Thank you for the question. I'm Hugues Vaillancourt from Employment and Social Development Canada.
You are correct. The budget does talk about the 400,000 additional kids who could benefit from the budget investment. In terms of what you raise around universality, we've certainly heard the same thing from stakeholders around the importance of being “free of access” and being barrier-free and limiting stigma at points of access.
What we know and what we see is there are different ways around how provinces already try to provide access that is stigma-free. Universal access is the gold standard, but there are certainly other approaches that are being used in different school meal programming that provide that stigma-free experience.