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When more people know, more help can happen. Today, we received a boost to public awareness via an article written by columnist Jack Knox that was published in the Victoria Times Colonist newspaper. Following is Jack's article...


"Polar bears are not the only northerners to keep in mind


BY: Jack Knox, Victoria Times Colonist newspaper, 03 November 2011

Perhaps Sen. Nicole Eaton is right, and the polar bear should replace the beaver as Canada's national emblem.

At least that might encourage Canadians to look north.

Or maybe the polar bear idea just shows how out of touch we are, how much of a gap exists between the Canadian north of mythology - the Arctic as we would like it to be - and how it really is.

The reality, Eric Manchester says, is a Third World disaster, unseen and ignored, in our own backyard. That's why the Victoria man is in the process of gaining charity status for the Canadian Arctic Service Corps, a non-profit organization he hopes will bring relief to the remote, farflung Inuit hamlets plagued by extreme poverty, deplorable housing and impossibly high living costs.

Manchester first visited the High North as a Canadian Forces paratrooper in the late 1960s, parachuting into the midwinter bleakness of places like Resolute Bay, where the soldiers lived in tents at minus 50. In 2007, by then a freelance writer, Manchester spent three months aboard the Victoria-based coast guard ship Sir Wilfrid Laurier, had a chance to explore seven isolated communities in the western Arctic.

"I got to see how things really were. It was extremely disturbing."

Every aspect of life in the Inuit settlements was desperate, he says. One observer called living conditions the worst she had seen in the developed world. He found people living 15 to a house in shacks that would be condemned in the south, so crowded that occupants sleep in shifts.

The tuberculosis rate was 14 times the national average, and life expectancy 13 years lower. The few kids who graduated from school couldn't find jobs where they lived, but had been raised in an environment so alien that it was hard for them to function in the outside world. Suicide rates were alarmingly high. "It seemed like it was the personification of the adage 'out of sight, out of mind.' "

Access to nutritious, affordable food is a huge problem in the remote communities. The traditional Inuit diet disappeared with their nomadic life after a succession of governments coralled them into permanent settlements. The old ways are gone for good, replaced by diabetes, heart disease and other ailments associated with the worst of southern eating habits. With no roads, residents rely on food shipped by the annual sea lift, a barge that comes in with a year's supply of goods. It's either that or the stunningly expensive cost of goods shipped by air; Manchester talks of stores selling $30 watermelons, $38 cranberry cocktail and $17.89 frozen pizza. A teacher told him of kids who drink three or four cans of Coke before school (cheaper than milk, which can cost $15 for a four-litre jug).

Yet down here in the south, marketing gurus leave us thinking of a pristine wonderland where it's the polar bears who drink the Coke. "There is a huge disconnect in reality between north and south," Manchester said.

Show Canadians a foreign disaster zone and they'll reach for their wallets. Manchester hopes they'll feel the same way about his organization's cause. He speaks of a program that sounds like Doctors Without Borders, and spending money on technology that would allow people in the hamlets to grow their own food.

It's tricky territory, though. For many Inuit, long-gone traditional means of survival have been replaced by dependence on southerners. (Manchester shakes his head at the problems that ensued when a federal program that subsidized shippers, who would then deal directly with consumers, was replaced by one that subsidizes retailers instead.) "We don't want to make the situation worse by making them dependent on us," Manchester says.
At the same time, he says, our fellow Canadians need help, now."

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