Subsidies: Do they offset the high cost of food?

Curriculum Goal

Estimate and calculate the cost of transactions involving multiple items priced in dollars and cents, including sales tax, using various strategies.

Read, represent, compose, and decompose whole numbers up to and including 100 000, using appropriate tools and strategies, and describe various ways they are used in everyday life.

Students explore subsidies and other solutions to high food prices in remote Indigenous communities.
Students should have completed “Lesson 1: Comparing food prices” and “Lesson 2: Food prices in remote First Nations” to better understand the reasons behind the high costs of food in remote regions of Northern Ontario.

Background: Subsidies in Ontario (Appendix A)
Handout: Determining item cost before subsidy (Appendix B)
Chart: Subsidy levels for Attawapiskat First Nation (Appendix C)
Chart: High, Medium and Low Subsidy Grocery Items (Appendix D)
Example: Using Appendices B, C and D to determine the cost before subsidy (Appendix E)

Introduction

After investigating the factors that influence food prices in Lesson 2: Food Prices in Remote First Nations, introduce students to subsidies as a possible solution to offset high food prices.

Lesson

Introduce the concept of a subsidy and show examples of services that receive subsides (Appendix A).
Explain that governments have attempted to offset the high cost of food in Northern Ontario with a subsidy program called Nutrition North. The food prices seen in Attawapiskat (Lesson 2) is the cost of the item minus the subsidy.
Provide your students with Appendix B and ask that they use this handout to aid in their calculations of food costs before the subsidy was applied. To do this, students will reference two charts:
- Appendix C shows the varied subsidy applied to items categorized as high, medium, and low;
- Appendix D shows a chart of which grocery items are considered high, medium, and low subsidies.
See Appendix E for an example of the calculations on the chart.

Conclusion

Ask students:
- What do you notice about food prices in Southern Ontario and Attawapiskat?
- Does the subsidy help to equalize the cost of food between Southern Ontario and Attawapiskat? What else could the government do to help with this?
- What other sources of food (i.e., traditional foods) are not being addressed through subsidies?