It was very impactful to hear from many of the stakeholders from across the country who supported your legislation.
I know we have other pieces of legislation that have come through here as well—private members' bills that have been really well thought out.
I know our colleague, Ms. Vien, from Quebec, has a great piece of legislation that will be coming to this committee. I know that it was supported. I believe it was supported unanimously in the House—I'd have to look back. That was another really great Conservative piece of legislation that will be coming to this committee soon. It will take priority over other things, because it is a private member's bill. We also know, for private members' bills, that there are timelines that have to be met or else you have to ask for extensions. That's really important.
Some of these pieces of legislation or some of these recommendations really do come from wanting to support families. However, also we know that families are having an incredibly difficult time. We know that food bank usage is higher than it has ever been before. We heard incredible amounts of testimony at this committee on that particular topic.
In particular, when we were doing a study on intergenerational volunteerism, we heard from a number of not-for-profit organizations that gave very impactful testimony on how their not-for-profits were really suffering, because their donations were down. They were losing volunteers. They were saying that there were a number of volunteers of theirs who then had to become clients, unfortunately. We heard from some not-for-profits that had lost volunteers who were seniors, because they had to go back to work in order to pay for their basic necessities. We heard the record numbers of food bank usage. I know we had one witness, actually, from my community, from the Central Okanagan Food Bank, who talked about the increases in numbers.
I've talked about this quite a bit, and I've seen this, too, with other members of this committee, where we want to represent our residents. I always made it a goal coming here that I wanted to bring the voice of my community to Ottawa, and really made it a point to bring forth witnesses who could testify on a whole number of different topics. There are lots of witnesses who have testified here who might have worked in an industry for 30 years and never testified at a parliamentary committee before. It was really impactful for them to bring forth their voices here. I'm always thinking about who might fit with this study, who might be an expert in their own way, and bring their voice here—if not within my community, then from British Columbia. I think sometimes here you have the Ottawa bubble, as they call it, where you're hearing from lots of the same witnesses. I think it's important to hear from witnesses from all across the country.