Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to follow up on what we call the “gentle Lobb questions” from Ben Lobb over here, from the Conservatives. I thought he had a good question. I wanted to follow up on one.
We had a specific program in the city of Saskatoon that wasn't only for “lower-income poor people”; it could be for others as well, but there was a real emphasis that way. It was called the good food box program. That is my rough recollection of it. They would provide garden produce and so on from market gardens around the greater Saskatoon area, and they would take them to people. If you were on a regular kind of list wanting this, you'd pay not very much, and there were recipes with it. The sense of this was--and I believe this to be the case--that with our modern supermarket-era society, a lot of people have gotten away from using raw produce out of the garden, and from cooking it and serving up delicious meals and so on. We open cans. We open boxes of macaroni or whatever, which is more expensive in some cases, and it is often not as nutritious, as you well know.
I am not necessarily suggesting that governments are the ones best poised to do this kind of thing, but certainly as any of us go through those times in our lives when we have less money, and probably at any point in time, we can all use some help in terms of budgeting and managing these types of things, and awareness of government programs, etc. Especially when I've had dips in income, then probably more than ever I've been grabbing for that kind of counsel and that help and advice. It's a good reinforcement of something I knew. Maybe it's new stuff altogether.
I was a little surprised at your remarks. Maybe you can help me. Maybe you are aware of community programs. Is that what you were implying? Was it that the government doesn't do it, but community groups should? It seemed to be a good thing. It was going into a home where there was both a mom and a dad, or there were often singles, but there had been no modelling in terms of how to cook from scratch, so to speak. It was all canned and prepared stuff, which too many of our people are used to. This seemed to be a good thing to have healthy, nutritious meals for these children, through this regular program, once or twice a week at fairly modest, nominal cost, with recipes actually included.
I hear some very good reports on that. We have used it occasionally ourselves, because it wasn't exclusive to people at a poverty-level income. Others who from time to time wanted to could be in as well.
I would appreciate your remarks on that. It seems to me that all of us can use some help with budgeting at whatever income level. Maybe as people get more money, they have more to spare and so need that less, but we could all use it, even in terms of being coached, I would hesitate to say, in what is possibly a bit of a lost art because we're so used to cans and cracking open packages of prepared refined processed foods. We've lost the art of our grandmothers or mothers in terms of cooking up the stuff right out of the garden, if we can get hold of it.