44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 8, 2023 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, I am honoured to be here today to speak to Bill S-227, an act to establish food day in Canada. I thank the member for Perth—Wellington for sponsoring it in this place.
This bill is very similar, with some minor changes such as the date, to Bill C-281, an act to establish a national local food day, which was introduced in the 42nd Parliament by the former NDP MP and national parks critic Wayne Stetski. MP Stetski's bill was itself a reiteration of legislation introduced in the 41st Parliament as Bill C-449, an act respecting a national local food day, by former NDP MP and agriculture critic Malcolm Allen. Therefore, it is good to be here debating this bill, which has such a rich history in this place.
It is incredibly important to ensure that Canadians have access to healthy, affordable food and a sustainable food system. These are national priorities. I agree with the former speaker that they need a lot more support and investment. It is important to support our local agriculture markets as they are essential to us moving forward with this goal.
As I was preparing for this speech, I was thinking a lot about what we experienced during the beginning of the pandemic. I remember a lot of communities and organizations contacting me to talk about food and how worried they were with the big changes that were happening across the planet and with their food security.
My riding is just under 60,000 square kilometres. I have a lot communities on islands, and they were very concerned. I remember when there was a COVID outbreak in Alert Bay. The butcher there became very ill and had to be away for 14 days. That made it very hard for people to access the meat and protein they desperately needed.
Therefore, ensuring that we have local responses and that we honour the importance of assuring that if something happens there is enough food to sustain us is incredibly important.
I am also pleased to have an opportunity to talk about the rich farmers' markets across my riding. What I find profound about all the farmers' markets is that they are evolving quickly, and they celebrate locally grown food, which I really appreciate. It means I can go online and look at all the resources our farmers' markets bring. They connect us locally to people who are producing different types of food. The websites are available on that one site, so people can look at what they can locally connect to directly, and that is important.
When we know who feeds us locally, it means we can access their products. It is good for the environment and it supports local businesses. I come from a rural and remote riding, and keeping money in our region is incredibly important. These folks work very hard, so I appreciate how it connects us to local providers and allows us to buy locally to protect not only those local business but also our planet. We must always remember to celebrate the people who make food for us and who are very close to us.
I think of my visit to the Blueberry Commons' farm co-operative, which does some great work around connecting with children in schools, providing food for people and creating a local business that is going to make sense. It is also looking at how it can add housing to this co-operative. When it looks at its community, it sees how high the need is for affordable housing. It is quite incredible when we see these kinds of groups coming together and identifying how they are going to support not only keeping food healthy, local and affordable for people, but also ensuring that affordable housing is included going forward.
I think about the Namgis community garden. When I went there I was amazed by the establishment it had created and by the many young people who would go there to learn how to garden from the more mature members of the community. This brings the community together. It was very profound to see the number of young people who were getting jobs because they were working with local businesses and people saw an opportunity to hire them. As they said, it was a good problem to have.
I think of Big D's Bees. We have strong support for bees in a lot of places throughout our riding. Big D's Bees does a lot of work to ensure we have good honey, but we are also showing our solidarity with the bees, which are struggling so much.
Amara Farm is another one, one of my favourite farms in my region. They do a lot of incredible work to create produce, and also work very hard to make sure that the farmers' market is successful.
The reality is that when we talk about this bill, we have to acknowledge how many people are going hungry. Twenty per cent of Canadians have said that they were very likely or somewhat likely to obtain food from a community organization in the next six months. We know that people are struggling to make ends meet, and it is getting harder and harder.
One of the hardest challenges for families that are struggling financially is finding affordable, accessible food that is healthy for their children. We hear about this all too often: children going to school hungry, children struggling with health issues because they cannot eat the proper food.
I know that my friend, the MP for Vancouver Kingsway, has put forward Bill C-212, an act to develop a national school food program for children. This is absolutely important. We know that too many children go to school hungry. We need to make sure that we are supporting those children without any embarrassment or shame, so that they can get the health and nutrition they need, so that they can be better educated and take care of that education. I really appreciate the focus on those kinds of things.
When we talk about this, we also know we are watching some of our grocery chains in this country, specifically Loblaws, which are seeing outrageous profit during this time when so many Canadians are going hungry. I remember when our leader asked Galen Weston how much profit is too much, and of course he was unable to answer that question. I wonder why. We know that feeding people is less important than making sure there is profit for people who have a stake in that business.
As the cost of food goes up, as we know, more and more food is being shipped across the planet. We need to find ways to look at this and have a more sustainable future that includes healthy food for people, but also includes accessing local food before we go outside, especially when we look at things like the carbon footprint and what that means for us as food travels around the world.
I have only a couple of minutes left in my speech, but I also want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the great heroes of all of us across this country, and that is our local food banks. Not too long ago, I was in Gold River and I was talking to one of the members of the town council. She was talking about how the Gold River Food Network is doing everything it can, but it is getting harder and harder to feed people because so many people are accessing it. They noted, specifically, that there are a lot of seniors accessing food banks. That is quite concerning, that people who are living on a fixed income are struggling more and more. If they do not have healthy food, their health outcomes are worse.
I also think of the Campbell River Food Bank, which does a lot of work in that community, but also holds a lot of food for other food banks on some of the islands near our region. As they see the increase in just the Campbell River area, they are having a harder and harder time taking in that extra food that they hold for those other communities. Storage is becoming a huge issue. If they cannot store the food, then it gets harder to get food out to other communities, and that really concerns me.
I also think of the Powell River Food Bank. I went to meet with them, and one of the stories I will never forget was about the embarrassment of a wife coming in and asking them to please not tell her husband that she had to go to the food bank, because they just did not have enough food. She had paid all the bills and there was nothing left over.
In this time when food insecurity is increasing, it is incredibly important that all of us in this place take responsibility and understand that we must support healthy food for people. We must look at what is happening in our local communities and lift those businesses up, lift those farms up so that they could provide the best food.
I look forward to supporting this bill, and I hope that we have a special day to recognize and celebrate local food. I also hope that all of us will celebrate it every day by buying products that are close to home.
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Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to join the debate today to talk about Bill S-227, which was brought forward by my friend from Perth—Wellington. I thank him very much for bringing this forward.
As many people know, I grew up on a dairy and beef farm in southwest Saskatchewan, so agriculture had a huge impact on my life when I was growing up. I will take a few minutes today to talk about how important agriculture is, was and will continue to be in our country.
First and foremost, we have the best agricultural producers in the world. What we do here in Canada when it comes to agriculture is so fundamentally well done by the people who are in the fields, raise cattle and produce milk. I am very happy to have lots of friends in the agriculture sector still, and to be a member of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, which unanimously passed this bill back to the House for third reading. I was so happy we passed it quickly so the legislation can pass and be made law, and so we can celebrate food day on August 5 of this year, as my colleague from Winnipeg North said.
One thing we are doing in Saskatchewan, which is one thing this bill would help with, is improving the education on how our food is produced. In Saskatchewan, we do something called “agriculture in the classroom”, which is about having students learn about where their food comes from and that it does not just appear in the grocery store or on their plate when mom or dad cooks it at home. It teaches them where it starts, which is the fields, the farms and the cattle ranches in our country.
Agriculture in the classroom is not just about the students. It gives educators the opportunity to gain real-life experience on the farm. One of the educators who took part in this in 2022 said:
This was the most transformational excursion I have had the pleasure to go on. I loved learning about how farmers are taking active measures to ensure that our food is produced in the most environmentally friendly way.... I really appreciated the connections I made with several of the participants and look forward to using some of the resources in my classroom now that I have a great awareness of what is available for my grade.
This is a quote from Sherry Lesser, a 2022 agriculture expedition teacher.
This bill would bring together rural and urban citizens and allow them to start the conversation about how we produce food in this country.
As I said, I have been on the agriculture committee for several years, and one thing we really need to make other Canadian citizens aware of is just how much has been done to improve sustainable agriculture, though I think all agriculture is sustainable. Our farmers should get credit for what has been done in the last 20 to 25 years. They should get credit for zero tillage, which has now practically been incorporated. They should get credit for crop rotation, where different crops take out different nutrients from the soil.
People have come to present to committee, and the agricultural soil in Canada is in the best shape it has ever been in. This is because we leave more in the ground and have the ability, through technology, to make our soil as healthy as it has ever been.
I had the experience of attending Ag in Motion, one of the biggest agricultural shows in North America. It takes place just outside Saskatoon. Yara, which is a fertilizer company, had a research plot there, and I was able to go on a tour with the company, which field-mapped the plot. Technology has done great things for agriculture. Yara had a little machine that scanned 30 leaves in this plot and then gave a reading, down to the decimal point, of how much fertilizer needed to be added to that part of the field.
Technology has come such a long way. We can now have a field map, with GPS, and the tractors now have GPS as well, so farmers can be so precise on how much fertilizer they put in the fields. It is amazing how much more sustainable our practices are. If one talks to any producer, one will hear that they want to lower their inputs as much as possible, because fertilizer and fuel cost a lot of money and that hits the bottom line. I am so proud of our producers and how well they have done in using that technology to make farming even more sustainable.
Of the total emissions for Canada, agriculture represents 8% to 10%. In any other jurisdiction in the world, the agriculture sector accounts for 25% of emissions, or more. That is how well we are doing in Canada: Our emissions are three times lower than in any other jurisdiction in the world that has agriculture as major part of its economy. That is what we have to keep in mind when we are talking about sustainability and agriculture. We have to let people in this country know how well our producers are doing when it comes to agriculture and sustainability. It is something we should be proud of, and the government should be there to promote what our producers have done.
We are definitely going to be at the forefront of being sustainable and feeding the world. As our population grows, our outputs and yields have to continue to grow. As we have lowered our emissions, the hard-working men and women in agriculture have also increased their yields. It is fantastic to see how much more we are producing with less, and that is something for which we should give credit to our producers. They made a lot of these innovative changes without any government intervention.
Getting back to Bill S-227, we can talk about education in the classroom, which is vitally important. I always talk about my rural, agricultural background, but I am an urban MP. I represent the west side of the city of Regina, so I am an urban MP. I always say I kind of blend the rural and the urban together. That is something this country should do more of. I think that people in downtown Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, our bigger cities, need to have conversations with rural people and talk about where our food comes from and how sustainably it is produced. That is something that will bring this country together more. At such a time in our country's history, we need more things that bring us together instead of dividing us.
Many people are one generation removed from the farm and still have that connection to rural areas, whether in Ontario or Quebec. I think there is a particular pride in being from a rural part of this country. When I am door knocking in Regina—Lewvan, many of my constituents either still have a farm in their family or are one generation removed. They talk about producing and what they are growing, with pride showing on their faces. I can see the smiles and memories that come back from when they were living on the farm, especially during harvest and seeding, when people really have that experience of coming together as a family.
We are going to see a lot of hope and optimism in May. Lots of people are hitting up fields right now in southern Saskatchewan. I wish everyone who is planting this year the best of luck. I hope it rains at the right times and that we have an amazing crop this year, because that is what we look for. There is a lot of hope and optimism in May in Saskatchewan, with people going out into the fields, but there is a lot of pressure too. It is big money, millions of dollars, that people are putting on the line to grow, fuel and fertilize so they can feed the world. With that hope and optimism also come a few worries.
Another thing I would like to do with respect to food day is to acknowledge that where our food comes from is a great way of life. Growing food and growing what we actually eat ourselves comes with a pride that cannot be explained. We raise our calves and send them into town. When we get that meat and eat it, we talk with our kids about how that meat went from being a calf to being part of our diet. There is something that comes with that, and it is a point of a pride when talking to kids.
Class field trips are something I remember. I remember going to a Hutterite colony when I was in grade 6 or grade 7. I learned about how everything is produced in that one setting. It starts in the field, where they have a bunch of plants. They also package and sell some of their own meat. We have not done that for a while, but my wife is on the student council at our school, and we are starting to do more trips to Hutterite colonies to have kids learn things first-hand and be on the farm. They can see how that production happens. It is interesting, because now, when my kids go to the grocery store, they look at the packaging of the meat a bit differently. They see where the meat was produced and packaged.
Food from field to fork and plate is something we can all learn a lot about. We should take great pride in our agriculture producers and how well and sustainably they produce the food that fuels this country. Canada will always have the food, fuel and fertilizer the world needs. We have to support our farmers. I am very happy to support my friend with this private member's bill.
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