If I can, Mr. Chairman, that's a good question.
I'll say three things. I would like to know at what time any government, any minister of agriculture, ever said local food was not important, because it always has been. What has always been the challenge for many institutions as they looked at the food side is the cost factor. To the point raised by the question, a lot of the product ended up being thrown out, wasted.
It took a change in attitude. What do we really want when we feed institutions, whether schools, hospitals, or long-term care facilities? How do we want to use it, and are we getting the best value? That then turns around and changes what we are trying to feed consumers in these places.
I'll note that the College of Management and Economics here at the University of Guelph has completed, or is just completing, a study on local hospitals and what's driving their institutional behaviour with food. It isn't the lack of a government mandate or even a lack of innovation at the producer/processor level; it's how the institutions historically looked at how they handled food and how to minimize the cost burden. That's how they thought of it. Now they have a change of attitude, which should start changing things.
Finally, I think it's a case of how we help people think differently about where the real value is in the marketplace, versus trying to say that we definitely know where it is. There's far too much complexity in the food system to think that a mandate or a regulatory rule will satisfy both the people consuming the food and the people producing and processing the food. We have to have much more flexibility.
On the sustainable farm plan, our biggest challenge from the centre is that it's a great concept, but both governments and industry have stopped that, so how does this really affect the environment? Can we really measure these impacts to see what really works and what doesn't work? That's a real challenge, in our view, to take this one step further.