I will start.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
It's a pleasure to testify before the committee today. I speak on behalf of Food Secure Canada, a national network of organizations and individuals aiming to achieve three interrelated goals: zero hunger, healthy and safe food, and sustainable food systems.
I'm accompanied today by Leticia Deawuo from Black Creek Community Farm, one of the member organizations we have.
The main point I want to make today is that public trust is not a public relations exercise. Very often these conversations revolve around how industry can better educate consumers who don't understand farming, science, markets or genetically modified organisms. In this view, consumers are naive, and particularly naive are the millennials, the foodies and the moms.
Today, I want to encourage you to take a broader view of public trust.
I don't believe we have a breakdown in public trust because Canadians don't trust farmers. We have a breakdown in public trust because there are four million Canadians who cannot afford to eat a healthy diet. We have a breakdown in public trust because we throw away $49 billion of food every year, an economic and environmental travesty that has not been adequately dealt with by public policy.
We are raising a generation of children with an epidemic of diet-related diseases. That is going to sink our public health care system if we don't soon get a handle on it.
Finally, there is not enough accessible, reliable, independent information on the environmental impacts of our food system and whether or not that food is good.
People want to eat healthy and sustainable food—food that is good for their bodies and the planet. While I know it may not be universally applauded in this committee, Food Secure Canada is very supportive of the government's new food guide. What happened in that food guide, among other things, which could present an enormous economic opportunity for farmers in this country—something that's not been talked a lot about—is that it turned our attention from what we eat to how we eat. I think this is what needs to happen in public trust. We need to talk not only about what we're producing, but how we are producing it.
We need to begin to envisage a food system where the economic health, equity and environmental objectives are joined up rather than being seen as trade-offs. We have been waiting for the announcement of Canada's new food policy for over a year, a topic that this committee has studied, that you've written a strong report on and that I and many colleagues have had an opportunity to testify about.
One of the recommendations that you endorsed in your committee's report was the creation of a national food policy council or an advisory board body, an arm's-length institution, where civil society organizations, industry, independent experts and different government departments would get together around the same table and have some of the conversations that are right now very siloed and apart from each other.
After this meeting, I shall walk over to the budget lockup to listen to the federal budget being delivered. I hope that today's announcements will include the creation of a national policy council. It would be a great victory for public trust in our food system.
I have four quick recommendations: Don't treat this as a communications exercise, as there are substantive issues that need to be addressed. Don't support industry-only round tables to address the issue of public trust; bring in supported civil society in. Create a national food policy council. Let's announce this food policy.