Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on May 4th, 2021

[Chief Roberta Joseph]

I think, for some places, freezers could be a great way of preserving food. I know in some places it's very expensive to transport freezers, but it's one of the most beneficial ways of preserving food in the north throughout the summer. You'd be able to preserve your food throughout the summer rather than letting it go to waste, because that could happen as well. As well, there's storage for cellar root vegetables that you grow in the summer so you can keep all winter as well, and we need facilities for that.

Thanks.

[Lenore Zann, Liberal, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Thank you.

Mr. Recinos, answer very quickly, please.

[Merlyn Recinos]

Thank you. Yes, we definitely need community freezers but also packing material for those freezers. It's one thing to put a caribou in a freezer, but then it gets freezer burn, and then you're sort of left with some spoiled meat. It's not just the infrastructure but also other capacity within the infrastructure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thank you very much.

Madam Bérubé, you have two and a half minutes.

[Sylvie Bérubé, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My question is for the representatives from Arctic Fresh.

What are the main problems you are facing and what are the solutions to improve the situation for your co-operative?

[Merlyn Recinos]

Thank you.

The biggest issue that we encounter is logistics with our airline partner. That really is one of the biggest issues that we have, the amount of time the food sits at different locations before making its way to the community and how that is stored in those locations. That is one of the biggest issues that we encounter.

The second one that we encountered at the beginning—not so much anymore—was the level of scrutiny that nutrition north took on our reporting. We were given no support, education or capacity to do the reporting that they needed, but they required us to be on point to make sure that we were able to deliver it how they wanted it. That really caused us a lot of problems at the beginning, because, first of all, we had no money, we had no time and we had very little staff.

We had to invest, and we had to shut down for approximately seven months because of that. They were not satisfied with how we were submitting, yet they provided, again, very little when it came to support for us to be able to do how and what they wanted.

[Sylvie Bérubé, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Chief Joseph, what do you think are the solutions to improve access to traditional food?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Answer very briefly.

[Chief Roberta Joseph]

Access is not a real concern here. What's happening is that our traditional foods are declining, so it's making it more challenging in that sense, as I mentioned earlier. As well, climate change is affecting the migration of the Porcupine caribou, and they're not migrating in the normal migration patterns that they used to travel in. Maybe more studies in terms of what's affecting the declines of various species, I think, would be helpful.

As well, during emergencies, if we were able to help our economy by investing in an airship and being able to manage it with a number of our first nations here, that would assist our communities, and it would assist the Yukon and other businesses as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thanks, Chief.

To finish this off, we will go now to Mr. Cannings for two and a half minutes.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

I'll start with you, Mr. Recinos. I really appreciated the comments in your testimony about self-sufficiency in northern communities. My own small experience with food insecurity in the north was the summer I spent in Old Crow. Everybody, in the early part of the summer, was waiting to get out on the land and go to the fish camps, but they needed their food supplies to go out there for any length of time. The food all came in on the plane, TNTA from Whitehorse. It was very hard to predict what you'd get. On Tuesday you'd go down to the plane and all they'd have was ice cream. The next week you'd go down and all they'd have was soft drinks. The community was really held hostage by that. Everybody was waiting for pilot biscuits.

You made the comment, I think, that micro-businesses were a better model than co-ops. I assume that you mean co-ops in the big co-op sense, where that money flows out of Old Crow or Igloolik or wherever and goes south to the head of co-op land. What about the difference between micro-businesses and small co-ops that are based in a community? That's where I got a bit confused. Perhaps you can clarify that and whether smaller local co-ops would be a good model.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

We have about a minute, but go ahead, please.

[Merlyn Recinos]

Thank you.

At its fundamental core, the co-op is a really good thing for communities. The problem is that, a lot of times, we don't use or we don't do what is fundamentally on paper. That's where the problem comes in. When you don't have autonomy over what you're doing within the community, it becomes really hard for the community to be able to do something.

For me, the co-op does play a really good role within it, but we have to innovate. That is key. We can't stay still within the same frame of mind, because that's how we become extinct. We have to innovate. If we can't innovate, we have the Amazons. We have the different players now in Iqaluit and things like that. That's because before there was that system that no competition was good—until the big guys came in and just destroyed the economy, which is what's happening in Iqaluit with Amazon and all of those things.

Before we get to that level, we have to innovate locally by creating micro-businesses, by creating opportunity within our community, so that we don't leave it to the big boys—the Amazons, the Walmarts and things like that—to take over and really destroy our economy at the end just because they have the money, the know-how and everything else.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thank you.

Chief Joseph and our Arctic Fresh guests, thank you so much. You heard the accolades from members of the committee. That's not false flattery. This has really been outstanding testimony and very helpful. Our analysts now have a lot of work to pore over as we prepare our report.

Again, thank you so much. You are free to go. We have just a brief bit of committee business to do right now.

Mr. Clerk, Ms. Jones has an issue with regard to the changing of witnesses. I think we could give quick approval to that.

Ms. Jones, do you want to outline once again your request?

[Yvonne Jones, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

Yes.

My request is that we exchange the Tsawwassen First Nation peace officer program witness, who was scheduled for May 13, and replace them with Andrew Beynon, the director of land code governance. That's for the First Nations Land Management Resource Centre and the work plan.

Is that okay with everyone?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Is anyone opposed to that? Everyone's good...?

I think you just passed muster there.

Mr. Cannings, did you have your hand up?

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Yes. I'm sorry. I'm new on this committee, so I don't know the history behind whose witnesses those are. I'm assuming they're not witnesses called by the NDP who are being transferred out. I just wanted to check.

[Yvonne Jones, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

I can't answer that. I don't know whose witnesses they were. All I know is that there was—

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

The clerk could tell us.

[Yvonne Jones, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

Yes, the clerk might be able to clarify, but one I think couldn't make it, so there was a request to change the witness.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Mr. Naaman Sugrue]

Yes, that's correct. It would be replacing a Liberal witness with a Liberal witness.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

That's fine. I just wanted to check.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Okay, so we have agreement on that.

With that, I'll take a motion to adjourn.

Ms. Zann moves that we adjourn.

(Motion agreed to)

Thank you everybody. What a wonderful two hours we had.