Mr. Speaker, nothing is more important to people than their food and knowing that they can feed their families. Yet, the minister announced that he was going to change the food mail program without saying what the changes were going to be. He left people for two months worried about their families and a lot of anxiety of whether they could feed them
On April 29 I asked for the details of the changes. Finally, we received those this afternoon at a committee hearing when we talked about food mail. The good news is we got the details. The bad news is that they may not be good details.
One of the good items though is that there is going to be an external advisory board that can deal with a number of the concerns I have outside the department. The chair is Elizabeth Copland from Arviat. Therefore, if anyone has concerns they should ensure to get them to her. The other board members are not presented. If anyone has ideas for board members, they can send their nominee to Patrick Borbey, assistant deputy minister of northern affairs at INAC or myself.
I just have time to deal with two of the concerns I have that are particular to my riding in the program. The first one deals with personal orders. The people of Old Crow, the Vuntut Gwitchin, use this quite often when they are in Whitehorse or their families are or they are in some other community outside Old Crow. They go into a variety of different stores to get best prices and the best selection of food. They take it to the airport, send it off or go with it to Air North which applies a mail subsidy. They get home and they go to their house, and they are very happy with this system. This was made quite clear in the consultations that people needed this system.
Unfortunately, in the new system there will only be certain retailers. They have to be accredited and the people then have to go to these particular retailers to get their food orders. I guess those retailers are going to have to ship it up themselves. The people will not be able to just go to the airport with their food, get off the plane, and take the food to their house.
It will limit their selection, limit their ability to go with the food, and it will add more administration for INAC now having to deal with all these retailers. The government said there are only 40 so far. That is the tip of the iceberg. Instead of just dealing with Canada Post, it is inefficient.
When I asked about this at committee, Jamie Tibbetts from INAC said that we may see a change in their buying patterns. They are going to have to buy from the local store.
During the consultation process, the government should have heard loud and clear that that was not acceptable in all cases. It is good for emergencies to have some local ability to buy locally, but also people definitely needed this personal mechanism that I just talked about. When we buy at the local store, it puts prices up for people who cannot necessarily afford it.
It costs a lot for electricity, for heating, for staff and so on, and all of that goes on to the price of the food or the store would not be economical. That is definitely not acceptable.
The other point I want to make is about transparency. Certainly, there were problems in the food mail program. That is why there were suggested changes. How do we know that those people who do buy from the local store, as opposed to personal orders, get the savings passed on?
When I asked at committee again today if each item would show the subsidy on the bill, I was told, no. Somehow the amount going to the community would be transparent.
The last problem that was not solved was that a lot of people, who did personal orders now, complained that they needed credit cards, so the lower income people who did not have credit cards could not buy food through personal orders, which of course is less expensive--