Food Sustainability Summit

Today, we had a summit meeting with two other parties, the Progressive Socialist Party and the Unity Party, to discuss the issue of food sustainability. We had a very heated discussion where many different ideas were introduced. However, many proposals hadn’t been carefully considered and still had many downsides. This lead to a lot of criticism produced by our three parties. While we came to no unanimous agreement or consensus during this summit, we received valuable feedback and new ideas to improve our position and solutions for this issue. We hope to come back and meet again with those parties at some time in the future to discuss our solutions for this issue again, when we have refined our action plan for the issue of food sustainability in Canada. For now, here is our action plan so far.

We, the Reformist Party, wanted to address the issue by breaking it down into three topics; food production, transportation of food/trade agreements and the distribution of food.

The ideas we presented were to increase the unit efficiency of food by setting standards for pesticides and using more natural fertilizers to produce the food. For example, using Foliar Feeding Fertilizer would be 8-10 times more efficient and benefit both the producer and consumer in return. As far as the transportation of food goes, the Reformist party believes that we should import the food from wherever is the closest location limited the amount of greenhouse gasses harming our environment. We also determined that the fuel used to export and import the fuel would be renewable utilizing natural materials such as algae fuel, corn fuel and other green alternatives.

Throughout this discussion an overarching topic discussed was taxing the distributor based on food miles. Meaning that the distributor would be taxed based on the bracket they fit in. The distance that the food travels determines how much the distributer is taxed. Our party strongly disagrees with this for two major reasons. One, by adding in this tax we limit the distributors freedom and also support the limitations of the types of foods they sell. Some foods can not be grown locally, what about them? What if you lived in the rocky mountains where food was hard to grow and come by? would the government make it so you would have to live with a limited selection and supply of produce. Locally grown food should be supported but we must remember to have a strong economy we must have a competitive one too. With this taxation model we give to much power to local farmers, they have found a way to function and thrive, lets keep it this way. Secondly, a tax on canadian stores and distributors hurts Canadians. Prices will rise or produce will be limited. Also Canada is a very populationaly wise, small country. It’s one of the biggest and best, but none the less small. We risk discouraging distributors here knowing they have a very realistic option of moving to the US.The Progressive Socialist Party and Unity Party want this. They also failed to mention just where these tax dollars would go? Whether to the government or back to the people where it should be. We have said this before, the Reformist Party wants change, but the right one. This isn’t it.

This is a big issue but we will help solve it.