about specifically what those barriers are?

[Dr. Laurie Chan]

There's the lobster industry, for example. Remember that incident in Nova Scotia...? There are similar seasons of harvest, etc., that may be in conflict with people's traditional practices and quotas set up for different fish or sea mammals, etc. Sometimes the policies developed by government and DFO, etc., may not agree with the traditional knowledge or the local observations. Those are some of the issues that we heard about and that are quite common.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thanks very much.

Thanks to all of our panellists. This was brilliant. We have your submissions, of course, which we're enjoying going through, but due to the time constraints, especially for tonight's meeting, I apologize for not allowing us to go on. It has been so interesting and such a great panel. We have another one coming up as well.

We will now suspend for a few minutes to get our second panel prepared.

Once again, thanks to all of you for a wonderful presentation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Welcome back.

Unfortunately, we are unable to hear Ms. Nellie Cournoyea's testimony at this time. We cannot have a meeting without interpretation, and the interpreters are having difficulty with the sound quality.

Ms. Cournoyea, it's not about you. It's about everything in between you and here. Please give us a written submission, and we will get in touch with you with regard to the possibility of another opportunity. I really apologize for that.

We have with us today Carrie Verishagen, who is the director at Eat Well Saskatchewan; and Gérard Duhaime, a professor at Université Laval, who is appearing as an individual.

Carrie, go ahead, please, for six minutes.

[Carrie Verishagen, Director, Eat Well Saskatchewan]

Thank you for the opportunity to present today.

I acknowledge that I am presenting to you from Treaty No. 6 territory and the homeland of the Métis.

My name is Carrie Verishagen and I am a registered dietitian and the director of the Eat Well Saskatchewan program, which is a service that operates out of the college of pharmacy and nutrition at the University of Saskatchewan.

What foods are safe to feed my baby? Our child has just been diagnosed with celiac disease, there is a three-month wait-list to see a dietitian and we don't know what to do. I just found out I have diabetes and I don't know what to eat; I am so lost. I can't afford to feed my family; what can I do? These are real examples of questions we receive every day.

Among all the harmful misinformation that fills the Internet and the fad diets that are heavily promoted by the diet industry, there is one thing for certain: Canadians are confused about what to eat and many lack the skills needed to meet their basic dietary needs. On top of that, many Canadians, even more so those living in the north and remote communities, face further barriers that ultimately affect their ability to access safe, affordable and nutritious food.

If I told you that you had to spend $18 to purchase one pepper or $20 to buy a four-litre jug of milk, would you buy it? Now imagine you're on income assistance of $155 a month to cover food and expenses for your family. These are the realities of people living in northern Saskatchewan when food costs 30% higher than the provincial average, and 70% higher in the far north where income is also substantially less.

There is no denying why people spend their food budget on the more lower-cost processed foods that are full of excess sugar, fat and salt. They are affordable, they are accessible, and although nutritionally inadequate, they meet immediate hunger needs.

People cannot access the proper foods they need to nourish their families, and as a result, experience higher rates of chronic disease such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity and depression.

A recent study estimated that the economic burden of not meeting food recommendations in Canada was $13.8 billion. As the only regulated food and nutrition professionals in Canada, registered dietitians are the most qualified health care professionals to help people meet their nutrition needs. Unfortunately, access to dietitians in rural and remote communities in Saskatchewan and other parts of Canada is often extremely limited or non-existent.

Here is where Eat Well Saskatchewan comes in. We cannot change the burden of high-cost foods for families and we cannot change income. Government policies are needed to address food affordability and availability, but what we can do is support families to make their food dollar go further in three ways.

First, we can educate people on lower-cost, nutritious food to eat healthy on a budget. Secondly, we can support initiatives that encourage more traditional food practices to grow and access more food. Thirdly, we can help develop necessary food skills to help people cook and prepare nutritious meals to meet their basic needs.

Eat Well Saskatchewan allows people access to timely, accessible and free nutrition advice from anywhere in the province by use of a telephone or an email. We provide people with general advice. We can link them to community services and provide credible resources. It doesn't matter if you're in a remote location or a city centre, if you have transportation or child care. We have eliminated these barriers.

At a critical time when people have been isolated due to COVID-19, when health professionals have been deployed and many essential services cut, Eat Well Saskatchewan has stepped up. We have remained accessible and filled a big gap.

Our current funding allows for one dietitian to provide services from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., four days per week. Despite the limited hours and dietitian time, we have responded to over 1,100 calls and emails from the public in more than 100 rural, remote and indigenous communities in Saskatchewan since our launch in 2019.

We are more than just a contact centre. We are a centralized nutrition information hub for the entire province. We can teach thousands of people basic food skills, food budgeting and meal planning ideas with the click of a button by using our social media channels, on which we have already reached over 400,000 people. We creatively have utilized indigenous storytelling to engage an indigenous audience across the province and have motivated people to make positive change. We have collected and shared local success stories to help residents cope with the food security challenges of the pandemic. Collectively, we have launched campaigns that have reached over 200,000 people.

I want to leave you with this. In two short years, Eat Well Saskatchewan has made a difference to thousands of lives. We are changing the way communities think about food. We are building trust within the medical community and we are filling a need. Every day I hear from people from across Saskatchewan who talk about the benefits of having this service.

We are helping residents to develop food skills, to manage chronic conditions and to eat within their means the best they can to feed their families. We have made and continue to make important indigenous connections. Our reach to indigenous, new immigrant and remote communities continues to grow. The potential for this service is way beyond our current funding capabilities. As a service that has managed to reach thousands of people with one dietician, on limited funding and limited hours, imagine the possibilities of what we could do with more.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thanks very much, Ms. Verishagen.

We now have Monsieur Gérard Duhaime from the Université Laval. He will be speaking as an individual.

Please go ahead for six minutes, Monsieur Duhaime.

[Gérard Duhaime, Professor, Université Laval, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am a professor of sociology at Laval University. I directed an ambitious multi-year research project on food security in the Arctic, the Canadian north, Alaska, Greenland, Scandinavian countries and the Russian Federation.

We used the same definition for our study that your committees are using now for their work. I will refer to this definition when I give the main conclusions on the factors behind food insecurity in the north. Obviously, these conclusions are based on my observations in Canada's north.

There are three main factors. They are not to be considered individually, but rather cumulatively.

The first factor is access to resources.

As my colleague Laurie Chan and his team pointed out, climate change and pollution are threatening people's ability to access food resources on the land, and sometimes even the stores' ability to restock.

Food security and safety are threatened by pollution brought by air and ocean currents to the north, which our team was able to prove for the first time.

Furthermore, competition with other land uses is another big problem in terms of access to resources. For example, in most northern regions, there is recreational and commercial hunting and fishing by non-indigenous people, and these sporting and recreational activities can sometimes limit indigenous peoples' access to their resources, which very often brings about hardship.

Extractive industries such as hydroelectricity production, mining and other resource extraction also greatly hamper the ability of indigenous households to hunt and produce their own food. These problems are extremely widespread and we see them almost everywhere.

The second major factor is the market.

We saw that the market up there is not working, despite the fact that we make out that it is functioning normally. There is indeed competition, the information is flowing, and so on, but things are not working.

First of all, the market is limited in many communities by the absence of roads. Even in communities when there is road access, the market does not function any better because of the limited number of businesses and especially because these stores are there to make money.

Marine transportation along the Canadian northern coast is unreliable, whereas everywhere else, even in Alaska and in Greenland, every small village has a deepwater port.

Finally, all these communities count on air links to replenish their supplies for a good part of the year. These communities are living dangerously because very often, they depend on a single company and it takes just one major breakdown for their supplies to be threatened.

The third major factor, which comes on top of all the others, is economic access to food resources. This factor is directly linked to poverty and to the average salary in all of the regions.

In the Canadian north, we have established a poverty rate that takes into account the cost of food. We calculated this for indigenous regions, i.e., Nunavut and the Inuit regions of the Northwest Territories, Nunatsiavut, Labrador and Nunavik, in Quebec.

Official statistics indicate a poverty rate of 15 to 20% which doesn't take into account the cost of food. When the cost of food is factored in, however, the rate jumps to 30 to 40%, even hitting 45%.

At the time of our study, the census average was 37.5% for Inuit households living below the low-income cut-off.

This widespread poverty obviously creates major difficulties for households when it comes to purchasing food. For example, store food prices are sometimes 150 or even 200% times higher, as stated by Mr. Chan and his team.

Finally, this makes food self-sufficiency in terms of hunting and fishing very difficult.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Mr. Duhaime, we're out of time there. We'll pick up some things through the questions.

Mr. Vidal, you're up for six minutes.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank both witnesses for attending tonight and for their valued testimony.

I'm going to have a few questions for Ms. Verishagen tonight. I want to congratulate you on the great work you are doing. My colleagues and I were actually just exchanging some messages about people taking new approaches and not just talking about failed programs and some of the frustrations. Obviously, your organization has done that and is doing it effectively, from the information you shared.

I read your brief. Could you expand a bit on your Eat Well COVID-19 campaign, or your #EatWellChampion campaign? You've obviously been doing some great work in northern Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan in general. One of the consistent messages we hear on this study is the difficulty in accessing northern and remote communities. Obviously, you overcame that in some unique ways.

I want to let you expand for a minute on how you have overcome some of those barriers. Could you speak a bit more about overcoming some of those barriers of accessing northern and remote communities?

[Carrie Verishagen]

Sure.

One of the big benefits of this program is that we are accessible from anywhere. One of the things that we have done to expand to different communities is, as you mentioned, the #EatWellChampion campaign. In this we featured different indigenous champions from communities across the province who tell their own stories. It's by indigenous, for indigenous. We let them tell their story about how nutrition has impacted them. Those have been really popular throughout the indigenous communities and they have been shared a ton through social media by indigenous communities, indigenous organizations. They have really helped to build trust within this population. That is one thing we have used.

Unfortunately with COVID, we were gaining some momentum there, but we did have to put a little bit of a halt to that. We were also attending different health care professional workshops working with health care professionals. That is another really important part of this service. It's not just for the public. We often field calls from health care professionals as well. Some of these northern communities might only have a dietician who travels out there once or twice a month, but many of them have nurses who are in the community every day. For some of these clients who might have nutrition questions, the nurses or the physicians can call us directly. We have broken down barriers like that, as well.

With more funding and more time.... We're still new, but we are getting calls from the north and a variety of communities from the north that are hard to access, so I think that's great. With more time and more exposure, because a lot of people still don't know about us, if we had more funding so that we could have more dietician time to actually go build some of those relationships and build some of that trust, then I think there's a huge potential for expanding in some of these northern communities.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you.

My next question was going about the opportunity to expand your program if that opportunity arose and what that might look like. I think I want to expand my question a little bit beyond just what that looks like in Saskatchewan, so that you and I aren't just looking after our own territory, so to speak.

Do you see the work you're doing being able to be replicated in other provinces and other places across the country? Is the success you're having easily replicable, so to speak?

[Carrie Verishagen]

I think absolutely it is. I think it's important to note that some other provinces do have a dietician call centre already. I think Manitoba has a dial-a-dietician. B.C. has one, and there's one on the east coast, but they're a little bit different. They are completely funded by the provincial health regions. Ours is unique in that we do have funding coming from Indigenous Services Canada and the university.

Regardless of how it's set up, I think this is definitely a service that can be replicated in other provinces. With COVID we are seeing a big trend towards more virtual care. It is breaking down barriers. We can access a lot more people in a day.

I also think there is a lot of resistance for people to access services because they don't have the transportation to get there, or they don't have the child care, when you have eight or nine kids at home. We can offer services quite easily and it's a lot more cost-effective for the government as well. I'm one dietician who is providing this service.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you.

You serve all of Saskatchewan. You serve all of the southern components of Saskatchewan all the way up into my riding from border to border, and all the way to the north border.

I want you to speak a little about the differences between the services and the opportunities you have serving people in the southern communities and those in what we would call northern communities, or up in my area. Then maybe you could speak specifically about the fly-in or the ones we don't even have road access for. Maybe you could lay out some of the differences in your experience in those three examples.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Can you do it in 30 seconds, Ms. Verishagen?

[Carrie Verishagen]

I'll try.

A big part of our service is also linking people to community resources. If somebody calls and they're having trouble feeding their family, we can link them to food banks, to community gardens and to community kitchens that are going on. There's definitely a lot more services available in the south, so there's a bit of a disparity there.

I do find it a little bit more challenging sometimes with the northern communities. People do call and they want to talk about how to eat better on a budget, but sometimes there's just not those options available when it is $16 for a red pepper and you're living on a minimal income. Those are some challenges that are definitely a lot different in the far north.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thanks very much. I appreciate that.

Mr. Bagnell, go ahead for six minutes.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

My riding is in the Yukon, the far north. I'm calling from the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council. Because of the north this is very important to me, so I thank the committee members for allowing me to visit. It's a really productive, positive committee, and it's great.

Professor Duhaime, the committee is convinced that country foods are a great bonus when they can be provided. Years ago we heard that recommendation. In fact, we put in a new program a couple of years ago that supplies costs to get country foods. People are preaching to the converted, but the conundrum I have is that there's a balance between eradicating a species and having enough country foods.

I'm just wondering if you could tell us some examples from the Arctic around the world, where indigenous people have come up with creative ways of enhancing or making sure there's enough or more country foods, whether it's plants or animals, to get the supply up, because everyone thinks that having as much as they can is beneficial.

[Gérard Duhaime]

Thank you for your question.

My answer is a simple one. We have to give the communities the resources they need so that they can make their own decisions on resource allocation or hunting and fishing quotas, for example.

This is done elsewhere. There are terrific examples of this in some areas of the country and abroad. These are success stories. For decades, local people have been kept out of wildlife management, such as establishing quotas for hunting beluga whales. When we bring in the people who know the animals as well as or even better than biologists, they are able to ensure resource sustainability.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

Could you tell us some examples from Russia or Scandinavia that we might not be aware of in Canada of some good practices with country foods, or types of country foods or of indigenous people using country foods?

[Gérard Duhaime]

In Scandinavian countries and in Russia, there is hunting, a lot of fishing and also herding, including reindeer herding. The herding is based on traditional models. The people have the knowledge they need to manage hundreds and thousands of animals, and their economic model is perfectly sustainable.

I can give you a few examples. In the far east corner of Russia, for example, in the Anadyr region of Tchukotka, herding is very common and is entirely managed by local communities. I could give you other examples of fishing communities in northern Norway, where the people have taken control of decisions regarding the fishing season, fishing quotas, fishing waters and so on.

These models work just as well or even better than those drawn up by biologists from central governments. Not only are these models successful, but the people are proud to have their knowledge validated.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

What barriers do you see we could overcome in the harvest of country foods in Canada? I guess you're suggesting that one would be to allow the indigenous communities to do the regulations such as hunting quotas in their own areas.

[Gérard Duhaime]

Yes, that is what I'm saying.

Obviously, this brings about many problems, because currently there are not enough people who can ensure food security in the territories allocated to indigenous peoples by the Canadian system. In order for that to happen, other regions would have to be involved. This is particularly true of regions where there is competition for access to resources, such as the forestry industry. When you cut down trees, the moose leave.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Do you have any comments on whales in the Arctic being used for food? I know they are in Alaska.

[Gérard Duhaime]

Absolutely. These hunts were been banned for a long time. However, the hunts have been taking place for a while in Alaska, perhaps 20 years or so. In Hudson Bay and in Ungava Bay in the north-east, beluga whale hunting is still commonly practised.

Other species of whales are now being hunted with very few quotas. People are very proud and happy, because a single whale can feed a village for a long time. This also allows the people to rediscover traditional skills. They are proving that they are perfectly capable of feeding themselves with healthy food, even if that food does not come from the store.