Finance committee  Thank you for the question. I'm Hugues Vaillancourt from Employment and Social Development Canada. You are correct. The budget does talk about the 400,000 additional kids who could benefit from the budget investment. In terms of what you raise around universality, we've certainly heard the same thing from stakeholders around the importance of being “free of access” and being barrier-free and limiting stigma at points of access.

Finance committee  On the funds, the objective here is to agree on a set of bilateral agreements with provinces and territories for focusing on and increasing and expanding existing school meal programming. Certainly, there are objectives around being stigma-free that are already, in many cases, objectives that provinces and territories have in their own programming, but the funding would not, as it exists, allow for all kids aged 4 to 18 to access the program.

Human Resources committee  Yes. My understanding of the private member's bill is to develop a national framework—working with provinces, territories and indigenous partners—and to report back and table that report. I have a similar understanding. The bill, in and of itself, doesn't have program funding associated with it.