Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will be supporting the motion as well. Certainly, it’s not entirely clearly defined how this is going to work. If people think that having a milk subsidy is too administrative a burden, then maybe we should just give it away. Maybe in a small community where milk’s expensive, we should just have a cooler full of milk that anybody can take and not just people ages one to 12.
People have mentioned some of the pressures on seniors. Everybody could stand to use a little more
milk. I don’t know about everybody else’s kids, but I’ll tell you, when my kids were growing up, if there was cereal in the cupboard, that milk jug got hauled out of that fridge a lot of times. There are a lot of good things you can do with milk. You can make soup — you’ve got milk based soups — you can make pudding; you can put it on cereal. You can make a lot of different things. You can put it in bannock. It’s a good staple food.
So I support the subsidy program. Like I said, if it becomes administratively burdensome — how you’re going to deliver it — I would just suggest giving it away, and I do not know how we as a government could go wrong. I don’t think anybody’s going to abuse milk.
As to Mr. Hawkins’s point of giving families a $100 subsidy, you have no guarantee where the $100 is going to end up. It may not end up buying milk. It may end up buying something else that we don’t support as a government. No slight against the folks who…. But, you know, there are a lot of pressures for family money. This will be one way of ensuring that everybody has access to something very nutritious, and it can become a staple in lots of different foods. So I would support that.
The only other thing I would suggest is that in the implementation of this milk subsidy, I would like to ensure that we check with communities that already have people who are working on breakfast programs and nutrition programs in the schools and so on, that we build on what people are already doing rather than coming in there and them vacating what it is they are doing in the community on a voluntary basis. I would like to work with them and add this to it. I think it’s a very good idea and a step in the right direction. I support the motion.