Hunger in Ottawa is reaching record levels. One in seven Ottawa residents is now food insecure. Ottawa food banks have been visited nearly half a million times this year alone, the highest number of visits in their history. They have had to extend hours into evenings and weekends to accommodate people who are working full time and still need to use the food bank.

People are calling, desperate and hungry, and being given an appointment in three weeks because that’s the earliest available time slot. Seniors organizations are receiving phone calls from hungry seniors looking for free meal programs because their fixed incomes are no longer covering the cost of food.

The school breakfast program provided by the Ottawa Network for Education is serving over 17,000 students every single day but it’s still not enough to meet the demand. Nine new schools were added this year to the program, but for the first time ever, a wait-list was created because there are more schools that want to join than there are resources to support them.

We know what the solutions to hunger are, but this government is too busy pretending they’re helpless in the face of an affordability crisis to implement any of them. It’s time to stop price gouging; reinstate real rent control; fund and build not-for-profit, deeply affordable housing; increase Ontario Works and ODSP; raise the minimum wage; and crack down on wage theft. It’s time for action, not excuses.

I appreciate the question coming from the member for Peterborough because he actually has an innovation cluster in his riding, in the city of Peterborough, that really is all-encompassing, including food production. I very much appreciated the opportunity to visit that with him recently.

I want to touch on the fact that we are not resting on our laurels, Speaker. We’re continuing to invest so that farmers and processors alike understand that they finally have a government in Ontario that is working with them to continue to increase production. We’re investing $25 million, in partnership with the feds, through the Sustainable CAP program. But the total results are going to be driven by Ontario farmers and processors through the Agri-Tech Innovation Initiative. This is going to reap incredible returns.

I think we need to recognize that all of our sectors are increasing production, and now we need the food processing to continue to innovate and match what the farmers are doing on the land.