Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. And I guess just to carry on where my colleague from Great Slave left off there, I am happy that Nutrition North is part of our priorities and made it into a mandate commitment because it is such a key pillar program of food security in the Northwest Territories because food security really, at the end of the day, is about affordability of food. It's a question of income, and it's a question of ensuring that there is affordability in every household for healthy nutritious foods to make it on to the table. And so this conversation about Nutrition North is really a key part of this mandate item of increasing food security.
And while I appreciate, you know, that the whole first page is about developing food industry in the Northwest Territories, and that is certainly very important long-term and about creating, you know, some self-resiliency there, but right now it's about affording food and the way that lot of our communities are trying to do that is relying on that Nutrition North Program through the federal government.
And I have a lot of concerns in regards to how the program was working before a lot of our cost of living increases, and my concern has only heightened with the increase to the cost of fuel, the cost of supply chains, and then also the impacts of climate change on food supplies from the south.
For example, the flooding that happened in BC had a huge impact on where fresh fruits and vegetables, especially vegetables, came from. And then now with the war in the Ukraine, a substantial amount of the global supply of wheat comes from the Ukraine and Russia. And so all of these, even those these are events that are happening outside of our borders, have an impact on not only of the availability but also the cost of these items to northern communities. And so I think even banding together with Indigenous governments to be able to have these conversations at federal tables is so important right now and probably now more than ever. And so I guess I just want a commitment from Cabinet that these conversations are going to happen because the affordability of food is, even here in Yellowknife, is definitely increasing, not decreasing. Thank you, Mr. Chair.