Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I've been listening to this discussion with Mr. Cormier, who I have no doubt means very well. I suspect he's quite passionate about his bill and cares a lot about making sure that children in this country are well fed and can learn. To Ms. Chabot's point, I don't think anybody would argue with the goal of making sure that every child in this country doesn't go to school hungry. I think that's just common sense.
However, as I listen to the debate, particularly my good friend and colleague Mr. Long, who rants about how the Conservatives vote against this and vote against that, and to my colleagues here who are talking about the everyday expenses of life and how things are definitely getting more expensive in part because of things like the carbon tax, I keep coming back to this point of all the programs that Mr. Long mentioned. This government announces with great fanfare all these programs.
I'll start with the 2017 national housing strategy as an example. It was going to be life-changing and transformational. Of course, the transformation has been that house prices have doubled, and rent has doubled and you can't find a place to rent. Then they come out with their child care program. It's a really good talking point: It's $10-a-day child care, and if you don't support that, then you hate children, because “we're Liberals and we're great”. We hear about child care centres all over the country that can't afford to deliver the program with this subsidy that the federal government has come up with. “We're going to hire more bureaucrats. We're going to tell provinces how to do things. We're going to help them out by paying half the cost”, but they never really do that. Then there's the dental care program. I've talked to dentists who say they can't afford to deliver the service based on what the federal government's telling them they have to do.
To Ms. Chabot's point, this is another situation, this food program in schools, where you have a federal government, an activist Liberal government, that is really, really good at the naming of programs. They're really good at the photo ops and the talking points, and as they meddle in provincial affairs, they get nothing done. This is a framework to come up with a plan to do something in provincial responsibility that probably will never actually occur.
To me, this is one of those examples of a government that yet again is meddling in provincial affairs and is at the same time ignoring their own responsibilities. The federal government has responsibilities to deal with fiscal issues. The fact that interest rates are as high as they are right now is in part because of the excessive borrowing and spending of a government that says they're fixing things, but are actually just making it worse. While we meddle in provincial affairs here at this level and we spend our time talking about this framework, or the plan to make a framework that will ultimately one day maybe feed a kid, we're ignoring the responsibilities at the federal level and trying to tell the provinces how they should do things.
To me, I fundamentally don't understand how a government that after nine years has promised the moon and back on so many different files and delivered so little can be so proud of their new framework on making sure that kids are fed in schools. I suspect quite strongly that Mr. Cormier didn't really plan to put forward a bill that just came up with a plan to make a plan to talk to provinces about having a plan. I suspect he wanted to do something more meaningful.
If I had one question for you, Mr. Cormier, it would be this: When your time is done here and years later we're still talking about a national food program for schools because we just created a framework that never got anywhere, how are you going to feel about that?