Meals on wheels
A traveling prime minister offers to work with provinces. Later.
One tries to guard against cheap cynicism. On Monday the Prime Minister of Canada continued his long pre-budget tour by announcing a national school food program.
Reading the federal news release, one discovers that it takes a truly bewildering amount of time to get to the point. Once we hack our way through the top 200 words of rote self-congratulation, we find the elements of the proposed program. It’ll spend $1 billion over five years “with a target of” — uh-oh — “providing meals to 400,000 more kids every year, beyond those served by existing school food programs.”
The release includes this sentence:
“This is a generational investment in the future of our kids, and we’re going to work with provinces and territories and Indigenous partners to ensure every child has the food they need.”
And this one:
The Program will be a safety net for the kids who need this support the most.
Actually, once you get past the top four utterly useless paragraphs, the release is full of interesting sentences. Here’s another:
This includes investments for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities as well as Self-Governing and Modern Treaty partners, many of whom have some of the highest rates of food insecurity in Canada.
The first thing to be said about a school food program (apparently we’re not to call it a school lunch program, because sometimes it’s breakfast) is that it’s not something a panicky Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland have pulled out of nowhere at the last minute. The Liberals seem to have wanted to do this since Bill Morneau was finance minister. His 2019 budget had language about school food. I can find no reference to such a program in the 2019 Liberal platform, but it was back for the 2021 platform.
From the outset, the Trudeau crew understood that they can’t deliver school meals themselves from Ottawa. The 2021 platform said they’d “work with our provincial, territorial, municipal, Indigenous partners, and stakeholders” to deliver the program. That work still lies in the future. Since the food would be delivered in schools run under provincial jurisdiction, a federal government would need to work with the provinces for most elements of implementation. And by “work with,” I really don’t mean “wave at” or “scrum snarkily about.” Indeed, I suspect that the prospect of working with provincial governments is what’s kept Trudeau from implementing his 2019 promise for half a decade.