Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise today in the House, as it is always an honour for me to rise here and speak. It is a particularly great honour to speak on a motion such as this one brought forward by my colleague, because I really do feel that as legislators we are called upon to be forward thinking and to look for policies that benefit Canadian citizens not just here but in the long run.
I would like to begin by telling the story of my fledgling career as a chicken farmer. My dear wife was always very strong on the fact that we should eat better foods, more natural foods, and she had the idea that we would raise meat birds and feed our children better quality foods.
It fell to me to be the one to develop a relationship with these creatures and I have to say I never did form any kind of deep affection for chickens. I found them rather loathsome. I had to go out and clean up after them. I honestly tried to develop dialogue with chickens, but I found it quite impossible. In fact, a farmer once told me he deeply objected to even raising chickens because he felt it was an affront to spend energy on an animal that had an IQ lower than a rutabaga.
But one thing I noticed about chickens was that they seem to eat anything. They will eat egg cartons. They will eat the styrofoam off the walls. They will eat the leftover mashed potatoes. The one thing they would not eat was white bread. They would leave it. At first I wondered if maybe there was something wrong with the chickens, if maybe they were not feeling well, but I noticed on a number of occasions that they did not eat white bread. That struck me. What was so terrible in this bread that even chickens would not eat it?
Mr. Speaker, I should have said that I am splitting my time with the hon. member for Ottawa Centre.
Returning to this gripping tale of the chickens and trying to understand what was wrong with white bread, I noticed at my daughter's school that all the children were eating white bread lunches and I thought that if chickens would rather eat styrofoam than white bread, there must be something wrong with it.
Not to belabour the point about white bread, I will tell members a great thing they can use white bread for. I had a job as a plumber for a very short period of time and we carried white bread in our toolboxes, because no matter how long we kept it in a toolbox it would never harden, which is a strange thing for bread. One would think bread would harden and form a crust, but it never crusted over. In fact, we would carry it in our toolboxes because when we had to solder joints and we had a real hard problem, we would stuff the pipe with white bread, it would absorb all the water and we could finish our soldering. I think it has an industrial use; I just think it is very scary to be feeding it to children.
That being said, I would like to keep my comments to four areas today and break this down. As agriculture critic, one of my issues is that when we bring forward legislation that changes how things are done it affects people. We know there are concerns in the canola industry. Back home in my region we have a number of canola farmers. I have been speaking with the canola groups. I have talked to a number of agricultural groups about what these impending changes would bring. One thing that I feel very confident about is the wording of this motion. What we are trying to do is open a dialogue and move forward. I have a great confidence in the producers across Canada and the food industry in Canada that we can move forward on this.
One of the things I have really noticed in the agricultural district I am from is that farmers are very much aware of the changes in a 21st century food economy. Throughout our region we have producers who are now moving into niche markets. They are starting to create what some call organic foods, or specialty foods, and the consumer is looking for that. We can now buy organic peanut butter at the local grocery store. That shocked me when I returned home this past weekend.
What I am seeing across the region among farmers and food producers is the sense of new opportunities, of responding to changing consumer patterns, so when we talk about the fear of losing jobs--and that is a real fear--we need to also be looking at the possibilities that are coming forward.
I share a region with my colleagues from Abitibi--Témiscamingue and Nipissing--Timiskaming. We share a common agricultural region and the producers are coming together. They have a wonderful event in Ville-Marie called la Foire gourmande, where food producers from across northern Quebec and northern Ontario come together. The marketing of these products is a real sign of the sense of where we are going in the 21st century economy.
Now in our region we are seeing the return to small bakeries and small butcher shops. People want products with quality. They want to know what is in their food. I think this motion is really speaking to a yearning that does exist in Canadians, a yearning for better quality foods.
That said, I will go to the second point in my speech tonight, which is that there is a growing disparity in terms of food choices in Canada and across North America. It is a growing chasm, I would say, between people who are perhaps economically and socially able to make these choices and a growing deskilling that we are seeing throughout what used to be perhaps a working class and even in the middle class and throughout the lower class.
I see it in my own community with young mothers who have never learned to cook, with families who have never had meals together. To me it is a shocking thing, because when I look back on growing up I would say that in my town of Timmins perhaps every single family ate dinner together every night. The central theme of our week was Sunday dinner in the Moneta district with my grandparents.
When we see this change into a culture that no longer knows how to feed itself, a culture where people no longer have the skills to eat--