Thanks to my friend from Nickel Belt. I want to add to this debate by focusing on an issue that’s really important to growers and residents where I live, in Ottawa Centre, and that is the issue of food waste.

It was alarming when I did the rounds back home the first time and started checking in with farmers’ market vendors, family farms around the greater Ottawa area and experts on the issue of residential and commercial food waste to learn some of the following things that I’m going to share with this House that I think are very appropriate to the mandate of the Agricultural Research Institute of Ontario, because after all, we are talking about what are the ideas that drive the bread basket, of, I believe, a lot of our country, but certainly of the jurisdiction for which we’re responsible.

So let’s just go over some numbers when we think about food waste in Ontario and in Canada. Surprisingly for me, I learned Canada has one of the highest food waste percentages of our output in the entire world. About 60% of all the food produced in this country ends up in waste. In Ontario, the 805 landfills we have in the province are expected to reach capacity by 2041, and a while ago, nine years ago, in 2015, the province estimated that approximately 32% of the landfill waste is food waste. So that accounts for 3.7 million tonnes of food that is thrown out every year. In a context we talk about all the time of hardship and affordability and poverty, 3.7 million tonnes of food is thrown out in Ontario every year.

The vast majority of this organic matter is sealed in plastic bags, which is serious because what that means is, when it decomposes, it doesn’t decompose properly and it emits methane—methane, of course, being a gas that is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It traps heat and is exactly opposite to what we should be working towards as a province.

I’m going to cite a local agency, a local community agency that has a lot of expertise, Foodsharing Ottawa. They said, in their report made available to the community, that 50% of the wasted food that they were aware of happened from farm to retailer. So it’s the capacity of the retailer to utilize the food to sell the product to the consumer, as the member from Peterborough–Kawartha said earlier. The consumer has an idea of what appropriate food should look like, and when it’s not appropriate, it’s not bought, and when it’s not bought, often it’s disposed of.

In 2016—again, some time ago—the province committed to revamp its waste management strategy. They talked about moving towards a system in which we encourage what’s called a circular economy, so when a grower produces food and that’s brought to a retailer, if there is food waste, we find some use for that food waste.

I want to salute, in the time I have left this afternoon, some people back home who are pioneers and innovators who are doing exactly that. I want to talk about Karen Plunkett from an enterprise called the Frugal Farm. Karen has relationships with 26 grocery stores in the greater Ottawa area, and she saves for her animals 10 to 12 tonnes of food that would otherwise go wasted per month, which she uses to feed her animals. If you go on Facebook right now—and I know everybody right now is paying rapt attention to the words I’m using, but if any one of my colleagues were on Facebook right now and you were to pull up the Frugal Farm’s Facebook page, you would see images of Karen’s farm, of livestock eating pumpkins that were otherwise destined for the landfill, of chickens eating pieces of watermelon, all appropriate for their diets, all tested with good veterinary science, but reutilizing through a circular-economy approach food that would otherwise go wasted.

I want to salute another organization called Box of Life. Box of Life, at home, is a vermicomposting social enterprise. What they are doing is trying to find a way to partner with apartment complexes, with restaurants, with agencies responsible for the creation of food, to make sure that what otherwise might go to the landfill is used in a revitalization process where worms are put in big tubs of earth that make some of the richest soil. I know there are green thumbs in this place. If you love to garden, then the kind of gold that gets produced from these vermicomposting units is precisely what you need.

Box of Life, I’m happy to say, has added 500 new residents to my own constituency office at 109 Catherine Street. We have one of the large vermicomposting units. It does not stink up the office; the scent is fine. What we do with our office staff team is repurpose any food scraps from our own homes and feeding our family. Anything in the day ultimately gets fed to the worms, our 500 friends in the office. What we do is, we have a fantastic little garden box outside our office door at 109 Catherine Street—you’re all welcome to visit any time—and we make some of the best cherry tomatoes, I believe, in Centretown. But that is all, again, part of that small version of what that circular economy should look like. And it’s a lot better, quite frankly, than—let’s review the statistic again—3.7 million tonnes of food being wasted in Ontario every year.

Why I’m bringing all of this up as we talk about the Agricultural Research Institute of Ontario is, I would actually like to see significant provincial investment put into how we support these local champions—Frugal Farm, Box of Life, Foodsharing Ottawa—because what we know is that any time we have invested in these pioneers, we use all or most of the food that we create in this province, which is good. We repurpose and lower costs for farms who would otherwise have to buy food for their animals. It’s a win-win all around.

But what we have to remember is that in the agricultural sector, we want to do everything we can to preserve arable land, to support the farmers and the growers and the agricultural workers who are doing all of that work. But once we have that bounty harvest, we’ve got to make sure that it’s used appropriately, and that has often been part of the discussion that’s not been appropriately understood.

I want to point to two jurisdictions for inspiration as I end the discussion of food waste, which I think is appropriate when we think about what this agency should be doing for Ontario. I want to talk about the city of Vancouver. The city of Vancouver has passed a bylaw which works directly with restaurants in the greater city of Vancouver, which provides pretty steep fines after an introductory period of education—and this has been around since 2015—if there are excessive food scraps going to their landfill. What they try to do long ahead of time is partner those restaurants and large community operations, business operations that are creating and making food, to repurpose all of that food waste so it can be used to produce effective fertilizer. They have one of the best green box programs in the country. They have shown that green box opportunities are possible for multiple-dwelling homes, single-family homes, large business enterprises, and that once business was aware of the conduit with which their food could find a home, you took a burden off them, and it was embraced.

I also want to point to the country of South Korea, which, as my friends back home have indicated to me, embraced this over 20 years ago. South Korea used to have, according to the research made available to me, 97% of the food waste going straight to landfill—today, it is almost 100% efficiency of turning around that food waste and, through a circular loop, repurposing it back so it plays a productive role and not the role of waste.

This is an odd moment, in which I am appearing as a conservative as a New Democrat. I am known by my children, in my own home, as “the food police.” They hate it when I pick on them—not just for finishing their meals. I don’t demand that they finish their meals, but I do hate it when food goes to waste in our own fridge. And I think that’s something we all should care about.

If the people we rely upon to grow the food, to manage the animals, to manage the enterprises that produce fantastic food in this province—it is a shame that 60% of that food should end up in landfills. We need to do a lot better than that. And what I know, from the folks I’ve had the pleasure to work with at home, is that we can do a lot better than that, but it requires making the right investments.

So I suggest to the government, as it works with this research institute going forward, that food waste should be a priority. We should be thinking about how we utilize all the food we produce. And we should be supporting the local producers and the local innovators who are making it happen.