Thank you again, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that.
They don't like it when we talk about food inflation, and they don't like it because they don't want to admit that that's why they have come up with this plan.
Conservatives fundamentally believe that we should be confronting the food affordability conversation. The fact that we would moving this down to four meetings.... Part of the amendment, I believe, is about the fact that this is within provincial scope and jurisdiction. It's very frustrating that the members opposite do not want to acknowledge that this is done by provinces and should be done by provinces, because the provinces run schools.
I come back to this fundamental piece: If we are not actually looking at the concept of the inflation of food, we are missing the root cause of the problem. The root cause of the problem isn't that schools need food; it's that kids are hungry. Kids could be less hungry if food were easier to get. It is so ridiculously frustrating that the members opposite refuse to consider that this might be part of the conversation.
I would recommend that members around the room vote for the amendment by my colleague Madame Larouche, because this is a space where Liberal members want to do something so they can talk about how proud they are of all the money they've committed to spending.
The reality, however, is that we have so many kids lined up at food banks. One in three kids is using a food bank in Canada right now. There are 2.2 million food bank uses in a month, and 33% of those uses are by children. This is very concerning. This is not just a statistic. These are kids who are going to school hungry. These are kids who don't have food to eat in general. These are parents who are skipping meals so their kids get food.
This is so much more complex than just creating a temporary solution and looking at the national school food program. My biggest argument is that we need to truly break this into a piece.
I come from a background of health and safety. In health and safety, you can fix a problem at its end, or you can fix the root cause of the problem. If you fix the root cause of the problem, the problem doesn't regenerate.
What the Liberals have proposed so far—and what they want to study—is to look at something down the line. It is potentially a solution, but it does not actually address the root cause of the problem. They're not aiming to. That is terrifying to me, and I think all Canadians should be terrified.
We're in this unique space of having out-of-control food inflation that is twice as high as what we see in peer jurisdictions, like the United States and Europe, in part because our government keeps spending taxpayer money. The more money it spends, the more that inflation goes up. The more that inflation goes up, the harder it is to buy food. The harder it is to buy food, the more the government has to spend to provide programs like this. Then it becomes a cycle.