That's nice of you. Thank you.
I did just want to elaborate a bit on the concept of community wealth building as a framework that I think could be very helpful for this idea of addressing food insecurity in the wake of global instability and all these increasing pressures.
Scotland as a sovereign nation just adopted community wealth building as a framework at the federal level a number of weeks ago. They're using it to ensure something that Joseph Howe, a person from my neck of the woods, talked about: “What is for the public good?” Every time we stimulate the local economy, is it for the public good? We should double-check.
Community wealth building has five pillars. I won't name them all, but one of the pillars is progressive procurement. It's making sure you use your public tax dollars to do the public good. To Mr. Lemire's question, we have these very isolated communities, many of which have provincially and/or federally funded institutions with significant food purchasing budgets. If you relocalize even 30%, which I think needs to be the bare minimum, you subtly create the type of economic demand and churn necessary to incentivize the additional food infrastructure you might need.
If I'm a rural abattoir, I might not exist anymore and you might need somebody to drive over with a truck. I've seen that in Quebec. Maybe, though, if you have an army base or a school or a jail preferentially sourcing all their beef locally, for example, suddenly you may be incentivized to make the economic case to mobilize that institution as an anchor institution to create the local food ecosystem that you need.