around this time last year people finally started taking notice of the food-related issues in the upper northern reaches of Canada; consider this your reminder that even since then, juice is still $26 in Pangnirtung, Nunavut, and that the predominately indigenous communities in Canada’s North are forced to pay extraordinarily exorbitant prices for basic groceries due to structural inequity and the contemporary effects of ongoing settler occupation.
Ugh I know I'm going to probably get a storm of shit for this because this is tumblr, but the reason everything is so expensive in Nunavut is because of TRANSPORTATION AND FUEL COSTS. Yes, racism is a problem, but that's not why fruit juice is expensive. Nunavut is far away from other things and very hard to get to, which means it's the most expensive place to get stuff into. All over the northern part of Canada, food and other goods are more expensive because of the cost involved in getting them there. Nunavut is so expensive because it is so remote and because it is ARCTIC TUNDRA which means your transportation options are limited even if you had bazillions of dollars to put in infrastructure, because of the weather and geological conditions. You can't just plop stuff down on arctic tundra and expect it to work out like it does on temperate soil. Ever seen the show Ice Road Truckers? That's just people trying to get stuff over ice roads into the Northwest Territories. It's still very dangerous, but it can be done. Nunavut on the other hand is so hard to traverse by land that they have to fly in all food from the outside BY PLANE. That is where most of the cost is. And even then you don't have year round good weather to be able to fly planes in or out! Then the other part is the energy it takes to keep stores heated and with the lights on, which again, is more expensive due to all the problems associated getting all things, including energy, into remote regions.
There have been bad effects from European settlement for the people there, but getting goods transported into Nunavut is now easier than ever before, not harder. Racism and structural inequity are bad but they aren't making Nunavut be in the arctic. It's not physically possible with current technology to move goods cheaply into a place like that. The prices on the shelf don't even reflect the true cost of getting things there because food transportation into northern communities is subsidized as it is. Canada already has programs that study how to make food cheaper in the north, and they use subsides to lower prices but until someone invents teleporters food from the outside is going to be expensive.
