The $18 gallon of milk and the $5 can of Pepsi

Nunavut, the relatively new province in Canada carved out of the Northwest Territories, is enduring high food prices.

Not just ordinary high food prices.  Food prices bordering on outright gouging.

Would you pay $104 (Canadian) for a case of bottled water?  Here, it's about $9-10, and the store-brand is about $6.

How about $10 for a bell pepper, where it's about $2 here?  A two-liter bottle of Pepsi for $19.  Store-brand chicken - here, you could get it for about $6 a pound.  In Nunavut, it's $65 for a 2kg package, or roughly $14.75 a pound.

Part of the reason why prices are so high is understandable - Nunavut has no roads, it is remote place, and fuel and shipping factor into the price.  But with Nunavut's minimum wage at $11 an hour, you can bet stores are exploiting the disadvantages of not having access to more stores.  If they are the only game in town, you can bet they're going to charge whatever they like and make a profit off of it.

Furthermore, Nunavutians could go to a major city, purchase what they need at a fraction of the price, and then ship it home.  However, shipping costs would easily negate this convenience - if shipping to Nunavut is $10 per kilogram and you're shipping 100 kilograms of food that cost you $500, that's $1,000 added to the price, easily double the cost you've purchased and increasing the per-kilogram cost to $15.

However, if you're a person with a narcissistic political bent, the cogs are turning in your head - just like cigarettes, you'd demand for a tax so high that few people buy the product you don't like.  Instead of an outright ban on bottled water, a town with a snobbish environmental bent (and a few bitter cranks) could charge $100 for a case.  In New York, where Mike Bloomberg is trying to limit soda sizes to sixteen ounces, he could instead charge $0.125 per ounce in taxes, tacking on $1 for every 8 ounces of soda consumed (64 ounces would command $8)  Or how about a two cent per calorie tax on fattening foods?  No one would want to buy a 2850 calorie milkshake if they're paying $57 in pure tax on it - or that 6,000 calorie Vermonster sporting a $120 tax!