WHEREAS the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories has set the goal of having a healthy and educated population and has agreed to work with families, communities and schools to improve the physical and mental well-being of our youth;
AND WHEREAS the Government of the Northwest Territories provides subsidies for goods and services that cost too much for ordinary northerners to realistically bear;
AND WHEREAS the increasing costs of living in the NWT make it more and more difficult for many northerners to provide the basic necessities for their families;
AND WHEREAS milk is an essential nutrient for the healthy development of children;
AND WHEREAS the price of milk in many northern communities can cost twice as much as Edmonton prices;
AND WHEREAS cheaper substitutes such as soda pop and other less expensive sugar-loaded drinks are often substituted for milk, leading to serious longer-term health issues;
NOW THEREFORE I MOVE, seconded by the honourable Member for Frame Lake, that the Government of the Northwest Territories establish a Milk Subsidy Program for all children aged one to twelve in any NWT community where milk costs are ten per cent or higher than those in Yellowknife;
AND FURTHER, that the Government of the Northwest Territories include the costs of the Milk Subsidy Program in the 2009–2010 budget and implement the program in early 2009.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The motion is on the floor. The motion is in order. To the motion, the honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
Mr. Speaker, this government is committed to a preventative approach to addressing the root causes of issues that we face. Milk is the single most important nutrient to the healthy development and benefit of our youth. The issue has been brought to us by community representatives, by health workers and by educational workers and teachers. Many thanks to them for bringing this forward.
Many people have seen, or heard recently from my colleague, the frightening photographs of many of our youth who are in desperate need of dental surgery and the backload we have there to deal with. Sugary drinks, as I mentioned in the motion, are much cheaper than milk in some of our communities, and it’s most unfortunate. But when people can’t afford the appropriate thing, they’ll turn to substitutes, and in this case it’s damaging our youth.
This program is meant to be implemented in concert with important ongoing community and school nutritional programs, and I’m sure the government will make sure that that’s done. Many residents fail to benefit from Food Mail Program, as has been mentioned, particularly those in our small communities who don’t necessarily have the literacy and education required to take advantage of this — or even the tradition, like the tradition that’s developed among our professionals who are visiting our communities for short periods of time. It should be our intent to promote the full use of the Food Mail Program, and this will minimize the cost of this program and the subsidy to milk specifically to ensure efficient use of our subsidy dollars.
Finally, I’d like to just mention the long term benefits that this can bring. Healthy kids mean healthy bodies and strong minds, with resilience to the challenges we face. This investment will return benefits and savings in terms of the physical, mental and psychological well-being of our youth and our families, and we’ll notice that in our costs down the road. I urge all Members to support this motion. There’s been very good support in getting it to this stage and presenting the issue, and I thank everybody for that support.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. To the motion. I’ll go to the seconder of the motion, the Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will add just a couple of brief comments.
I’d like to commend my colleague Mr. Bromley for bringing forward this idea and this motion and for thinking creatively. It’s something I think we all should be well aware of and should attempt to imitate. We spend millions of dollars in subsidies on our residents. Albeit this is an additional subsidy, I think it’s a subsidy that probably is more important than almost any of the other ones we currently have, and I think it’s one that is very much needed. I also think of this as one option to try to go a little bit towards evening out the costs that residents have to bear in smaller communities versus Yellowknife, the capital and the largest community.
Just as an aside, I think there is some opportunity, if we add this subsidy in, for reducing the price of milk. We can probably do something to offset it by looking at increasing taxes on pop and junk food and/or removing subsidies for freight, which we already have on pop and junk food. We may end up being revenue neutral as we also get creative in how we implement this particular subsidy.
I urge all Members to support this. I think it’s a wonderful initiative and one we all should gladly support.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. To the motion, the honourable Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.
Mr. Speaker, I’d like to recognize Mr. Bromley’s motion as very important, and I appreciate the spirit and intent of it.
Mr. Speaker, as the father of two young children I certainly understand and in no way dispute the nutritional value of milk. I understand that clearly, and it makes perfect sense to me. I also understand the impacts of what happens when you don’t have milk.
It’s difficult to say this, but I cannot support this motion at this time the way it’s designed. This program, in my view, is what the Food Mail Program, in principle, should be doing but isn’t doing. I believe that the problem really is focused on how the Food Mail Program is delivered. I think in a little bit of time the Food Mail Program, if delivered properly, would solve this exact problem.
Mr. Speaker, at the end of the day the feds are paying $50 million into the Food Mail Program, and I’m not sure we’re getting the value we need out of it. We now have to find a way to subsidize milk to lower that cost when we already have a program that does it. I don’t feel the territorial government is in a position to subsidize the federal government.
I completely understand why the motion has come forward. I like the intent; I like the spirit — if it could just be that simple. I really wish it could, but it isn’t. Where is the money going to come from? We already know that the territorial government has difficulty with its finances now, and we’re making tough choices every day. But are we going to a $500,000 program run by a $1 million administration? I’m not necessarily sure.
Is it a question of people making good choices for their families? Well, I’ve always believed that families will make good choices by themselves on what they feel is appropriate for the family. If you are in a small community, I understand that it’s easier to reach for a $2 can of pop versus a $10 jug of milk. But you know what? When you do the math, the milk still is cheaper. I think it comes down to nutritional choices that people are making.
Mr. Speaker, if we want to have impact on the youth, my feeling is: why aren’t we subsidizing things like baby food? Why are we leaving seniors off the table? Seniors would benefit from milk too. I’ve heard constantly that osteoporosis is a problem in the seniors’ community; we should be including them in this program. There are a lot of concerns right now.
There’s another way. If we want to benefit parents to make responsible choices, why don’t we give them all another $100 per child in child care? That would free up money in their pockets to make good choices.
Mr. Speaker, the intent is really good. There are lots of ways to achieve the same thing, but I’m not necessarily sure how this would be. If it’s to go to low income folks or income support folks, I am concerned and curious if this money would be clawed back. In other words, we’ve just found a new way to give more money to the Northern Stores or the co-ops without necessarily doing much. I think the end user would be set back.
If the goal is to help people, I think we need to find ways to help people directly. Let’s put it onto income support payments and increase the base for people who have children. If you have children, you get an extra $100 per child per month. That way they can help make good choices directly. We could do that in one broad brush stroke without creating a new program. That could be done today if we really wanted to. It’s this House that sets those dollar values, so we could do that.
Mr. Speaker, at the end of the day, I want to thank Mr. Bromley. He also came to me to talk to me about my reservations. I want to thank him for his efforts to go through his perspective on this motion. I agree with the intent, but I have to stand by my concerns and convictions on this one, which are that the fundamental problem is the Food Mail Program. That is the delivery mechanism that we could get the best value for all Northerners on, and that’s exactly where the problem is. Once an audit goes through, I think that will solve a lot of our problems and go in the right direction.
If we want to change the subsidy in another vehicle to help support people with their milk, that’s okay. I’m willing to listen, and I’m certainly willing to stand up and support an income support adjustment to help the people in the lowest income bracket any day of the week, Mr. Speaker.
With that, I’ll be voting against the motion. I don’t do so in a happy way. I just think this isn’t exactly how it should be addressed.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. To the motion, the honourable Member for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to support the motion that’s before us on the milk subsidy program. I want to commend my colleague Mr. Bromley for having the sense and the courage to bring something like this forward. I think it shows a great deal of creativity. As a government I think we need to start somewhere, and this is a good place to start.
I think milk is absolutely a requirement in a child’s nutrition, and we need to make sure that children can get milk in the smaller communities where it’s costly. You know, I’ve been to Inuvik, and it’s interesting how the government can subsidize the sale of liquor in our communities. The price at the liquor store here in Yellowknife isn’t much different than it is in Inuvik. But if you look at the price of milk in Yellowknife compared to Inuvik, it’s a great deal different. There’s something wrong with that picture, Mr. Speaker, if the government is subsidizing the sale of liquor when we should be giving our parents, especially in the smaller communities, the opportunity to choose between pop and milk. If there’s a subsidy in place that would allow them to purchase more milk for their families, I think that’s a step in the right direction.
Part of the vision of the Government of Northwest Territories is Healthy Choices, healthy individuals making healthy choices. Again, I think this speaks to that. It’s a principle motion. This is going to be developed. It’s going to be taken through the committee system. It’s going to be, you know, poked and prodded by Members until we get a final version of it. So this isn’t the last that we’re going to hear of it. This is the principle and something that I fully support. Again, I want to thank Mr. Bromley for his creativity. We need to start somewhere as a government, and this is a great place to start.
Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. To the motion, the honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, will be supporting the motion, and I would like to thank Mr. Bromley for bringing it forward. I think this is a no-brainer. When you go into a community and you see $16 for two litres of milk and you expect people on low income or income support clients to make a choice between spending $16 for two litres of milk, or in some cases $3.50 for a can of pop…. We have to realize that with the high cost of living in our communities, it is a very expensive commodity in a lot of our communities. In the larger centres it may not be that way. In order to stretch our dollars as far as we can, by implementing this motion, it will improve the quality of life for children in our communities.
Yes, we do have a problem when we start seeing our children walking around the communities who are just starting to walk, and they’ve got a can of pop in one hand and candy or chips in the other. It makes you wonder what the condition of that child is going to be in the next ten or 15 years and the high rates of sugar diabetes that we are seeing in regard to our population. A lot of that stems from exactly the food that’s being provided and choices people are making. If this can help by offsetting the high costs in our communities, I am fully in support of it.
Mr. Speaker, as a government we also have to look at other jurisdictions throughout the North, such as Iceland and Greenland. They have implemented a sugar tax on products that come into their jurisdiction which have high traces of sugar. We tax fuel products; we tax tobacco. I think there’s no reason why we shouldn’t consider that as an option — taxing items that carry high traces of sugar. Everybody knows there are nine teaspoons of sugar in one can of pop, and again, that’s something we should be made aware. So I will be fully supporting this motion, and I think it is a good motion going forward.
Thank you, Mr. Krutko. To the motion, the honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will be supporting the motion as well. Certainly, it’s not entirely clearly defined how this is going to work. If people think that having a milk subsidy is too administrative a burden, then maybe we should just give it away. Maybe in a small community where milk’s expensive, we should just have a cooler full of milk that anybody can take and not just people ages one to 12.
People have mentioned some of the pressures on seniors. Everybody could stand to use a little more milk. I don’t know about everybody else’s kids, but I’ll tell you, when my kids were growing up, if there was cereal in the cupboard, that milk jug got hauled out of that fridge a lot of times. There are a lot of good things you can do with milk. You can make soup — you’ve got milk based soups — you can make pudding; you can put it on cereal. You can make a lot of different things. You can put it in bannock. It’s a good staple food.
So I support the subsidy program. Like I said, if it becomes administratively burdensome — how you’re going to deliver it — I would just suggest giving it away, and I do not know how we as a government could go wrong. I don’t think anybody’s going to abuse milk.
As to Mr. Hawkins’s point of giving families a $100 subsidy, you have no guarantee where the $100 is going to end up. It may not end up buying milk. It may end up buying something else that we don’t support as a government. No slight against the folks who…. But, you know, there are a lot of pressures for family money. This will be one way of ensuring that everybody has access to something very nutritious, and it can become a staple in lots of different foods. So I would support that.
The only other thing I would suggest is that in the implementation of this milk subsidy, I would like to ensure that we check with communities that already have people who are working on breakfast programs and nutrition programs in the schools and so on, that we build on what people are already doing rather than coming in there and them vacating what it is they are doing in the community on a voluntary basis. I would like to work with them and add this to it. I think it’s a very good idea and a step in the right direction. I support the motion.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. To the motion, the honourable Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.
Mr. Speaker, some years ago I remember going to one of the small communities. I was hosted by a family, and when we got up in the morning, we had some breakfast. I couldn’t believe that a family that was feeding the child breakfast cereal…. They had water there, and they had Coffee-Mate. They were making milk for the child. That’s their milk, because the milk is so expensive in our small isolated communities that have no roads, have no opportunity to purchase milk at a lower price. I sat there with the family, a well respected elder and mother, and they were making milk with Coffee-Mate, and they were pouring that for the children to eat before they went to school.
I asked some people in my region and my community: in the past what did you do? Our lifestyle has changed quite considerably from the nomadic life to where we are now in the communities, where we have great dependency on the store, and Health Canada has been pushing to have milk as one of the primary products to have within our lifestyle.
Mr. Speaker, the price of milk is something that has been a big concern for my region. I’m just looking at some prices here. These are probably old prices. In Tuktoyaktuk it’s $8.99 for two litres. It’s probably gone more now, on special. And I hope it’s fresh. In Good Hope it’s $6.50. But another number, I think, is more reflective of the prices that we pay in our small communities now.
Mr. Speaker, I will certainly, definitely support this motion. I think there is something that we can do immediately. I think that the Food Mail Program will take.... You know, the government will drag its feet on that. It will have a lot of complications and challenges to implement a true Food Mail Program in the Northwest Territories. But this is something that we can definitely show our people in our regions that we are supporting the different guidelines that we are being handed by Health Canada, by the Government of Canada and this government, in terms of how we sustain a healthy life within our families, within our communities.
I hope this milk subsidy program sees the light of day by the time we get through the business plans in terms of how we implement something like that. It is so beneficial and certainly will help our communities in terms of them coming to the stores — not to benefit the Northern Stores — to benefit our people. Some of that milk sits on the shelves, and it’s past due date. They still sell it at full price. It’s a crying shame.
Today is when we have to check. In our community sometimes the expiry date has already gone past; we still have to pay the full price, though. I hope that now, when the students come and the families come into the Northern Stores, they have fresh milk there at a good price, and that’s something that they can afford, and they can now tell people in the communities, “We’ve got milk.”
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. To the motion, the honourable Member for Nunakput, Mr. Jacobson.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I’m in full support of this motion. I thank Mr. Bromley for bringing this forward and know how many people it’s going to affect in the smaller communities. I really think, you know, the well-being of our youth.... They are our future, so we should try to help them in any way we possibly can, especially the families. I mean, I have five children at home. We go through a lot of milk in my house. In regard to any motion like this that will help the people, it should be done. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Jacobson. To the motion, the honourable Member for Tu Nedhe, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, will be supporting the motion. I would like to thank Mr. Bromley. I think it’s important to put good healthy food on the table, and I consider milk to be very healthy. As people in the House know, I support the youth strongly, and I’m happy to see that they will be getting a good start with milk and so on. So I, too, will support the motion. Perhaps at some point this milk subsidy can be expanded to formula and start with infants right up to 12 years old.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. To the motion, the honourable Minister of Health and Social Services, Ms. Lee.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to just speak briefly to this motion, as lead Minister of the Reducing the Cost of Living Strategic Initiative. I appreciate the intention behind the motion and agree with the Members that we need to make sure that our children get every opportunity to grow up healthy and strong. As a government we believe that all of our residents should be able to meet their basic needs and already have many programs that help ensure this.
At the same time, Mr. Speaker, we know that economic pressures on our residents are increasing, and we welcome the opportunity to work with Members on actions that will help people over the long term. The government is committed to working on reducing the cost of living, and we made this a focus of our strategic initiatives. We do recognize our high cost of living makes it difficult for some of our people to meet their needs. We also recognize that there are differences in cost between our communities, and that threatens the sustainability of some of our more remote and small communities. We do want to take steps that will help reduce these differences and ensure that NWT residents have fair and equitable access to the most basic necessities where they live.
Mr. Speaker, I think it should be noted that the GNWT also supports programs that ensure our children have access to nutritious and healthy food regardless of need. One example is the Department of ECE’s Healthy Children Initiative, which provides funding to community based child development programs. In 2007 and 2008 this initiative provided just over $1.6 million to support child development centres, preschools, daycares and other early childhood programs that often serve nutritious snacks to children in communities across the NWT. ECE also provides funding to help licensed daycares and day homes purchase food for healthy snacks and meals. In 2007 and 2008 there were 117 licensed programs caring for 1,768 children up to the age of 11. In total, Income Security spends $17 million a year on food, shelter, utilities and clothing, and we saw an increase of that just last year.
Mr. Speaker, we do support the intent of the motion, but we do want to look at whether milk should be the one that should be subsidized, whether it should be a subsidy. We are willing to review that. Not everyone drinks milk. There might be other things, and it’s not part of a traditional diet in every community either. So if there are other alternatives that we could look at, we want to look at that.
Also, we want to look at the fact that the cost of living is determined by many independent and other factors, such as transportation of goods. Subsidy at the end of the supply chain is not always the best way to deal with the cost of living. So as the lead Minister of the strategic initiative committee, I’d like to tell the Members that we will review this and we will continue to work at other ways of reducing the cost of living in the long run. Also, as this is a recommendation to the government, Cabinet will be abstaining from the motion.
Thank you, Ms. Lee. To the motion? I’ll allow the mover of the motion closing comments. Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to begin by reiterating that this idea came from the people, and I’m just one of the vehicles here bringing this forward. It has been stressed that this is a preventative and creative approach. It has got an element of fairness to it — small communities and so on, the potential to be revenue neutral. There is absolutely no duplication with the Food Mail Program.
I have to comment briefly on some of the spurious arguments I have heard on that. There are about half of our communities that actually have the food mail service. But this program could apply to milk that was brought in with the Food Mail Program, as I’ve tried to highlight to all Members. It is a starting point.
Seniors. I would love to see us help out seniors as they need it. We’ve heard about Nunakput seniors and some of the empty fridges there. We’ve also heard from the Minister of Health. I appreciate that support, that there are many programs out there. I am sure that this idea will be modified and that many brains will be brought to bear on this, hopefully milk fed brains so that they will be sharp and fully developed.
The preventative approach was also stressed. Diabetes is one of the big diseases that we are facing.
I would like thank everybody for their comments and hope they are recorded here. I would also like to request a recorded vote, and unlike the Minister of Health, I’d like to strongly encourage Premier Roland to allow Cabinet to have a free vote on this motion. Mahsi.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The Member is requesting a recorded vote. All those in favour of the motion, please stand.
Mr. Bromley, Mr. Abernethy, Mr. Menicoche, Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Groenewegen, Mr. Beaulieu, Mr. Jacobson, Ms. Bisaro, Mr. Yakeleya, Mr. Krutko.
All those opposed to the motion, please stand.
Mr. Hawkins.
All those abstaining from the motion, please stand.
Mr. Lafferty, Ms. Lee, Mr. Miltenberger, Mr. Roland, Mr. Michael McLeod, Mr. Robert McLeod, Mr. Bob McLeod.
Results of the recorded vote: ten for, one against, seven abstaining.
Motion carried.
