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House Hansard - 313

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 10, 2024 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 313 - May/10/24
Ms. Julie Dabrusin (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change and to the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Lib.)
  • May/10/24 1:44:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am very happy to have the opportunity to get up and speak to this issue today because it speaks to issues that are dear to my heart, such as a food policy, the environment and food security. Therefore, it is about how we make sure we support Canadians with respect to issues of affordability and access to healthy food. I really want to thank the member for Willowdale for bringing forward this motion. It has been a very interesting debate. I think there are moments like this, when we can hear people sharing ideas and stories from their different communities. It is so important for us to be able to have these very real conversations here, so I appreciate that. I also want to thank advocates across Canada who have worked hard on issues regarding food waste, and perhaps most importantly, those who have been working on food security. They are the heroes on the ground. We have heard stories about some of these people in the debate so far, people who are working on a community basis to really uplift the community members around them and to make sure they have access to healthy food as well. I have a personal interest in food policy. It is actually what brought me to politics in many respects. In my own community, I had started a group that was part of Second Harvest. It would have these groups of people go out on foot and pick up food from restaurants or businesses that they were not using anymore, but that was still good, and bring it to local food banks. If it was too small of an amount to pick up by truck, then people would go out on foot and pick it up. Therefore, I started what was called the Danforth Hunger Squad, and people from the community would go out and pick up food from different restaurants and stores along the way. We would work with Newcomer Women's Services to provide that support. Overall, it worked well, but I think it also highlighted for me some of the problems with that model, so I will put that as a pin there. The other thing I think worked really well was this: I worked with local farmers at farmers' markets in the community to help them donate food that had not sold at the end of the day. It was good food that had sold 10 minutes earlier but would not be good the next market day. Ontario has the Local Food Act, which allows farmers to use this as a donation writeoff when they donate food to charities, but it also meant that all those healthy greens and the like were able to go to a local food bank. These are local examples of how people can work on some of these issues, not only with respect to food waste but also in terms of food security. I also want to highlight, because it is my personal favourite, that we used to do a thing in the park called stone soup. It was based on the book Stone Soup. We would get the book, and somebody would read the story to kids. We would encourage people in the community to go out and collect vegetables, usually from the farmers' market we were trying to support, and we would make a giant pot of soup together and share in that soup. It was really important, because food is not just about how we keep healthy, but also about how we bring people together and build community. Therefore, when I was thinking about running, food policy was something that was really important to me. I am particularly excited to be able to speak to something like this motion. When I look at the pieces I hoped to see come together when I started, one of them was to get a school food policy. Another was to get a food policy for Canada. Canada had never had a food policy before 2019, so in many of the earlier years, from 2015 to 2019, I was working on how we could develop a food policy and how we could make sure we had something in place that created a framework as to how to move forward and work on such issues as food waste, food security and those different pieces. In our 2019 budget, we actually put in a food policy for Canada. It included many different elements, such as improved access to affordable food and ensuring access to safe, nutritious and culturally diverse food, especially for vulnerable populations. It included improved health and food safety to promote healthy eating habits, as well as safe food practices to protect Canadians from food-related illnesses. It included conservation and protection of soil, water and air, promoting sustainable food production practices to protect the environment, growing more high-quality food and supporting Canadian farmers and food producers to increase the availability of high-quality food. Budget 2019 also included food waste reduction, directly on point to this motion, and implementing strategies to reduce food waste throughout the food system, as well as innovation in the agriculture and food sector and support for northern and indigenous communities. One piece of that food policy is a reference to a school food program, which is why I am particularly happy today to see that, in this year's budget, there is funding to bring that part forward. There are two pieces that are interesting when we are talking about the issues that were brought up in this motion. Following that piece in budget 2019, there was a commitment to a local food infrastructure program. When we talk about these local programs, which people have been raising in their speeches, we see that that fund has had an amazing impact on community organizations. I have seen it support community kitchens in my neighbourhood and community gardens, which are ways to support people getting access to that healthy food. However, more directly on point, it also included the basis to move forward with what ended up being the food waste reduction challenge, which was launched two years ago. Its aim was to find innovative solutions to prevent or divert food waste and to advance technologies that extend the life of food or transform food waste. Some people in the House may have seen LOOP juices when they go to a store. These are amazing juices that are created from perfectly good fruits and vegetables that would have otherwise been discarded because they had an odd shape or size, or maybe an aesthetic imperfection. This is the part that we are not talking about very much about in food waste. A certain amount of food just never ends up on our shelves in our grocery stores because they are kind of odd looking, but they are still absolutely good and healthy. LOOP Mission uses these rescued produce items and creates, as I mentioned, cold-pressed juices. It also uses the leftover pulp to make things such as soap bars. This is the kind of innovation that we want to support, and that is the kind of innovation that receives support through the food waste reduction challenge. It a nice thing to see how the building blocks get put into place to move forward. I do want to be clear that, when we are talking about food waste, it does not have to be specifically tied to working on food insecurity or poverty, which I think are two separate issues. I, personally, support having a different approach to each issue. There is also an environmental impact from food waste, which produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas. There is also an economic loss. We put all that work into producing that food, but when it is wasted, all the way from the farm to the table, that is actually a wasted economic value. We really need to make sure that we reduce food waste for the environmental impact and for the economic impacts. However, I will question slightly whether that entirely should be a way of dealing with food poverty. France, for example, has included a requirement that grocery stores donate unsold food rather than dispose of it, which has been very effective in reducing its food waste, so that is one method. I will say that, in my personal experience, I have seen that it sometimes results in less healthy foods going to food banks or maybe food that really is going to end up having to be disposed of by the food bank down the road, so I am not sure that is the right way. There is also a potential stigma, and I would never want anyone to feel like what we are doing when we are trying to deal with food waste is to be diverting food that is not valued to people who are living in poverty. I think there are more important policies, and we have been building those building blocks, be it through the Canada child benefit, which is indexed to inflation; the GIS and the OAS; the workers' benefit; the disability benefit, which is new; or the school food program. There are other steps that we have to take, for sure, when dealing with that issue of food security and poverty, which, I would say, is not fully tied to food waste. To conclude, it is so important that we have these conversations, and that we uplift community organizations and advocates. When we talk about how we can deal with food waste better, I think of those innovative solutions, such as LOOP Mission, and that we come together and say, “How are we going to make sure that we help people in our communities who are vulnerable to food insecurity so that we meet their needs?” I really appreciate the member of Willowdale creating that opportunity for us.
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