Thank you very much, Ms. Zarrillo.
The national school food policy is something that is a shared mandate item between Minister Bibeau and me. We launched consultations in November 2022. They concluded publicly in December 2022, although we're still receiving input from a number of community organizations as well as first nations, Inuit and Métis communities.
We're engaging directly with indigenous partners on this. In fact, ITK has an Inuit-specific proposal when it comes to school food, so we're also collaborating and engaging with Indigenous Services Canada.
Right now there's a patchwork across the country. Every province and territory and many indigenous communities have some kind of school food program, but it's not even, so we're trying to collect this information to find a way to level the playing field and raise all boats—we don't want to go to the lowest common denominator—to make sure that kids across this country have access to healthy and nutritious food.
I think at this point the latest statistics say that one in five kids in Canada go to school hungry.