Mr. Speaker, I could not agree more with my hon. colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley. I tend to agree with him whether we are on committee or just going for a walk down Wellington. We are both very pressed with the issue of trying to find solutions to affordability in Canada. I have noticed the same thing. For months now, a head of lettuce has been $3.49 where I shop, and I do not think it is as a result of a drought. It is because the price went up, people became used to it and the prices just kind of sat there; stores said that people were now used to paying $3.50 for lettuce. That is too expensive, and there needs to be a little more accountability.
If a price shock occurs because of any number of factors, then we understand that people need to be made whole. We can choose something else in many cases. I feel the same way about shopping seasonally. There was a big thing on Facebook a couple of weeks ago about watermelon, and everybody was freaking out about the price of watermelon, but watermelon was wildly out of season at the time. It is also appropriate that we consider the time of year when we are shopping for certain items. I enjoy the convenience of having watermelon all year, but it is also true that we can shop seasonally to save a bit of money.
The other thing I wanted to discuss is something I am not sure will come up. Most people in the House are my age, a little older or close to it. I am 42 years old. In my first job, I was working for about eight dollars an hour. These days, that is absolutely not okay, and nobody works for eight dollars an hour in Canada; however, one of the reasons things have become more expensive is that we are starting to pay people closer to a minimum livable income.
I am not saying we are there just yet. People who are working in grocery stores now are not being paid enough, but perhaps they are being paid $16 or $17 an hour; that is almost nine dollars more than we were paid 15 years or 20 years back. This is another concern that we need to feed into the system. I believe in a living wage being paid to the people who are ringing our groceries through and stocking the shelves. If that could normalize a little and balance out against the billion-dollar CEO profits and bonuses we are seeing, that would also be fair.