Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister, for joining us.

It's a very interesting discussion on nutrition north. I've been involved in these discussions for quite a few years. I used to be a minister with the Government of Northwest Territories, and one of my responsibilities was dealing with the transition from food mail to nutrition north. We had many interesting discussions then also.

At that time, the Conservative government was in power, and they were trying to kick all our communities off the list. We have 14 communities now, but at that time it was reduced down to eight. We were struggling to convince the government of the day, the Conservatives, to keep the program and to keep on the list the communities we had that were isolated. It was very challenging. The program was underfunded and didn't have any avenue for input, for advice.

I'm very happy that now we've made some progress. I have a number of communities that probably would not exist if we didn't have this program. There's room for improvement, but the budget has certainly increased significantly, and we have an advisory board that provides advice on the program to you and others.

It's important to recognize that this is an important tool, but it doesn't address the root cause of food insecurity in the north. I think we all need to agree that in order to have healthy and affordable food over the long term, we have to do more. More work has to be done to address the root causes. We need to talk about local food that's harvested within our communities in our regions. We need to talk about climate change. How much bigger can this program get? I have communities that are losing water access and barges that can't get in anymore. Ferries are not going to run. This is all reality. The waters are drying up in our rivers and our lakes.

At the time when we were talking about the new nutrition north program, which is quite a few years ago now, we all assumed that in the Northwest Territories we would have roads to each community and that we would have proper runways. We would have longer runways so that planes could land with a full load of freight, but we're not quite there yet.

I wanted to ask you if that is part of the discussion you have at cabinet and part of the considerations to make the program better when you look at options. Are you talking to other departments? Are you including all of these things to make things better?

Michael McLeod

$436,167.00