Food Prices in Remote First Nations

Curriculum Goal

Estimate and calculate the cost of transactions involving multiple items priced in dollars and cents, including sales tax, using various strategies.
Identify and describe various factors that may help or interfere with reaching financial goals.

Use the properties of operations, and the relationships between operations, to solve problems involving whole numbers and decimal numbers, including those requiring more than one operation, and check calculations.
Describe relationships and show equivalences among fractions, decimal numbers up to hundredths, and whole number per cents, using appropriate tools and drawings, in various contexts.

Students should have knowledge of remote Indigenous communities and the strengths and challenges of living on remote reserves. This should be done over several classes so that students gain a thorough introduction to First Nations. See Appendix A for ideas.
Students should have completed the “Lesson 1: Comparing Food Prices”. Information and data gathered from that lesson will be used in this lesson.

Introduction

Reflecting on the data gathered about differing food prices from cities in Southern Ontario, ask students about the factors that may influence different food prices. For example, the cost of transportation, difference in growing conditions, the absence of competition from multiple grocery stores.

Lesson

Students compare the food prices from grocery stores in the Greater Toronto Area with the remote Indigenous community of Attawapiskat.
- Provide the costs of the same grocery items as in Lesson One but with the prices from a grocery store in Attawapiskat (Appendix B). Students will immediately see there is a disparity between food prices from the two regions.
- While the comparison of food prices is not perfect (not all food prices are from the same grocery store provider), it is enough to provide students with an idea of the varying food prices.
Ask students to look at the cost of food items and calculate the tax. Using Appendix C, they will see that items are taxed differently and that Indigenous peoples do not always pay the same amount of tax on all goods.

Discuss why Indigenous peoples pay different rates of taxes on certain goods. See Appendix D for an overview of the tax exemptions for Indigenous peoples.
- Watch a video of Wab Kinew explain the different types of taxes Indigenous peoples are required to pay: STROMBO: SOAP BOX: Wab Kinew
Graph Attawapiskat food price data and compare it to the food prices gathered in lesson one.

Conclusion

Discuss the differences between Southern and remote community food prices. Ask whether the lower tax rate sufficiently compensates for the increased prices. Ask your students to calculate what kinds of tax reductions would be required to equalize costs? What would happen if there was no tax?

Can students calculate the tax on different food items using different tax rates?
Do students integrate their knowledge of what influences food prices to determine if tax reductions help make food accessible?