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The Current Transcript for October 26, 2022

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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I'm here at the food bank because the prices are going up in order to get all the vegetables that I need. I'd be just eating mac and cheese ramen noodles. I'm losing weight and, like, I shouldn't. I've got no more weight to lose.

MATT GALLOWAY: Canadians across this country are struggling with the high cost of food. Food bank use is up. The price of bread, eggs and milk is climbing at the fastest rate in more than four decades.

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And now with milk, we're cutting down on milk. Also, because milk has gone up and it's going up more. Yeah, but you can't cut down my milk. Have osteoporosis, you know. Yeah. So it's it's a lot of thinking about what can we afford?

MG: With Canadians making tough choices. There is debate over who or what is to blame for rising costs.

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VOICE 1: I think it's simply the high inflationary costs throughout the supply chain. It seems like the retailers are taking the blame for it right now.

VOICE 2: And then on top of it all, there's a great big layer of cream that the supermarkets themselves are collecting.

MG: Today, we hear from experts about the roots of food inflation and from Canadians across this country about how they're coping with the high cost of food. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to a special edition of The Current Eating the Cost.

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Canadians are struggling with the skyrocketing cost of food — who or what is to blame? – Pt. 1

MG: For many Canadians, grocery shopping has become a stressful endeavour. Food prices have soared. Every item placed in the cart demands calculations. Staples like milk and bread now feel like luxuries to some people. Later in this programme, we'll talk about the economic forces driving all of this and the concerns over grocery stores taking advantage, perhaps, of consumers. We begin, though, with a trip to the store with Canadians hoping not to break the bank to feed the family.

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JASON: All right. And ahead this way, we've got our family wagon with us.

MG: That's Jason Gimmel and his child, Marlowe, with a red wagon in hand. The pair are heading out for their weekly grocery shop. They're walking through their neighbourhood in Toronto, heading to No Frills.

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JASON: I'm very much a sales shopping person. What I do is. So yesterday I went through and I made our meal plan for the week. And then I'll go through the local flyer for the store we're about to go to, and see what's on sale there, and that kind of informs the meal choices too. Occasionally there'll be something out of the ordinary that we'll have to pay whatever price it is. But typically it's sales.

MG: Trading at the wagon for a shopping cart. Jason heads inside the list is on his phone. With the sale price next to each item, he starts in the produce section.

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JASON: Need some cucumbers, kiddo? They're on sale for a buck 50. Marilyn loves cucumbers.

MARLOWE: Especially with salt.

JASON: In here. Oh, the raspberries are on sale. Like this is the most expensive stuff often, is the berries. Yeah, at a dollar 88. That's really good, because usually they... They get close to three or $4 here sometimes.

MG: He plan to buy a package of pepperettes for his 11 and 15 year old's lunches. But once in the store, sticker shock sets in.

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JASON: Oh, the app lied to me, we're not going to buy those today. Like these are $11 for a package that's... double digits is a little much for something like that. Yeah. So we'll skip that this week. Yeah, I can, but we're fairly lucky. Like, my wife and I both work, so we're not affluent by any means, but we don't have to worry as much. We've had our moments where things have been tight over the years, like my wife was going through school to be a midwife, so there was only my income coming in. So we were very tight at that point. So we're very, very careful about things and we still are, but we're never in danger of of not having dinner.

MG: Jason and Marlowe are focussed, never straying from the list. Most of the family's food will come from No Frills this week, but Jason has checked out the competitors and plans to make a few stops.

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JASON: Coffee can be expensive, but there are certain stores that almost always have our brand on sale, so I'll end up going there. And recently, this is very recently we got a membership to Costco, but because I don't have a car that often, it's me on my bike. So that really keeps us from buying too much because I can go in there and go nuts, quite frankly.

MG: Jason and Marlowe make their way to the checkout counter. They budget about $110 a week for food, but expect this bill will be quite a bit lower.

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JASON: I guess our most expensive items today were all the vegetable oil. Even at $10 that was on sale, it was still pretty expensive. And the. The [unintelligible] bacon. It was about six bucks, I think. Usually you pay about four or five. This was lighter than usual for sure. Usually I'd come out about the full bill would be about $110 to $120. This was sort of a supplemental because we had so much stuff left over from last week. I was kind of thinking it was going to be around maybe 50 bucks. So it was you know, it was 25 bucks more than I was expecting.

MG: The bags are packed up and it's time to head home. Rolling the cart out of the store. Jason and Marlowe head home to unpack. It is a familiar scene, the weekly shop. But for many Canadians, the line between being budget conscious and being able to make ends meet is getting razor thin. Across the country, foodbank use is up and for seniors like Amy Leong in Richmond, B.C., the food bank is a lifeline.

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AMY: My husband and I, both seniors close to 80, and we moved down here from Edmonton. I used to love going to grocery stores, but now it's a scary, you know, venture. Everything is very hard.

MG: Amy and her husband are retired on a fixed income and supplement their weekly shop here.

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AMY: We've cut down on food. You know, you just have to cut down and buy what's on sale. You know, there's no two ways, you know. I used to take a carton when I shop. No, you know you won't. That's only a few things you can afford. We used to eat more meat, and we love seafood, but we can't afford it anymore. So, you know. But even vegetables are high just despite the cheap, cheaper, cheaper vegetables. And now with milk, we're cutting down on milk. Also, because milk has gone up and it's going up more. Yeah, but you can cut down my milk, have osteoporosis, you know? Yeah. So it's a lot of thinking about what can we afford. But the food banks are doing a wonderful, wonderful job. And all the staff, actually. That's wonderful. Yeah. They don't make you feel bad.

MG: That sense of dignity is key to the Stop's approach. The Stop is a community organisation in Toronto that runs a drop in meal programme twice a week. In a church basement, a team of volunteers wearing masks and hair pulled back, gather around a stainless steel table.

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BRONWYN: You can start off with onions and we'll just give them a medium dice. And these knives just got delivered, so they're nice and sharp.

MG: Bronwyn Cocker is the community chef with a black apron tied at her waist. She glides through the kitchen, dicing and sorting as she goes.

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BRONWYN: Today we are doing a vegetarian Indian dinner, so we are doing a red lentil Mysore dolls, some basmati rice with some fragrant bay leaves and cinnamon and cardamom and a cucumber salad. So cucumber, tomato, red onions and herbs. Cucumbers and tomatoes are just at the edge of being out of season, but they're still pretty reasonably priced. We have some nice tomatoes that were grown in an indigenous medicine wheel garden that is located just around the corner from St Matthew's church. They've generously donated to us over the summer and we have some nice ginger. I have some peppers that were donated to us from Daily Bread Foodbank, so they'll usually donate a small amount every week, usually a vegetable, yoghurt, eggs, a little bit of chicken. So not a lot, but enough to kind of help boost us up. We have some Ontario tomatoes that I bought from one of our suppliers, as well as lots of fresh herbs cilantro, mint, dill and parsley, as well as some Ontario sweet potatoes.

MG: Food costs are forcing Bronwyn to think differently. With donations down and prices up. She's getting creative.

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BRONWYN: And people aren't always able to afford fresh. I think there's totally merit to getting can produce. I plan my budget on like or my meals on a weekly basis just depending on what we receive. Like if I receive a lot of beets that are donated, I'm definitely going to keep that in mind. When I'm planning next week's meal. I might do a borscht or a salad with roasted beets or something like that. So I'm definitely always keeping an eye on our donations and thinking of creative ways to incorporate them. Meat donations tend to be challenging because sometimes you receive not so nice cuts of meat or you receive like breaded chicken strips. Like there was a few weeks last year where every week I was receiving these boxes of chicken strips and I was kind of thinking to myself, how do I elevate these to make a nutritious filling meal like I could very easily? Just I'm sure people would be thrilled if I just throw down chicken strips and fries for them. But that's not really my M.O. as a chef and as an organisation. So yeah, I thought of creative ways to incorporate them. You kind of chop them up into the nice sauce and did like. Kind of like a riff on the general, how chicken incorporated them in like props with lots of vegetables and a nice hummus spread. Stuff like that. We try to kind of incorporate a fresh salad with our meal, but the lettuce that we usually bought increased from $35 a case to $91, which is about 160%.

MG: And it's not just lettuce. Cooking oil has jumped in price, too.

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BRONWYN: We usually get like a 16 litre of oil just for sorting. It tended to be the most cost effective at the time, but it jumped from $29 to around $72. So you definitely have to think about that and make it stretch.

MG: Bronwyn carefully pours a few tablespoons of oil into a huge pot heating up on the stove. Onions sizzle, and she adds lentils into the mix.

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BRONWYN: Bring everything you got, adding it all at one time. My personal strategy is to try my best to cook with the seasons because I find the food is more flavourful. So if you're getting tomatoes in peak season August as opposed to January, it's not only going to cost a little less, but it's going to be more flavourful. And I also think relying on a lot of legumes and pulses is great, maybe investing in some some spices from a bulk burn so you can take those kind of bland staples and elevate them like you could take a race and make something really nice with it, with some rice and beans and like some nice herbs and spices freezing if you have the space can definitely be helpful as well. So if you see stuff on sale or even I know there's like those off produce rocks at the grocery store, you might be able to take some bruised peppers and like process them into a really nice pair sauce or a jam and make it stretch.

MG: So you can only stretch so far though. When the cupboard is bare, there are few options. So the Stop is trying to help fill those gaps.

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BRONWYN: When you're cooking for so many people, you add much more than you think. I am going to be doing about 130 takeout meals for this evening and usually the number kind of shifts based on the time of the month. So four is the beginning of the month people receive like their O.W. in their early checks, so they might have a bit more money to purchase their own food. However, towards the end of the month, as money runs out, we definitely see our numbers increase. Our clientele has shifted significantly in the past few years, so when we first took over in 2019, we were dealing with or serving a lot of people who are experiencing homelessness. Currently, we're serving a lot of seniors because we have a seniors building next door to the church. So seniors who yeah, are living on quite a tight budget will come here to make ends meet and grab a meal.

MG: At the University of British Columbia, a similar meal programme. But instead of feeding seniors, it's students like Olivia, a grad student and volunteer.

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OLIVIA: I've really been needing to crunch my budget. I had to take all my receipts from when I go grocery shopping and I put them in an Excel sheet to keep track of my spending. And then I already know how much I'm going to spend on rent. And then I have the rest of this money that I have to sort of divvy up for any sort of like emergency costs and food costs. And so I sort of budgeted my weekly expenditures to be about 55 a week. I put it in the spreadsheet to make sure I don't go over every week or any week so I can make sure I have enough to spend the next week on food. I can't spend any money on dairy products like cheeses or milk because they're just too expensive. And especially meats are just not affordable for me. So I've had to take that out of my diet and I'm not even vegetarian, but I find myself not eating dairy products or meat. And yeah, I've had to also not eat luxury foods that I might want. You know, I eat rather basic foods just to sort of give me the minimal nutrients that I need for the day. And, like, basic foods, like rice or starches. Just fill me up.

MG: That desperation has driven Olivia to get involved. Last week, she joined hundreds of students at a protest calling on the university to increase funding for food programmes on campus.

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OLIVIA: You know, people think that because you're in sort of a prestigious university, you don't have the same sort of poverty struggles that other people might have because, you know, oh, you can afford to go there because you can pay tuition. And it's such like a nice area. And so they see that sort of prestige and they think that it wouldn't make any sense to have this sort of struggle. But you can have these same food insecurity issues even in a community that is viewed that way. The reality is that anyone can struggle with food security. You know, it's not about how much you pay and tuition. You can still have to cut back because of that. You know, it can be one of the causes of food insecurity.

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CHERYL: Okay. So I'll just type in the address of where we're going.

CHERYL: Just south of Vancouver. We're on our way to deliver meals. The food looks and smells delicious. Bacon wrapped pork tenderloin with mashed potatoes.

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CHERYL: And these are going in. Everybody gets a dessert and everybody gets a salad unless they choose not to have one and it will stay.

MG: Cheryl Reed is all business. She's a volunteer driver in her sixties with energy to spare. We load the meals into her car. She has eight drops tonight. Hot and cold food are separated to keep it fresh. Homemade pie for dessert.

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CHERYL: I think I've been doing this for about a year. I think my husband's been helping me since this past spring, doing it. But it's a it's a nice way to get out and see people. And some of these people that we're calling on, like during COVID for some of that, we may have been the only people they saw. And that's really heartbreaking for some of the most of them are singles who live on their own. Very often, older women, I found, although we do have men who are on their own as well. And I just find it's a nice way to keep busy and doing something constructive and productive and and pragmatic, you know, and being helpful for other people. So it's kind of. My mom and dad used to do this. So.

MG: Matthew Campbell is the manager of the Cloverdale Community Kitchen. He's constantly on the move from his kitchen to the packing area and an auditorium where a community dinner was happening.

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MATTHEW: One thing that really definitely has hit us hard is the cost of protein and the cost of meat. And so any food that we don't have donated here, we have to purchase. And it's really pushing against that budget that we have, making it difficult to put on good, nutritious meals.

MG: The White Rock Meals on Wheels folded after 51 years, and that's because the food supplier doubled the price of meals from seven to $14. Cloverdale community stepped in to fill the gap with a team of volunteers. They make meals on site and deliver them.

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MATTHEW: The seniors that are receiving this are definitely on fixed incomes. Many of them that are well into their eighties felt like ten or 15 years ago when they retired that they they were able to make it. But inflation has really eaten into their savings. And so where they used to have a bunch of extra money maybe at the end of the month. Now it is very, very tight. And a lot of them are having to choose between food and rent.

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MANDEEP: So here the meals get cooked. They've started about 9 a.m. and they're coming close to packing time.

MG: Mandeep Kumar helps pack up the meals.

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MANDEEP: So I'll show you from here. We have different routes. Today we have 12 routes are going out and about 140 meals. There's a lot of love and care that gets put into the food. And, you know, we always want to go above and beyond. And, you know, a lot of our clients are elderly and they put a lot of hard work out there. And, you know, it's our time to give back and take care of them. Whatever we can do to show them love, we do.

MG: Back in the car, we pull up to a low rise senior apartment building.

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Cheryl from Cloverdale, Community Kitchen. I have your dinner.

MG: Diana Ghent buzzes us in.

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DIANA: All right. Yep. See you in a bit. She's right. Oh, my goodness. We got you. Just as you were coming in or going out or... Let me know what made you go. Oh, thank you.

MG: Like so many Canadians, Diana is making hard choices.

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DIANA: I find the cost of food has extremely jumped. And it's not just in one particular area, and it's not from one particular store. It's all over. There are times when I actually sit down and I go like, okay, can I afford to buy this toilet paper that's on sale? You know, it's that extreme. Yeah, it really is. Well, we enjoy making you your dinner. I got to tell you, have a good time making dinner. So I calculate a lot of my finances a week before, two weeks before. And when the price went up on this, I went. This is nothing compared to what the store is doing to me. They went up $0.50 and ah, was it a dollar? It was a dollar, yes. And I went, Wow. Like if I had to go to the store, there's no way I'd be able to do this. So I feel really blessed.

MG: That documentary was produced by the Currents and Penman, Lara O'Brien and Amanda Grant. Your CBC News is up next.

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And then grocery store companies are passing on their own higher costs and then some. I'm not saying that their greed sparked the whole problem, but their greed is certainly present in the increased profits that they're generating.

MG: Not everyone is feeling the pinch of higher food costs in the same way. Coming up, are grocery store chains taking advantage of a bad situation to rake in profits? Our special programme, Eating the Cost, continues in 6 minutes. My name is Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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Canadians are struggling with the skyrocketing cost of food — who or what is to blame? – Pt. 2

Guest: Simon Somogyi, Jim Stanford, Karin Marley

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to a special edition of The Current, Eating the Cost.

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MG: Still to come. For many people, just getting to the grocery store is already expensive. Now, with the cost of food going up, things have gone from bad to worse. One programme in Newfoundland is trying to lighten the load. We'll tell you about that. Plus, the destructive impact that climate change is having on some of Canada's cultural heritage sites. But first, passing the buck at checkout.

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MG: First, the House of Commons voted unanimously to investigate grocery giants. Then the Competition Bureau said it will study Canada's grocery market. Both of these probes come at a time of record food prices. For nearly a year, food inflation has been higher than the overall rate of inflation, and that has shoppers wondering if they're being fleeced. Simon Somogyi is a professor and eral chair in the business of Food at the University of Guelph. Jim Stanford is an economist and director of the Centre for Future Work. He is in Vancouver. Good morning to you both.

JIM STANFORD: Morning, Matt.

SIMON SOMOGYI: Morning.

MG: Jim. We'll get into the specifics, but broadly, as you understand it, why are food prices going up in this country?

JIM STANFORD: Oh, there's about five sources of the bad news that we experience every time we go to the store. Matt, some of it's global related to the supply chain disruptions after the pandemic. Some of it is related to nature, frankly, climate change and many of the disasters we've had floods, droughts and others in various agricultural regions around the world. The war in Ukraine obviously hurt both in terms of some of the agricultural products that are made over there and the impact on energy prices. And then on top of it all, there's a great big layer of cream that the the supermarkets themselves are collecting. Profits in food retailing are up very, very strongly compared to pre-COVID times. So put all those things together. And it's a recipe for some pretty angry customers in the in the line up at the cashier.

MG: Is your sense that grocery store chains are charging more than perhaps might be necessary? You used the phrase cream like are they skimming more off the top than they would in other instances?

JIM STANFORD: Well, there's no doubt that grocery store companies are passing on their own higher costs and then some. And we see this in the bottom line. The bottom line is the profits of the industry, which have more than doubled since 2019, the last, quote unquote, normal year before the pandemic. So they are obviously passing on the higher costs, on inputs and from their suppliers, but then they're taking more profit. There's no doubt about it. I'm not saying that their greed has sparked the whole problem. There's clearly a huge adjustment happening in Canada's economy, in the global economy, but their greed is certainly present in the increased profits that they're generating through this inflationary episode. And that's true in many other industries. I know supermarkets have got a lot of attention and I think that's fair. But there's a lot of other industries in Canada doing exactly the same thing, and that is leading to a real surge in corporate profits across Canada.

MG: Simon Somogyi, you've been listening and what do you make of Jim's argument? In part people use this phrase greed, affiliation to talk about what's going on right now. From your perspective, why is it that we are all paying a whole lot more at the grocery store?

SIMON SOMOGYI: Well, I think Jim's right. We've seen very high profits for our major grocers, and we don't have a lot of competition in the grocery sector in Canada's three grocers that control most of what we buy. If you drill down a little bit into the profits, you can see that taking Loblaws as an example, you know, their profits are being driven by their different types of stores. So if you look at their no frills stores, they're no name brands. You know, the private labels that they make, it plays in a litChoice that they make more money from those. So that's playing into their hands to some extent with we've seen the pharmacy sales as well be very strong for Loblaws, particularly with a lot of people going out now because now that the pandemic has slowed down a bit and spending more on things like cosmetics, which are very high margin product and also some obviously with the COVID pandemic, we've seen a lot of medicine sales, cold and flu sales and those types of products give them more profit as well. So yeah, there is a lot of profitability going on. I think Jim's correct that this isn't just a isolated case for the grocery sector. We've seen record profits for the energy sector, for particularly for the banks. And there is some discussion that gross profit margins haven't changed a lot since pre-pandemic times into that 2 to 4% range. But I think going forward there is some discussion and talk about how the Competition Bureau might look into this. I think that's welcome, but it would be good if it was looking forward to profitability across all different types of businesses because this isn't just an isolated case, it's it's a trend.

MG: But I guess to Jim's point, I mean, he says there's a lot of anger out there. Is there any evidence that grocery store chains are deliberately charging or taking advantage of the situation right now because of all of the things that Jim talked about, to charge more for groceries and then ultimately, you know, impacting the consumers who rely on those groceries.

SIMON SOMOGYI: It's hard to definitively say grocers have the ability to strategically shift their prices. They will do a thing called loss leading, which is where they will sell a product at a very low price to people. Go into the store and hopefully get you to buy the high priced items. You know, if you think about Costco, you do have the $1 a dollar 50 hotdogs that's designed to draw you in and then you buy a whole bunch of other things while you're in the store. So to understand exactly where their profitability is coming from, you'd have to then look at each product and what say when a grocer buys it for from their suppliers and what it sells, sells it for to consumers and understand those margins. And I think that's very difficult to gain that information that's not available in the public sphere and investigations should take place to see exactly what that is.

MG: Jim, why would you say that grocery stores might be in part taking advantage of the situation that we're in right now to charge more.

JIM STANFORD: In a way that it's how our economy works? You know, and I don't think anyone really should be surprised by it. The reality is we have an economic system where we empower private companies to charge whatever the market will bear. And some people think that's natural and healthy. Some people think it's greedy. And in fact, it's hard to tell the difference between greed and profit maximisation. So there is no doubt that the supermarkets are, quote unquote, taking advantage of a situation where there have been supply chain disruptions. And there's some evidence that even the expectation or the anticipation of higher prices amongst consumers gives a sort of psychological space for supermarkets to increase prices further than would be required to cover costs. But, you know, they're doing what private businesses are supposed to do, which is maximise their profit. The problem is this in in grocery stores and other sectors in Canada, the economy is contributing to a very serious economic problem, which is inflation. And I think we should ask a fundamental question why do we have the essentials of life in our economy priced according to whatever a private company thinks they can sell it for?

MG: What do you make of the argument that comes from, for example, the Retail Council of Canada saying that the big driver of higher prices is the vendors themselves, that that the inputs, the wholesalers of food, the processors, the manufacturers, that that all contributes to the cost of food. What we see on the, you know, the sticker on the store shelves.

JIM STANFORD: There's certainly a grain of truth to that, that, first of all, those suppliers have higher costs themselves. Of course, for all the reasons we talked about supply chains and droughts and floods and the war in Ukraine. And by the way, there's some healthy profit making happening along the food supply chain as well. You know, I've looked at the the profits in food manufacturing, for example. They're up strongly since before the pandemic, about 50% higher than they were in 2019, in the last 12 months. But supermarket profits are up even more, 118% in the last 12 months. So pretty well all along the chain. Everyone who can stick their hand in and grab a bit more profit at a moment of uncertainty and supply disruptions is doing so. And it all adds up into an incredible bill at the cashier.

MG: Simon, what's the role of the vendors in that? I think part of this is also about supply management. It's not every part of the food industry that is controlled by private sector. You think of the dairy sector. Supply management in many ways shapes the price of what we pay for eggs and milk, butter, what have you.

SIMON SOMOGYI: The idea behind supply management is to constrict supply, and the argument from the supply managed sectors has been that it's it's there for a whole sense of sort of reasons, but to keep prices low for Canadians. But we've seen record prices, price increases for dairy products, and that part of that is going to farms as well. I think, you know, back to Jim's point about profit maximisation, he's right in saying it is the role of a private company or a publicly listed company to maximise the profits for its shareholders. Well, think about that. Where are the shareholders for these companies? They are in the case of our grocers, many of them are managed funds, which are RRSPs, other pension funds invest in that, then give returns to their members and look, looking at profitability, as I mentioned, where that money goes and that a lot of that does go to ordinary Canadians.

MG: This is the subject of scrutiny from parliament. The Federal Agriculture Committee recently passed a motion that's going to prompt an investigation into grocery store profits and the industry itself more broadly. Take a listen to what James Vercammen, a professor of food and resource economics at UBC, had to say about this.

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Canada's certainly not an exception in terms of food price inflation. Like I looked at us there, September results were 11.2%. Food price Australia had 9.3%. Germany had a whopping 17.7%. So all the countries are going through very similar to what we're doing. So in terms of the investigation, I don't really see it being able to uncover too much. These supply chains are very complex, so it'd be really hard to determine that the retailers themselves are making excess profits over and above what the manufacturers are setting.

MG: Jim Stanford not a lot of faith there in what this investigation could uncover. What are you hoping it might reveal?

JIM STANFORD: Well, there's the parliamentary investigation, Matt, and now the Competition Bureau has announced its own investigation as well. So we'll have a couple of opportunities to dig in to some of those numbers that Simon was talking about and. There's no doubt that many of those factors, the supply disruptions, the higher costs along the supply chain are a huge part of the higher grocery prices that we're paying. And Canada supermarket industry is a cosy oligopoly, if you like. Three, three major chains have a dominant market share and they are able to exercise price power both over consumers, but also over their own suppliers and their own workers, as we've seen through some of the past scandals. You know, the idea that Canadians will share in those profits through our RRSP and so on, I think will be probably a bit of cold comfort. There aren't many people in line at Loblaws who say, Oh, well, I'm going to pay, you know, $200 for this card of groceries, but I'll get a few cents profit and in my in my RRSP account. I do think that these investigations are merited. The bottom line profit numbers make it clear that this industry is doing more than just passing on higher costs. And I also think it should be the start of a bigger conversation. There are other sectors, frankly, that are that are even worse. Gasoline is the single most important contributor to the inflation that we are all now tightening our belts to try to control. And most of the petroleum products we consume in Canada were produced and refined and distributed here in Canada. So there's no obvious global reason why we have to be paying that much. So I think that it's politically potent. This is why it's got legs in Ottawa, there's anger out there and politicians of every stripe know that, you know, in a moment of national disruption with a looming recession and a pandemic that's still running, do we actually just allow companies to charge whatever they think they can possibly charge? And that's how it's working right now.

MG: Well, you mentioned previous scandals. I mean, part of this is Loblaws, which is exposed for its role in price fixing around bread and those who were impacted. But they got a $25 gift card to help compensate for that. What do you think something like that tells us about the industry that we're discussing?

JIM STANFORD: Oh, that history is is very clear. And in my mind, even an even worse example, frankly, was what they did to the workers. You know, Matt, I come from a labour union background and we had the situation where for a few weeks during the worst of the lockdowns, the grocery stores were all paying $2 extra wages for the workers who literally were risking their lives to go to work and allow us to buy groceries and get through the the pandemic. So they were heroes. And then all at the same time, the three chains decided to take the $2 away, not because they weren't heroes anymore, but because they weren't as worried about whether enough people would show up at work in the face of COVID to run the grocery store.

MG: And it all happened, it all happened at the same time instantaneously.

JIM STANFORD: And it was just another glaring example of how this market power in a highly concentrated industry like this one is exercised. That market power was there before the pandemic. So, you know, we can't sort of simplistically say there are no oligopoly and that's why prices are up now. Why in that case, why weren't they up before the pandemic?

SIMON SOMOGYI: And back to Jim's point, I think he is right that there is excessive profitability happening in real dollar terms. I am a little concerned that the Competition Bureau won't get to the bottom of this. They're still investigating the bread scandal almost seven or eight years on. So that doesn't bode well for this investigation. And we wouldn't want in a case when the economy changes, then this whole issue just sort of dissolves out because everyone forgot about it. Now the prices have settled. It's an ideal opportunity for people around Canada to understand better how the food supply chain works, how the grocery system works. So I think that's that's of value. But at the end of the day, will the Competition Bureau be able to bring in more grocers? No. Will it be able to set prices for consumers? No.

MG: What do you make of the fact, Jim, that Loblaws announced this three month price freeze on its no name products? If you go past the stores and there are giant signs in the windows with a lock on it saying we've locked the prices, we're not going to increase our prices on this brand until we're through this part of the winter.

JIM STANFORD: Well, on the one hand, you know, it was a genius marketing device, that's for sure. They've got an enormous amount of free publicity out of it. But at the same time, I think there were some unintended consequences, if you like. One of them is it immediately affirms that these companies have pricing power, immediately raises the question, well, why didn't they do it for other things that they sell? And then the greatest irony was you had one of the major competitors, Metro, come out the next day and say that they do the same thing. In fact, they said it was sort of normal practise over the November two post-Christmas period for a price freeze like this to happen, which again just reaffirmed everything we think about the supermarket business, which is it's it's controlled by a very small number of very large companies that effectively coordinate their actions.

MG: Simon, in light of what Jim just said, why the trumpets from Loblaws announcing this?

SIMON SOMOGYI: I agree that they have more power over their other brands or the national brands that get into supermarkets, and therefore, they can push their own private labels, which they will make more money from, even though they get suppliers to produce them, that their margins are higher on those products. At the end of the day, I hope that the investigations get to the. Point of a why? Why have we allowed this to happen? Is that some evil force within government that constricts the way we buy? Is it a case that we've really pushed away small grocers, we've pushed away the butcher stores, the fresh produce stores, and we're all just content to go to one store to buy everything that we need.

MG: What's your sense? Because people look for easy solutions. People will say, this is about these companies that are making money hand over fist and they're squeezing people in a moment of vulnerability. Is it. Is it that simple?

SIMON SOMOGYI: I think part of it plays back to our consumer behaviour that we have rightly so loved. The idea of going one place to get all the food we need that that convenience factor is strong and I understand why people do that. We've allowed grocery stores to act like standalone cities in some respects in that you drive to a very large business and then you can get everything you need rather than being part of a mall situation where there are other food retailers. We've allowed through planning and our urban planning that to play into their hands a little bit and that's unfortunate. So I do hope that investigations do get people thinking a little bit about how they buy food. It's an opportunity to see how could we make more competition for retailers, not just bringing in another big retailer.

MG: In the meantime, what do we do to bring prices down? Aside from opening butcher shops and fishmongers and the local vegetable stand, what do you what do you do to bring prices down, Simon?

SIMON SOMOGYI: Well, I think at the end of the day, we don't have a lot of power to as a consumer, to say to the grocery store, hey, we just want cheaper stuff, give us cheaper stuff. It comes down to being a smart shopper in some ways, looking at specials, looking at alternatives that might be cheaper. It's about being smart. It's about sticking to budgets and making that dollar stretch further.

MG: Jim, those are individual practises. Are there larger state interventions, government interventions that could be needed to help bring prices down for all of us?

JIM STANFORD: Well, I'll tell you about one state intervention I'm very worried about. To tell you the truth, Matt. And that is that in response to this inflation in groceries and other industries, we've got the Bank of Canada dramatically raising interest rates and likely putting Canada into a recession. Most economists think we are headed for one, and that the banks response to the high grocery prices and high other prices is to literally say Canadians have too much money to spend. Domestic spending power is overheated, they say, and too many of us have jobs. So, you know, I think, again, because we've taken this pricing power and the private sector for granted and assumed they're going to charge whatever the market will bear, the only thing we can come up with is, well, we've got to throw the whole economy into a recession to undermine that. That price pressure. I really think there's a better way. I think that competition policy itself could be strengthened. I think some of the more outrageous examples of price coordination in supermarkets and other sectors could be tackled not just through an investigation by the Competition Bureau. We would clearly have to strengthen the powers of competition regulators, including penalties for collusive behaviour, but also even things like breaking up large companies that have too much power. Some of those international supply chain problems are resolving themselves. Some of those international costs are coming down. In the meantime, I think allowing Canadians to have their wages keep up with prices and income support programmes for low income households, etc. Targeted support that way will help us get through the next tough couple of years.

MG: We need to eat. Can you imagine in is there any jurisdiction where you limit the price of food or you restrict the cost of food?

JIM STANFORD: Oh, sure. There's lots of places that have tried to put caps on essential commodities. I was reading that Israel just implemented price caps on different sort of core staples. That's difficult to do, particularly with a grocery store where there's thousands of different items there. There's other ways, I think, that you can limit the power of private companies to increase prices. And then at the end of the day, if necessary, redistribute some of that excess surplus that the companies have collected. That's the idea behind taxes on super profitable companies that's been implemented in many countries in Europe and elsewhere, and then take some of those profits and give it back to the consumers whose higher than normal payments explain those profits. I think there's a lot of different ways to go at it. None of them easy, none of the magic bullets. But I do think that we can't blame consumers for this. And in essence, the Bank of Canada is saying you've got too much money to spend. This is why inflation is a problem and most Canadians would just reject that.

MG: Good to speak with you both about this. Thank you very much.

JIM STANFORD: Thank you, Matt.

SIMON SOMOGYI: Thank you, Matt.

MG: Simon Somogyi is the oral chair in the business of food at the University of Guelph. Jim Stanford is an economist and director of the Centre for Future Work. We did request interviews with the heads of Loblaws Metro and Empire, which also operates Safeway, IGA, Sobeys, Farm Boy and FreshCo Stores. We asked multiple times for those interviews. Everyone declined. We also requested an interview with the Competition Bureau of Canada. They also declined our request. We. Also requested an interview with the Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland, and she, too, declined our request. We will continue to ask all of them to come on this programme. Stay tuned. We asked you to comment on how you are making things stretch in your kitchen and how the cost of food is affecting you. The Current senior producer Karin Marley is here with some of your mail. Karin, good morning.

KARIN MARLEY: Good morning. Let's start with Suzanne from Delta, British Columbia, who writes: We make regular visits to our local farms who often have great deals on ugly veggies. I've learnt to safely use my pressure canner and also how to make pasta and bread from scratch. With the money we used to spend on eating out, we've slowly built an inventory of jars and canning supplies. We buy wholesale bulk ingredients, 50 pound bags of flour, rice and oats. As I am listening to your show, I have two large parts of stocks simmering on the stove and just pulled a loaf of bread from the oven.

MG: Delicious. Linda Dixon writes: I have grown a vegetable garden since I was 20 years old. I'm now 70 and was about to retire my hoe and spade. However, the cost of food at the grocery store has given me a change of mind. I have always been a careful food buyer, purchasing in bulk and shopping the sales, but my garden has definitely contributed to both our budget and nutrition as a result of the inflation rate on food, I will continue to garden and to convert some flower patches to veggies and herbs.

KARIN MARLEY: Susan Borden from London, Ontario, wrote: I stopped buying most animal proteins from grocery stores and started buying them directly from an abattoir. There is no middleman, which means a pound of strip loin steak is one third of the cost I see in grocery stores. The meat is locally raised and is always fresh. My husband uses an app to inform me as to where the best price for butter is. And yes, we currently have £16 of butter in the freezer. This year I resumed canning and have over 100 years of various salsas, condiments, sauces and jams on hand.

MG: One wonders how big 16 pounds of butter is. What does that actually look like? That's a lot of butter. And Jamieson from Coppice Casing Ontario says: I do my weekly grocery shopping at the only grocery store in town, a Loblaw chain and grocery store. I received the no name brand price freeze announcement on my PC app with considerable scepticism. The prices on most no name products have already gone up and the price for the freeze is less than four months in length. A more impactful way to actually reduce food bills for households on a very tight budget would be to put the sale price on each individual item instead of the purchase of two or more. Nobody should pay more for buying just the right amount of food.

KARIN MARLEY: And finally, Joshua Edwards from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, emailed us these thoughts. Twice a week, I bake bread for lunch sandwiches. And this year, for the first time, we got a Costco membership. It's pretty crazy how much you can save at a big box store, though. That means careful menu planning when you have limited food storage space. Still even sticking to basics. Our monthly grocery budget has ballooned to at least $800 for many in our community and across the country. I simply don't know how they do it. No budgeting skills in the world can offset this craziness. We are seeing the consequences of what happens when the government and private sector treat food as a profit mechanism rather than the necessary sustenance that should be considered a human right.

MG: Thank you, Karin.

KARIN MARLEY: Welcome.

MG: Karin Marley, senior producer here in The Current. And thanks, everyone for your letters. You can get in touch on anything you hear on this programme, whether it's today's food programme or just about anything else we talk about. Email us thecurrent@cbc.ca. You can find us as well on Twitter. We are @TheCurrentCBC. And coming up after your regional update, we're going to head to Newfoundland and Labrador. Finding affordable food can be a struggle for many Canadians and for those who live in what are known as food deserts. Just getting to the store can cost you money. We'll hear how one programme in Newfoundland is trying to help. That's in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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Canadians are struggling with the skyrocketing cost of food — who or what is to blame? – Pt. 3; The fight to preserve archeological sites and artifacts from climate change

Guests: Matthew Bett, Mike O’Rourke, Joshua Smee, Sandra Antle

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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One bell pepper and no parsley.

No, just put on a [unintelligible]

Do you need bags?

[Indistinct chatter]

MG: Bell peppers, apples, parsley. Just a few of the things you can pick up at the new mobile market in Saint John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Food on the Move is an initiative by Food First NL. It brings healthy food and a low cost to neighbourhoods without ready access to groceries. And while dessert isn't usually a word that people might associate with the province's rainy climate, food deserts in that province are becoming more common. Joshua Smee is the CEO of Food First NL and joins me in our studio. Josh, good morning.

JOSHUA SMEE: Good morning.

MG: Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. Let's start with a definition. How do you define what a food desert is?

JOSHUA SMEE: You know, you actually almost nailed it right there. It's an area could be usually we say say it in an urban context where there isn't ready access to affordable, affordable groceries. One thing to know about food deserts is there isn't much more of a definition than that. And we don't you know, it's not within any set distance or there's not a lot of parameters around it. But I think you get the message here, what it means that when you have a neighbourhood or a rural area where there isn't food readily available.

MG: We often talk about urban areas when it comes to a food desert and big cities in particular like Toronto. We talked about this a lot here. We've talked about it in the wake of a shooting in Buffalo. We talked about the food desert that existed there in that city. What about in Saint John's? What is what does it look like when it comes to access to healthy food?

JOSHUA SMEE: Yeah, it's complex. And I think that's one of the things about food deserts is it's more than just what your neighbourhood looks like. So we did a lot of research in Saint John's and we do find that people really do struggle to access food, especially folks with lower incomes. That's probably no surprise and what a lot of that has to do with access to transportation. So there are plenty of folks in Saint John's who live a pretty good distance from a grocery store, certainly farther than you'd like to walk. The bus system isn't great, and so there are places that you'd call a food desert in that sense. But what really matters is how are you going to get there? And we know that for lower income folks, the vast majority of people, they can't afford to operate a car. Right. So if you if you earn more than $90,000 in Saint John's, we did some work on this. 90% of those folks are using a car to get food. If you're under 20,000, it's less than 25%. And so for those folks are food deserts is much, much more relevant because their access to the food in their neighbourhood is much more constrained. If you have a car you can drive to the other side of town, it's not as relevant.

MG: What about more broadly in the province? I mean, what does it look like in terms of food access?

JOSHUA SMEE: I'm glad you asked that question because we talk about food deserts in the urban context a lot, and I actually think it's a really relevant thing to talk about about rural communities. So we know about 80% of communities in Newfoundland and Labrador don't have a grocery store. So largely because they're small, you know, we have a very distributed population. The place you'd be able to get food in those communities, usually a gas station, a convenience store, and folks are travelling huge distances to access groceries. You know, I've plenty of friends who drive for five hour round trips to go grocery shopping. And so in that context, really, most folks who live in rural communities live in a food desert, for lack of a better word.

MG: And so how are you trying to address that with the Food on the Move programme?

JOSHUA SMEE: So food on the Move is a mobile affordable grocery market. So we're patterning on similar initiatives in lots of other places. There's a there's a great one in Halifax, for example. And the way it works is we, we take a truck around, we pick up food wholesale at a low cost. We break that wholesale big bulk food into smaller, smaller bits. And then the truck visits community centres around Saint John. So in Saint John's we have a number of community centres that serve neighbourhoods of affordable housing built by the Newfoundland and Labrador Housing Corporation. So the truck rolls up, sets up its little tent or it goes inside. If the weather is Saint John's weather and we offer groceries for sale and what we do is we can pass on the low price that we can get at the wholesalers and in quantities that are small enough that make sense for folks in those neighbourhoods to come by and pick up.

MG: So describe I mean, for some reason I think of like a bookmobile, do you know what I mean? Like you can't. The library is too far away. You can't go to the library. The library comes to you. You're describing like a truck that's going around as a grocery store. Describe what it actually looks like.

JOSHUA SMEE: Yes. So we're just piloting this. This is our first year. So we rent a U-Haul, you know, every market morning, our staff go out, grab a U-Haul truck. We have a big banner that says Food on the Move and a pop up tent. So we roll up to the community centre, pop up the tent, pop up the banners, set up our our point of sale system and load the table down with food ID and. Looks like any small market that you might see on the street side, you know, anywhere in any community, really, but it moves from place to place. So every market day it goes to a couple of different community centres and makes its rounds around the community. Funny that you mention the bookmobile actually, because our public library's also just launched a mobile library and it travels with us. So every time the borough market shows up, so does the library truck and we set up a little mini downtown at every community centre we go to.

MG: And again, this isn't kind of a mobile farmer's market. This is a mobile grocery store.

JOSHUA SMEE: Exactly. And that's a really important point. So, you know, it's great to have local in the supply chain for these kind of things. And we definitely try. But the focus of this is on affordable food. And so that means what do folks in these neighbourhoods need and what are they looking for? Right. And we know from talking to the community in Saint John's, for example, that culturally specific foods are really hard to access for some folks. So if you've moved to Saint John's from from somewhere else in the world, you might not live anywhere near the store in the community that provides, say, Syrian groceries, for example, or basic staples, you know, the things that are just in your pantry all the time. So, yeah, it's not a farmer's market in that sense. It's meant to just make those basics a little bit more attainable in the context of this crisis of food prices that we're in right now.

MG: Okay. So I want to hear from somebody who has used this market. Sandra Antle is a resident of Saint John's, recently visited the mobile market. She's been listening in to our conversation. Sandra, good morning to you.

SANDRA ANTLE: Good morning.

MG: How are you doing?

SANDRA ANTLE: Great, thank.

MG: You. Tell me about going to the mobile market. What was it like?

SANDRA ANTLE: It was it was good. As in it was really convenient for me. I didn't have to get a cab and they did have everything I was looking for and in smaller quantities. If I wanted to buy three apples or four bananas, it was perfect for my family size.

MG: You say you didn't have to get in a cab. Tell me about how you would normally get your groceries.

SANDRA ANTLE: Well, you'd probably only go once or twice a month, but it's a cab and it's probably $30 round trip. So when you're a senior and you're just kind of running out of a few vegetables or fruit, and at the end of the month, you don't want to have to be going, you know, getting cabs everywhere. And the local store doesn't always have these items. So it was convenient just to go to this little market and to buy three onions or to buy three apples was perfect for my needs. There's no wastage and the price was right.

MG: And you'd need to take the cab because there's not a grocery store that would be close enough distance to you.

SANDRA ANTLE: For seniors, we can't we can't walk there. So we would have to get us.

MG: To get a cab. $30 is a lot to go grocery shopping.

SANDRA ANTLE: And cab fares are pretty pricey right.

MG: Now. Does that mean if you have to take that money out of the grocery budget, does that impact what you're able to buy if you were taking the taxi to go to the grocery store?

SANDRA ANTLE: Yes, that also and also, if you're at the grocery store, you're going to pick up some things that you may not need, whereas this just gets my basic items and what I need for for my week or whatever.

MG: Now, you mentioned some of the quantities of things that you were able to get, you know, a few bananas or a couple of apples. Was there anything else that you got from the mobile market that that would be different than what you'd get from the grocery store?

SANDRA ANTLE: Well, I always use parsley as the dried parsley. You buy the bottles. And I was talking to a lady in the Q and she said, Oh, parsley, this is great on meat. So of course, I didn't know what to do with fresh parsley and but I was interested. So I just bought some and, you know, got home and looked it up on Google and see how I could preserve and freeze some of this for later use. So it was it was it was a great thing to do, try different things. And they had some fresh radish, which was lovely.

MG: And what did you think of the partially.

SANDRA ANTLE: Yes, I thought the party was great.

MG: Good, good. It was it was money well spent.

SANDRA ANTLE: Yes. And and it's a nice time, too, because you kind of line up, you see your neighbours and everybody's buying a little bit of food. And I got to say, it's great supporting some local.

MG: Josh, what do you think, listening to how Sandra has experienced what it is that you're providing? I mean, you must feel gratified.

JOSHUA SMEE: Yeah, that's so nice to hear. And it's, I think hitting so many of the notes we hoped this project would hit and that's a big part of it is, you know, what does it mean to to build a build a community where you can age in place and where you're not your whole lifestyle isn't put at risk if the cost of cab shoots up or the cost of food shoots up in this way. And so it is really great to hear great to hear from Sandra that she's using it in that way and that it's making such a positive impression.

MG: Does that sound common to you in terms of your experience and what you know about food deserts that people would have to take cabs for that would cost $30 and that they would only go a couple of times a month because it's a lot of money.

JOSHUA SMEE: Absolutely. So $30 is the bottom end, I would say, for a round trip cab fare in Saint John's to go to a grocery store. There's many people would have to spend more than that. And I think. That's why we have to think about this, that when we're talking about where people's food budgets come from and where they're making these compromises, you know, investments in transportation, whether that is getting food to people or making it easier for people to get to food, that's a direct impact on how much money people have in their pockets to to purchase food. And that's a we don't always make that link, you know, when we're talking about putting in a new bus route. So, you know, we're not recognising how much household food budget is going to come out of that bus route being there. But for deliveries, especially for mobile markets like this, I think it also solves, you know, the challenge that people have with bringing their groceries on the bus even. It's not always easy for folks, particularly in the winter. And so I think there's always a space for localising these things, especially in neighbourhoods that otherwise don't have a lot of retail options.

MG: Just pull back a little bit. I mean, if you take a look, this is somebody who is involved in helping to provide food and provide healthy food. If people don't have access to easy, healthy food, what is the societal cost of this?

JOSHUA SMEE: Yeah, there's tons of research on this. We know it's enormous. It's there's there's health consequences across the life cycle of not being able to access the food that you need. And there's also mental health consequences. It's you know, I think for those of us who don't have to experience and are lucky enough not to be food insecure, we we might not have be able to understand what it is to not know where your next meal is coming from or whether your family is going to be able to eat. There's this profound instability that that is a big part of a lot of people's lives. So, you know, it's almost one in six people in our province. Right. 25% of kids are food insecure in Newfoundland and Labrador. And so what does that mean? You know, it's not a cost that goes unpaid, right? It just gets paid in different ways by other systems, by people's personal lives, by the health care system. And it doesn't have to be that way.

MG: How wide can this go, do you think? In the best case scenario, beyond the pilot, where do you want to see an idea like this go?

JOSHUA SMEE: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think St John's like lots of Canadian cities is a city that goes beyond its own boundaries. Food access challenges are not just in kind of the inner city parts of Saint John's. So what does this look like at at a regional level in a in a in a city like that? And also, what does this look like in rural communities? So we have another project working on on that. And I think there are some models to think about. How do we how do we bring models like this out to communities that are small and far flung? And how do we partner with the local stores that are there? Right. How do we strengthen? If you do, you live in a community where you have a small convenience store that really sits at the heart of your community. What can we do to make that a better place to access food? So you're not having to make those round trips.

MG: Sandra, I'm going to give the last word to you. Why does something like this matter to seniors like yourself?

SANDRA ANTLE: Because it's affordable. I can go off and buy three items for $5. I can get my the quantity I need. And actually, I'm waiting for 30 for the next pop up market in our community.

MG: What's for supper tonight?

SANDRA ANTLE: Good question.

MG: You'll figure it out when it's time. I'm sure.

SANDRA ANTLE: I will. But something with fresh vegetables for sure.

MG: Excellent. Sandra, I'm glad to talk to you. Thank you very much. And take care of yourself.

SANDRA ANTLE: Thank you.

MG: And Josh, thanks so much.

JOSHUA SMEE: Thank you.

MG: Josh Smee is the CEO of Ferd Food First NL and Sandra Antal was in Saint John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Again, we'd love to hear from you. This is an issue that affects everyone right across the country, the high cost of food. How is it impacting you and what are you doing in the face of that high cost? You can email us thecurrent@cbc.ca. This is the current. My name is Matt Galloway. Months worth of erosion in a matter of hours. That is what happened in some parts of Atlantic Canada when Post-tropical Storm Fiona hit last month. Damage on this scale is only expected to become more frequent as we've been discussing, as climate change leads to more intense and more frequent storms. But the kind of physical damage caused by climate change isn't just a problem for the future. It also impacts the past. Archaeologists across this country say they are in a race against time to preserve archaeological sites. Artefacts are being washed away, unearthed or otherwise disturbed by climate change. And the pace of destruction, as you can imagine, is getting faster. Matthew Betts is an archaeologist with the Canadian Museum of History, chair of the Climate Change Committee of the Canadian Archaeological Association. He does most of his work on the East Coast in Nova Scotia. Matthew, good morning.

MATTHEW BETTS: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for being here. How much of a threat does climate change pose to archaeological sites in this country?

MATTHEW BETTS: Well, it's been described as a global heritage crisis. But with the longest coastline in the world and the largest freshwater ecosystem in the world, Canada sits at the apex of this crisis. So we have more archaeological sites that are at risk, more unserved portions of the coast that we don't know where archaeological sites are. And it poses an extreme risk for the history of the past in this country.

MG: So we were talking, obviously, in the wake of Fiona about what happened in Cape Breton and other areas in Atlantic Canada. But even before that storm in Nova Scotia, what were you seeing?

MATTHEW BETTS: Well, we have a collaborative project with Acadia First Nation and other Mi'kmaq groups in Nova Scotia. And when we surveyed the coastline, we found that 65% of the of the known sites in the states that we discovered were found have no intact archaeological context. That means they're effectively destroyed, their histories lost forever.

MG: And just essentially washed away.

JOSHUA SMEE: Exactly.

MATTHEW BETTS: With every wave, with every rising tide, all the artefacts and stratigraphy are gone with very limited information for us to assemble what these mean for the past.

MG: Paint a picture of what that looks like. Take us to one of those sites. What would it what would be happening there?

MATTHEW BETTS: So we go to find one of these sites. And what we're largely looking for are the remains of shells and animal bones and artefacts. When we arrive, what we might find is a few shells, a few scattered pieces of stone tools, but nothing else. The entire stratigraphy, the entire site washed out to sea with the largest portion of the artefacts completely missing, and only the barest hint that there was ever a site even there.

MG: You mentioned the Acadia First Nation. Jeff Purdy is a counsellor with that First Nation in Nova Scotia. Take a listen to why he says from his community's perspective, preserving the archaeological records has an impact on the present day fight for rights.

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MATTHEW BETTS: Any archaeology sites proves pre contact lands entitled Moving Forward Our Rights of magma what we've harvested. So having access and being able to see this not only helps for mental health and reconnecting spiritually who you are, it helps connect us as a nation. Unfortunately, with the government, it's very colonial that we have to prove that we were here since time immemorial. It's a constant battle of we were here first.

MG: So what sort of evidence is at risk here, to Jeff's point, that might impact his nation's fight for indigenous rights?

MATTHEW BETTS: Well, he raises a very good point. In Canada, Supreme Court superior court decisions in obligate indigenous groups to show long term and recurrent use of land and resources to establish rights. But with every wave, with every large storm, those those that very evidence, the archaeological evidence is being washed out to sea. And so really the impact on these sites is in a very real sense, impacting indigenous rights and the ability to deploy their history and their past to affect their economic future.

MG: I mean, again, it sounds like history is being erased in some ways. Is that fair, a fair characterisation?

MATTHEW BETTS: Absolutely. It has been called in some respects, the the burning library syndrome. And so an analogy to the great library of Alexandria that has burned, except here we have thousands of these libraries that are burning and the unknown histories are just being lost, lost to time and again.

MG: Given a changing climate, you're seeing the pace of that erasure increasing.

MATTHEW BETTS: Absolutely. And to give you an example. Erosion has been ongoing for thousands of years. In the 1940s, fifties, sixties and seventies, people were finding sites 4000 years old in Nova Scotia. Now we can only find sites that are only 1500 years old on the coastlines of Nova Scotia. That's a loss of 2500 years of history in my lifetime, and.

MG: There's no way to get that back when it's gone. It's gone.

MATTHEW BETTS: When it's gone, it's gone. And we're fighting against time to salvage what's left.

MG: All right. Stay on the line, Matthew, because we want to whip across the country and talk about where this is happening elsewhere. Last year, Mike O'Rourke became the first person to hold the title of climate change archaeologist for the government of the Northwest Territories. He's in Inuvik. Mike, good morning to you.

MIKE O'ROURKE: Good morning, Matt. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for being here. What is what what does your job the climate change archaeologist. We just define what it is that you're doing.

MIKE O'ROURKE: Right. So I think in the grand scheme of things, I'm part of a coordinated team at the G NWT, the government of the Northwest Territories that's really looking at understanding and adapting to climate change. So in that kind of big picture, I've got access to this range of experts in fields like permafrost science and remote sensing and other divisions that allows me to get access to that kind of information. But in terms of what my job specifically entails, I've spent the better part of the last year documenting site conditions throughout the Beaufort Delta region. So we're looking at the northern extent of the Northwest Territories, and that includes visits to a number of different sites at risk on the Beaufort Sea Coast. But we've also been developing a set of site vulnerability maps that I'm going to be using to discuss site impacts with Inuvialuit community members on a visit later this winter.

MG: And this job was created. Why I mean, why was it necessary for for someone? It turns out it's you to hold this title.

MIKE O'ROURKE: Right. So the N.W.T. has been working on climate change impacts for quite a while and I think they've recognised through no short amount of petitioning on behalf of the environment to provide me the education, culture and employment division to get this position in place. So there's a recognition that heritage is important and heritage within the end of it is quite important. You know, the vast majority of what we would term archaeological remains are in fact the cultural patrimony of indigenous communities. So it's it's critical that we get this work happening and happening fast, as Matt said, you know, this is this is a time sensitive situation.

MG: I'll ask the same question that I asked Matthew, which is take us to one of those places. What does it look like and what are you seeing?

MIKE O'ROURKE: Right. So there's a site kind of out on the Beaufort Sea Coast called McKinley Bay, and it's a site that's been visited by a number of archaeologists over the years. And we've been documenting the impacts to that site over that time. And we're seeing, you know, between an average of 1 to 5 metres of erosion every year. So you can imagine if one of these are clear you eat, which are the traditional inuvialuit ancestral sword houses. If one of these is four metres across, let's say 4 to 5 metres, that's an entire Iqaluit feature lost in a single season. So that site is really being eroded very quickly and it's these really fine sands that are being pulled up by wave action. So as we see more climate change, we see, you know, stronger storms, longer storm seasons, we're going to see more of these impacts happening. So we're seeing entire houses washing out onto the beach. You know, bones, animal bones and artefacts washed away.

MG: Animal bones. What do you mean?

MIKE O'ROURKE: So within the region, there's a pretty strong tradition of, say, hunting beluga, and particularly in the Cook Mullet Bay area. And these sites there's a cook back to really old village site out on the coast. The beach is literally littered with beluga bones. So just washed out from these what we call middens, as Matt was saying. And we really look for shell and bone in these remains of the past and they're literally strewn across the beach. You can walk. And it's difficult not to step on beluga bones. So really major impacts from coastal erosion.

MG: And when they are moved, what is the impact of that?

MIKE O'ROURKE: So there's a couple impacts, I think that is. I mean, one, there's the impact on the past. As Matthew was saying, you know, we lose the information about those past life waves. But I think the impact on indigenous communities is quite large. I mean, this these objects of the past, these material remains really contribute to a sense of identity, you know, cultural continuity and a sense of place. You know, it's knowing that these sites are out there on the land contributes to a really positive experience with those landscapes. And when they're gone, they're gone.

MG: Matthew, what is it like when you go to a site like the one that you described and you see that there has been huge change, that it looks completely different than than it did when when you were there before.

MATTHEW BETTS: It can be devastating both for the communities we were working for and for ourselves. We're looking to assemble a culture of history in southwestern Nova Scotia who, what, when, where and how of history. And now we're only finding the locations. So it's sort of like a a book with all the pages ripped out and all the words scattered all over the beach. It's very difficult to assemble the sentence. As is in the paragraphs in the actual which form the history of those sites. And essentially, we're finding locations that are not particularly valuable for for reconstructing the histories or really for reconstructing rights based evidence for indigenous groups.

MG: We heard when it comes to the race based evidence from Jeff Purdy, from the Acadia First Nation. Let's listen to him again talking about the value to his community of the sites and the artefacts in those sites.

SOUNDCLIP

Being able to reconnect spiritually, mentally with your heritage, reconnecting of who you are and where you come from is part of a healing process that hopefully some of her own Mi'kmaq become archaeologists and they will pick up the artefact and hold the artefacts that they actually feel a strong spiritual connexion to the artefacts that they think my ancestors made this night. First time that's been held for thousands of years.

MG: Mike, what needs to be done? I mean, we know that this is happening now. So what needs to be done to try to preserve these these sites?

MIKE O'ROURKE: Right. So in terms of my own work, I'm working closely with Inuvialuit to make that happen. So I think the first thing that needs to be done is these community relationships need to be developed. So really working closely to get an idea of not only how inuvialuit communities in particular where I'm working, value those sites and see those sites as important, but also looking to receive guidance from those communities around how to culturally do the work in a culturally appropriate manner.

MG: And that would be preserving the sites, ensuring that those artefacts aren't lost forever, even if they're being moved around.

MIKE O'ROURKE: It's really going to depend on the perspectives of the community. So, I mean, the range of mitigation or interventions we can have go from doing nothing at all, acknowledging that some of these sites are just going to be lost. There are almost 7000 archaeological sites or what we term as archaeological sites in the Northwest Territories. It's going to be difficult to address all of those sites, but we can go all the way through the gamut from, you know, doing nothing to doing these excavations, which can be quite expensive.

MG: Just to say, Matthew, from your perspective, we're almost out of time, but what do you want to see done based on what you've seen on the eastern coast of Canada?

MATTHEW BETTS: Well, archaeologists have to change the way they do archaeology in the first instance. Instead of using research based approaches to archaeology, we have to use community based approaches because it's the communities histories who are being washed in the sea. So they have to make decisions about what what sort of histories they want salvaged. We also have to change our methods to move more quickly to mitigate sites in a manner that can increase the amount of information we get from them in the shortest amount of time.

MG: This is alarming stuff. It's really important to talk about what's happening again. A facet of climate change that perhaps people remove from those sites may not be immediately aware of. Thank you both for the work that you're doing.

MATTHEW BETTS: Thank you for having me.

MIKE O'ROURKE: Thank you.

MG: Mike O'Rourke, climate change archaeologist for the Northwest Territories. Matthew Betts, curator of Eastern Archaeology with the Canadian Museum of History and chair of the Climate Change Committee of the Canadian Archaeological Association. That'll do it for The Current for this Wednesday. q's up next on CBC Radio One. My name's Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again tomorrow.

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Wednesday October 26, 2022 Full Transcript

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