Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to rise in the House to speak on behalf of the hard-working people of Windsor.
Today, I want to talk about something that matters to every family in Windsor and to a whole lot of families across this country: food affordability. I am going to speak based on what I witnessed on the front lines of policing a little over a year ago, before I retired. Current evidence shows that the reality has gotten worse, not better. It is right there in front of the everyday Canadians who do see it, except for perhaps the Liberal government.
When it comes to grocery prices and food affordability, Canadians do not need spin. They need honesty. Let us start with the basics. Across this country, food is now the number one pressure on household budgets. That is consistent across surveys and media reporting on what Canadians are telling anyone who will listen to them. Groceries today cost roughly 30% more than they did five years ago. Wages did not go up 30%, and neither did pensions, disability supports or fixed incomes. When people say, “I do not know how this happened so fast”, they are not exaggerating. They are describing reality. We heard claims that headline inflation numbers are cooling, but food prices keep rising. That is why Canadians do not feel any relief. They buy groceries every week. They see the prices every week. There is no hiding it. There is sticker shock. It is real.
Now let us talk about food insecurity. About one in four Canadians now live in a household that struggles, at least some of the time, to put enough food on the table. This is the part that matters most: Most food-insecure households are not below the poverty line. These are working people, seniors, people on disability or single-parent households. These are people who did everything right, paid their taxes and assumed that the basics would be there for them. Instead, many are making choices they never, ever imagined between food or medication, food or heat, and food or rent. Health researchers confirm what people already know: When food gets expensive, people skip prescriptions, delay refills or stop paying rent altogether. That is not being irresponsible; that is desperation. We do not need a consultant to tell us this. We just need to listen.
Whether someone is browsing online or attending a community gathering in this country, the same stories come up again and again. Seniors are only shopping on discount days. Parents are skipping meals so their kids can eat. Full-time workers are using food banks for the first time. People standing in line at the food bank are ashamed and hope no one they know sees them in that line. Food bank visits are up to 2.2 million every month, nearly double the pre-pandemic level. That tells us something important: Emergency food aid is no longer an exception. It is becoming normal.
That number, by the way, does not include the food supports provided by community centres, churches, mosques, synagogues, temples or gurdwaras across this nation. When we combine traditional food banks with faith-based groups, we are seeing roughly 3 million to 3.5 million food assistance visits every month. That is not a marginal issue; it is a systemic failure. We are just covering it up with charity.
Now I want to talk about something most people do not see first-hand but what police officers and loss-prevention officers deal with at the grocery store every day: retail theft. There is a big difference between organized theft rings and desperation theft. Anyone who has worked on the road as a cop or worked in loss prevention knows the difference immediately.
Loss-prevention staff and cops across the country are reporting more incidents involving basic food items like milk and bread, not electronics or resale items. Increasingly, the people involved are seniors, people on disability or people with no prior contact with the police. Here is what that looks like: an elderly person detained at the door, hands shaking, apologizing over and over again and saying they forgot to scan an item. Meanwhile, everyone knows they did not forget. They are crying not because they were caught but because of the humiliation.
Loss-prevention workers and cops will tell us that these are the hardest incidents to deal with. They can tell us, “This is a normal person, and this is not what they do.” These are not criminals by nature. These are people who ran out of options. The damage goes beyond a police report. Being detained for shoplifting strips these desperate people of their dignity, especially seniors, who often carry deep shame and will not even tell their family what happened. They will often stop going to the store and prefer to go hungry because they are ashamed. Officers themselves feel deeply humiliated, regardless of the outcome of the investigation, because they feel they are being asked to criminalize hunger. That is not right.
Sadly, I have seen that look of shame before. It is the look of someone who feels they have failed. Truthfully, it is the system that has failed them. They did not fail.
Let us talk about why this is happening. Food does not magically appear on the shelves. It moves through a chain, starting with farms, farming equipment, fertilizers, processors, packaging and transportation. Every added cost along that chain ends up at the checkout.
Fertilizer is a good example. It is not optional. Without it, we do not grow enough. Fertilizer production is energy-intensive. Under the current industrial carbon tax system, producers are facing hundreds of millions of dollars in added costs. This will increase over the coming years. When fertilizer costs more, farmers pay more. That is not ideology. That is math. The question we should be asking ourselves is whether our ideology should be costing that senior citizen or single parent their dignity. In my opinion, the answer is no.
Some studies say that carbon pricing alone adds less than 1% to food prices, but Canadians do not live in a world where costs happen only once. These costs stack up. Fuel, energy, fertilizer, packaging and transportation are individually small, but they are crushing collectively. Experts like Sylvain Charlebois, the food professor, have been very clear: Canada's food inflation problem is now a structural problem, not a temporary one. Prices are not snapping back. They are staying high. A one-time rebate will help people breathe easier temporarily, but it will not fix the structural issue of why groceries cost so much in the first place.
How do Canadians see the Liberal government on this? The common perception is this: The government acknowledges the problem. Canadians hear the PM saying that they ought to judge him by the price they pay at the grocery store. They feel the government is not moving with urgency or owning the outcomes of its own policies, which are dismal, by the way. People hear announcements. They hear that ministers are meeting with the CEOs of the grocery stores. They hear about voluntary codes for grocery chains and short-term cheques being issued, but they do not feel any relief. There is frustration, confusion and a sense that the government is not doing nearly enough to help regular Canadians. I happen to agree with that.
From a Conservative perspective, this is where we draw a clear line. We believe in environmental responsibility, but not by making food unaffordable. We believe in helping families, but not just by talking about it or giving them a one-time cheque that many will not be eligible for.
Food security is national security. When families cannot afford basics, it affects health care, public safety and social stability. I have seen it first-hand. When seniors are having to steal food, when working people are lining up at the food banks and when medication is being skipped so that groceries can be bought, it is not a theoretical debate. It is evidence. As in any good investigation, when the evidence piles up, one does not argue with it. One responds to it in a way in which one is clearly accountable, responsible and transparent. That is what the Canadian people expect of us.