Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to try to get a more expansive answer on a question I asked in question period a couple of weeks ago. I asked the member from northern Saskatchewan about the spike in food bank usage in Saskatchewan, where 35% of children are food insecure and over 30% of households are food insecure. I found the answer the member gave me lacking. He went on some rant about nothing that was even close to the question I asked about food banks.
Since I asked that question, new numbers have come out. For the first time, there have been over four million visits to food banks in Toronto. The numbers are quite staggering. I will read some into the record. Canada food inflation is nearly double the Bank of Canada targets and food prices have been rising 40% faster in Canada than in the U.S.A. Quite often, our friends across the way want to make this a global issue, but the food price increases are hitting Canada particularly harder than many of our G7 partner countries.
The question is, what is happening in Canada that is not happening in other parts of the world? Conservatives have asked this question time and time again, and the member for Whitby went on a rant about there being no hidden food taxes, but that could not be further from the truth. Some of the policies the Liberals have implemented over the last 10 years have led to so many Canadians being food insecure.
Nearly one in five food bank clients are employed but still cannot make ends meet. Ten years ago, that was not the case. Those who had jobs in Canada were able to put food on the table for their families. That is not the case anymore. The HungerCount food report that just came out says, “It took decades to reach one million visits in a month, and it has now taken half a decade to double that.”
We hear a lot from those on the other side, but one thing they trot out as their showpiece is the school lunch program. One thing I cannot figure out is, after 10 years, why the Liberals are proud that they are handing out food stamps. That is not an endorsement of their policies. That is an indictment of them. Parents want to be able to feed their own children. What the Liberal government has done under Justin Trudeau and now the current Prime Minister is strip that ability away.
Canadians now pay more in taxes than they do in food, clothing and shelter for their families. That is what the Liberal government has done with its reckless spending and continued increases in taxes on Canadians. They still stand to say they took 22 million Canadians off the tax rolls. Yes, that saved them nine dollars a month. The fact that parents now drive past the grocery store to go to the food bank is an indictment on how bad the Liberal government has handled the finances of our country over the past 10 years. Inflation continues to spiral out of control, and food prices continue to go up.
Do the Liberals realize that having a food program in school is an indictment of the government and not a showpiece? Parents would love to have the ability to feed their own kids. They do not want food stamps. They want good jobs on safe streets in the country they love.