$500 per child grocery fund ending for Inuvialuit families

By Tamara Merritt 

One mother in Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T., says her family with 5 children will turn to more traditional foods

The Inuvialuit Regional Corporation (IRC) is permanently ending its food subsidy program in August.

The program, which began in January, provides $500 per child, every month to families who live in one of the Inuvialuit region’s six hamlets and who have school-aged children. The money can only be spent on groceries at select stores in the area.

The IRC announced in July that the grocery supplement would end, saying in a news release that the corporation “will no longer have access to funding.” It encouraged families to begin planning ahead for the school year, when the subsidy will no longer be available.

The supplement is part of the corporation’s school foods program which also provides students in the region breakfast and lunch on weekdays.

CBC News contacted the IRC but it declined to comment.

For some families in living in the N.W.T.’s more remote hamlets, the program has provided necessary support amid challenges with food security.

Lynn Archiekasook, in Tuktoyaktuk, said the grocery subsidy program has helped take “a lot of worries” off of her family’s shoulders.

Archiekasook has lived in Tuktoyaktuk all her life. She has five children, aged eight to 21, and she receives $1,500 each month through the grocery supplement. She said high food prices in her community mean that only a week after receiving this month’s food credit, all the money had been spent.

Now her family has been slowly moving toward other methods of gathering food, and changing their diet to eat more things like caribou and geese. Once the grocery supplement is gone her family will continue to rely more on traditional ways of gathering food, like hunting and fishing, she said.

With no official food bank in her hamlet, Archiekasook said the end of the grocery program will be a heavy loss for many in her community.

In Ulukhaktok, where the cost of living is similarly high, many residents are also concerned.

“It’s so incredibly hard to get by,” said Pat Klengenberg, the mayor of Ulukhaktok. “This program has probably been the best program available to our community.”

While the supplement can only be used for buying food, Klengenberg said it has ultimately helped families prepare for the future in other ways.

“When a program like this is put in place, it really helps out the whole family,” Klengenberg said. 

“Not just with food within the household, but also overall with keeping up with bills and being able to get ahead instead of barely getting by or falling behind in bills.”

Klengenberg said the hamlet will begin to look at alternative ways to provide community members with food. He suggested a possible collaboration with the hamlet’s hunters and trappers committee, which could provide community members with locally-sourced meat, or ordering a lot of dry food on the barge to store in the community.

“If everyone works together, the best outcome could be providing more food for our kids,” Klengenberg said.

Related stories from around the North: 

Canada: Aurora College research team wants to change the way the North looks at food security, CBC News