Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time.
As we have heard today and repeatedly over the last little while, we know that Canadians are struggling desperately to put food on the table. This past August, food inflation managed to outpace overall inflation by 84%. The average family of four is now spending nearly $17,000 a year just on groceries. That is over $800 more than last year.
Abacus Data found that 61% of Canadians are not confident that they will be able to afford groceries six months from now. For households earning under $50,000, that number rises to 73%. There is no question that younger Canadians are feeling the pinch more than most, as 81% of those aged 18 to 29 regularly worry about being able to cover essentials. These are our neighbours, our friends and our families, and they are suffering under these poor Liberal policies on harmful food inflation.
The Liberals want us to believe that this is a global issue. The Liberals want us to believe that this issue can be solved by more government programs and more bureaucracy. However, here is the truth. Food prices in Canada have risen 48% faster than in the United States, but what is the Prime Minister's excuse?
Food banks are being depleted from coast to coast, and the latest annual survey from Food Banks Canada suggests that food bank use in Alberta over the past five years has been one of the highest increases in food bank use in Canada, up by 92%. A third of the food bank usage in Alberta is now by children. In Toronto, the Daily Bread Food Bank recorded roughly 3.5 million visits in 2024, a 273% increase since before the pandemic. In Ontario, 25% of food bank users are employed full time. This is absolutely shocking. Canadians are working full-time jobs and they still cannot afford groceries.
To note a real experience, my family has been blessed enough to be able to donate a side of beef to the local food bank every year for many years. This beef used to last over a week, and now it just flies off the shelf. It is gone in less than a day. The demand is hard to fathom.
Grocery store shelves tell the same story. Since March, sirloin beef is up 33%, canned soup is up 26%, coffee is up 22% and staples like potatoes and onions are up 16% and 11%. Lots of this food is produced locally and the price is still rising; it does not matter.
Families earning $75,000 or less now spend 57% of their income on essentials. Poverty and food insecurity have surged 40% in two years. Why is this happening? Inflation is a huge part of it. With their programs, the Liberals have spent money like drunken sailors, have increased the printing of money, have reduced our foreign exchange capacity dramatically and have made everything more expensive. All the inputs for farming, all the inputs for agriculture and all the imported foods we have are far more expensive than they used to be.
There is another failed Liberal policy that contributes to this. The industrial carbon tax is crushing Canadian farmers. It is also crushing Canadian truckers and food processors. Every step of the food chain, from growing crops to transporting goods to running grocery stores, gets hit with higher costs. Those costs do not disappear. They are passed directly to Canadian families, with higher prices at the till.
Fertilizer taxes and restrictions make it more expensive to grow and force farmers to change crops to something less productive. This is forcing a greater reliance on imports. Again, the foreign exchange problem makes that more expensive. Imports from countries that do not suffer from a massive industrial carbon tax make the competition and math untenable.
The Liberals' plastics ban and new packaging requirements make matters worse. Deloitte estimates the P2 ban could increase fresh produce costs by 34% due to waste and spoilage, reducing availability by over 50% and wasting half a million tonnes of food. Greenhouse gas emissions could rise by 50%, and health care costs related to food-borne illnesses could be over $1 billion a year.
Rural Canadians will be hit the hardest. The industry is struggling with $8 billion in front-of-pack labelling changes and compliance costs, and yet again, that will get passed on to families.
As I alluded to a minute ago, farmers are reeling. Net income for an average sized farm in my own province has decreased by nearly 41%, much higher than the national average. Farmers in my riding of Bow River have sounded the alarm that the industrial carbon tax balloons their costs to do business, costs such as power and fuel to run pivots and machinery, to heat their barns and shops and to dry their grains.
Stats Canada reports that the realized net income for Canadian farmers fell by $3.3 billion, an almost 26% drop. Total farm net income has decreased by just over 40% since 2023. At the same time, farm debt increased 14%, the largest increase since 1981. Canadian farmers are being taxed, regulated and forced to operate under impossible conditions while families pay more for groceries.
The Prime Minister once said that he would be held to account by the prices that Canadians pay at the grocery store. Well, the bill has come due, and Canadians cannot afford it.
The Conservatives will act, and we will scrap the punitive industrial carbon tax on farmers and truckers and the rest of industry. We will eliminate the fertilizer restrictions that strangle Canadian agriculture. We will cancel the food packaging and plastics taxes that make fresh produce more expensive.
I want to note that the number one way for families to afford food is to afford it in their homes, to not suffer from high inflation and to not suffer from declining paycheques, yet the Liberal government believes in the nanny-state mentality, which leads to the fallacy that a bureaucracy of scale is a better solution. We believe that families are better equipped to take care of themselves as long as the government gets out of their way and stops making their lives less affordable.
Food affordability is not an abstract statistic. It is about whether parents skip meals so their children can eat. It is about whether seniors choose between groceries and medication. It is about families working full time and still having to go to the food bank.
The Liberals have failed. The Conservatives will make life more affordable again by standing up for farmers, standing up for families and standing up for Canada's right to put food back on the table.