Nunatsiaq News

This from the best darn news on line in the north. Works for me in Labrador too.

Nunatsiaq News: "October 27, 2006
The food mail farce
The challenge that Canadian North airlines mounted recently against Ottawa’s latest food mail air transport contract sheds new light on one of Indian and Northern Affairs’s most absurd northern programs: food mail.
The program’s stated goal is necessary and laudable: to supply northern communities with fresh, nutritious food at prices close to those in the South, using subsidized postal rates.
Calling it “mail,” by the way, is a bureaucratic fiction. It’s an air cargo subsidy program. Under it, food is handled, shipped and stored by airlines, not by Canada Post.
It’s also a dysfunctional mess. That’s because you can’t ship food mail directly by air from places where wholesale food costs are actually low, such as Ottawa, Montreal or Winnipeg. Instead, Ottawa demands that you ship it from ridiculous places such as Val d’Or and Churchill.
For example, if you do buy cheap food from Montreal, you have to ship it along a seven-hour truck route to Val d’Or before you can use the low food mail rate. The most likely explanation is political patronage: Ottawa’s desire to subsidize the ailing economies of Val d’Or and Churchill. The greatest benefits appear to flow towards a handful of business people who operate wholesale businesses in those places, not to northern consumers.
If Canadian North’s recent allegations are accurate, Ottawa may also be using food mail to subsidize inefficient airline monopolies, such as that enjoyed by First Air in northern Quebec and many routes in Nunavut.
Ninety per cent of food shipped under the program goes to eastern Nunavut and Nunavik. If it were made to work well, it could become a vital tool for combating our unbearable cost of "