Mr. Speaker, I am pretty sure the member is heckling me again right now. It is not a band-aid solution. National school food programs have been in all G7 countries except Canada for decades.
In Kingston alone, Andy Mills, who runs the Food Sharing Project in Kingston, has been facilitating some form of school food sharing through donations and volunteers since the eighties.
Governments have been calling for this for years, because the reality is that there are different socio-economic circumstances for different children, and they should not interfere with their ability to have proper nutritious food in the morning before they start to learn in school. To try to conflate such a meaningful program for so many young children in Canada with a band-aid solution for tackling an inflation problem is disingenuous at best and completely misleading at worst.
I am also concerned about some of the things I heard from the Leader of the Opposition. He was talking earlier about the Bank of Canada, and I find his comment really interesting, because when we are in the House, we are expected not to mislead. We are expected to give factual information to the best of our abilities. Sometimes that can be based on opinion and sometimes it can be based on information we get from one place that is argued by somebody else.
Moments ago, the Leader of the Opposition had this is say. I want to quote him, so I went to his YouTube channel to replay the video, where he was on YouTube Live while he was speaking. He said, “Already, the Bank of Canada is signalling that it is again doing away with its main mandate, which is to fight inflation. They have taken that mandate off the main web page, where they used to describe their mission as low and stable inflation, and they have replaced it with a grand pronouncement that they are not just any bank, they are ‘the Central Bank’.” Members will remember that he used some language there and he got a good little cheer from the swath of Conservatives who were sitting in the perfect camera shot behind him. They all cheered for it.
However, if we actually go to the Bank of Canada website, right on the main page, and this is not in bullet point form or somewhere random, buried in a policy document, there is an infographic on the main landing page of the Bank of Canada. It says, “What does the Bank of Canada do? Our primary responsibility is to preserve the value of your money by keeping inflation low, stable and predictable.” The Leader of the Opposition came in here and just spoke about something that was completely untrue.
I made a bit of a joke during that exchange, saying “I didn't even know they had a website.” He laughed and got his cohort behind him to chuckle along as he said “the whip...is saying he did not know the Bank of Canada had a website”, and that maybe I should do some research. The only thing worse than not knowing the Bank of Canada even has a website is knowing they have it and not being able to properly read it when quoting it. That is exactly what he did.
I asked him a question. I just wanted to know if his senior policy adviser, Jenni Byrne, still did paid lobbying for Loblaws. It was a simple question. The Leader of the Opposition stood up and said “of course she does not”, as though it was impossible for me to even think that could possibly be true and to ask that question. She was registered as a lobbyist on the Ontario lobbyists registry as late as early 2024.
It is very fair, when the Leader of the Opposition brings into the House the topic of discussion of the cost of food, inflation and the challenges that Canadians have buying groceries for me to ask if his campaign manager and senior policy adviser is still a lobbyist for Loblaws, helping to lobby government to reduce regulation so that it could make greater profits. He comes in here and acts as though he is the all holy individual who could properly represent and speak on behalf of the Canadian people, meanwhile his campaign manager is a lobbyist for Loblaws.
I will go back to how I started this speech, which is that Conservatives are up to the same tactics they have been up to since I came here in 2015. One would think that after having leader after leader, Conservatives would finally realize that maybe they have to try something new. I even thought that maybe after losing his own riding in Carleton, and having to go to find the safest Conservative riding in the country to run in to fight his way back to that seat, that maybe he had learned something along the way and would have a different approach.
There is nothing. It is the exact same. The only difference now is that he is the member for Battle River—Crowfoot instead of Carleton, but it is same Leader of the Opposition playing the same tricks and, unfortunately, bringing the same misinformation into the House.