Liberal MPs have launched a national consultation process with hopes of forming the outlines of national food policy by late January.
Liberal health critic Carolyn Bennett told a Dec. 11 news conference in Ottawa that the object of a national consultation and then a meeting Jan. 23 in Toronto will be to produce a broad policy.
She said the consultation, led by Liberal MPs, would look at “food security, food protection, ethical considerations in terms of international development, sustainable agriculture and fishery industry policies, all the health issues and health promotion as well as the ethnic and multicultural issues surrounding food policy.”
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Agriculture critic Wayne Easter was more focused in what he saw as the goal of the exercise that will involve MPs consulting and trying to draw up policy on issues as varied as pesticide use, genetically modified varieties, import standards for food, poverty, child obesity and agricultural sustainability.
“As a party, we have to reconnect with our rural roots and with rural Canada,” he said.
“This is part of that endeavour. Farmers produce food but at the moment they’re suffering financially. Yet we have families in this country going hungry.”
Easter said part of the project will be to connect farmers to their consumers, to help urban consumers understand the pressures on farmers and farmers to understand the food sensibilities of consumers.
“So the bottom line is to overcome that rural-urban divide and in the process, build a national comprehensive food policy for Canadians so at the end of the day, we’re all better off and Canadians have confidence in the food they eat and the farming community has some confidence in that others understand their industry and can provide the economic returns to that industry,” he said.
Easter said the Jan. 23 meeting in Toronto, hooked up through the internet to similar local meetings across the country, will not produce a final document.
