Madam Speaker, it is nice to be able to resume where I left off back in December.
Just to refresh the memory of everyone in this place, we were discussing the 10th report of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food.
I have been a proud member of that committee for six years now and I would say that it is the best standing committee out of any committee of the House, because we often arrive at our decisions on a consensus model. We certainly have our differences, but the collegiality stems from the fact that, no matter what political party we represent, we all represent farmers in our respective ridings and have a great deal of respect for the work they do.
This particular study is unusual, if we look at the long list of studies the agriculture committee usually embarks on, in that we are dealing more with a retail issue, which of course is the subject of food price inflation. I am happy to say that this 10th report was the result of a unanimous vote on my motion for a study. The study was also backed up by a unanimous vote in the House of Commons when the NDP used our opposition day to move a motion backing up the committee's work.
Given the brutal food price inflation rates that many Canadians have been experiencing over the last couple of years, the political and public pressure of the moment, I think, really helped focus parliamentarians' efforts on this important issue in making sure we were paying it the attention it deserved, given what many of our constituents were telling us they were suffering through. Therefore, it was nice to see that unanimous vote and the fact that we were able to get into this study.
If we look at the news these days and the experts who research this particularly brutal problem, we already know that a record number of Canadians are having to access food banks. I certainly hear from my constituents in Cowichan—Malahat—Langford that they are having to make those difficult decisions every single week. It has affected not only the quality of food they have been able to buy, but also the quantity of food.
I think that is an enduring shame on our country, given that we pride ourselves on being an agricultural powerhouse. If we look at our standing vis-à-vis other nations around the world, we are a very wealthy country, but what we have seen over the last number of decades is that wealth is increasingly being concentrated in fewer hands, and too many of our fellow citizens are struggling to get by on the basic necessities of life.
I think this is a call to action for all parliamentarians. It is obvious that the policies we have put in place over the last 40 or 50 years and this sort of obscene corporate deference we have seen from successive Liberal and Conservative governments and the neo-Liberal orthodoxy that exists are not serving our fellow citizens right. We need to take a critical look at why that is.
This report contains a number of recommendations. I want to focus on a few of them, particularly on recommendations 11 and 13. Recommendation 11 is something that we heard not only in the course of this study, but also in other studies. It deals with the fact that many people who work in the food value chain, particularly the ones on the other side of the ledger from where the retail grocers come into play, have long been calling for a grocery code of conduct.
Initially, the calls were for a voluntary code. I think there was a tremendous amount of goodwill and a bit of leeway given to the industry to figure this out on its own and to come up with something whereby all players could develop the issue and have faith in it. However, what we have seen recently is that some of the big grocery retailers, namely Loblaws and Walmart, are now indicating they are uncomfortable with the direction the code is taking. In my humble opinion, this code simply cannot work if it is going to exclude major players like Loblaws and Walmart, so we may be arriving at a point at which the government needs to step in and enforce a mandatory code. That way, the rules are clear, concise and transparent, and all players in the food supply value chain can understand what they are and abide by them.
What we are seeing is that there is a complete lack of trust in the grocery retail sector, and for good reason. Grocery retailers have been accused and found guilty of fixing the price of bread. They have engaged in practices that, on the surface, look a lot like collusion. They have often followed each other's leads in setting prices and so on. Recently Loblaws was forced to climb down from its decision to reduce the discounts. There used to be a 50% discount on items that had to be sold that day. Often people are looking for those kinds of bargains. Loblaws was going to reduce that to 30%. That company consistently shows that it is unable to read the room and that it is completely tone deaf to the public environment in which it is operating.
Not only have consumers lost trust in grocery retailers, but on the other side, the suppliers, the food manufacturers and the hard-working men and women who work in primary production and farming have also lost trust, because when they are trying to get their goods put into a grocery market, and let us understand that 80% of Canada's grocery retail market is controlled by just five companies, which is a brutal situation and a totally unfair stranglehold on the market by those five companies, they were often subjected to hidden fees and fines for which they had no explanation.
As such, I am glad to see that recommendation 11 calls for a mandatory and enforceable grocery code of conduct.
I am also happy to see in this report recommendation 13, which asks the Government of Canada to strengthen the Competition Bureau's mandate and its ability to ensure competition in the grocery sector. The first two bullet points were about giving the Competition Bureau more legislative muscle through the Competition Act and making sure the competitive thresholds the Competition Bureau uses to evaluate mergers and acquisitions ensure that competition does not suffer.
I think, based on the hard work of this study and the recommendations of this report, we have actually seen legislative change come to this place, and it was great to see, in particular, Bill C-56 receive a unanimous vote in the House of Commons. It has passed the Senate, and it has now become a statute of Canada by virtue of the Governor General.
There are more measures contained in Bill C-59, and our leader, the member from Burnaby South's private member's bill also includes a number of very important changes. Of course members of Parliament are going to have the opportunity tomorrow, after question period, to vote on that bill, and Canadians will be watching to see which members of Parliament are serious about stepping up to fix that particular problem.
I also want to talk about the supplementary report that I included as the New Democratic member of the committee, because committee reports reflect the majority view of the committee. In the case of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, that is almost always the unanimous view of the committee. I do not think I have ever really seen a dissenting report, but sometimes some recommendations that some members would like to have seen added to the report do not get in there.
I agree absolutely with the main thrust of the report. I think the recommendations were very strong. There were some additional ones, some supplementary ones, that I would have liked to see added. We heard from a number of witnesses who asked our committee to recommend that the government embark on legislative recognition of the right to food, so one of our recommendations would have been:
that the Government of Canada acknowledge its obligation as a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights to respect, protect, and fulfill the human right to food by adopting a framework law that would enshrine this right in Canadian law and require the federal government to legislate binding, specific, and measurable targets toward realizing the policy outcomes it set out in 2019 in “The Food Policy for Canada”.
Again, when so many in our population are going hungry, it is incumbent upon us as legislators and policy makers to really step up to the plate and meet that need in the moment with specific action. I think that, given that this recommendation came from people who are directly involved in the national food bank network and are dealing with this issue every single day, we would do well as policy makers to listen to that on-the-ground expertise and follow through.
I also want to take some time in the final four minutes that I have to really recognize two witnesses who appeared before our committee. They are both economics professors who go against the prevailing orthodoxy of corporate deference that so many economics professors practise. They are, particularly, Professor D.T. Cochrane and Professor Jim Stanford, who I think offer a refreshing and alternative view to the dominant orthodoxy, to look critically at why systems are the way they are.
I just want to quote Dr. Jim Stanford:
Greed is not new. Greed long predates the pandemic, but greed has had a good run in Canada since the pandemic. After-tax profits in Canada during the pandemic or since the pandemic have increased to their highest share of GDP in history. Amidst a social, economic and public health emergency, companies have done better than they ever have.
In response to one of my questions, he went on to say:
At the top of the list, there's no doubt about it, is the oil and gas sector. The excess profits earned there since the pandemic account for about one-quarter of the total mass of profits across the 15 sectors I identified in that work. The increased prices that embody those huge profit margins then trickle through the rest of the supply chain. Food processors have to pay that, so they have higher costs, nominally, but then they add their own higher profit margin on top of that. The same goes for the food retail sector. By the time the consumer gets it, there's been excess profits added at several steps of the whole supply chain. That magnifies the final impact on consumer price inflation.
Two things have been true over the last number of years. Canadians have been suffering through brutal inflation. They have seen the cost of almost everything rise to almost unsustainable levels, in fact, to unsustainable levels for too many of our fellow citizens. That is one truth of which we can see empirical evidence.
The other truth we are dealing with is that since 2019, many corporate sectors have been raking in the cash. Those two facts exist side by side, and we know for a fact that when profits are increasing in many different corporate sectors that Canadians rely on, that money has to come from somewhere, and it has been coming directly from the wallets of the constituents that I represent, the constituents that every MP in this place represents from coast to coast to coast.
I will wrap up my speech there by saying that this was an important report and these are important recommendations. I am glad to have been a member of the committee that produced this report. Of course, I will be voting to concur in it. With that I will conclude my remarks.
