Poilievre slams Trudeau for saying free school lunch program will fix 25% poverty rate in Canada

In Tuesday’s Question Period, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre blamed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for a “record-smashing” 25 percent of Canadians living in poverty. Trudeau responded by citing some of his government programs, including a proposed free lunch program for Canadian schools, as the remedy for the problem.

Poilievre was noting a report from Food Banks Canada. “You know, [the prime minister] has been promising that raising taxes would make life fair. We find out today from the Food Banks Association of Canada that now a record-smashing 25 percent of Canadians live in poverty after nine years of his taxes, his deficits, and his doubling housing costs. Why is he going ahead with the same wackonomics that caused the poverty in order to solve it?”

Trudeau claimed that Poilievre was being two-faced because he “talks about affordability but he's standing against raising taxes on the wealthiest so we can give more supports to those who actually need it. He's standing against our school food program, which is going to help 400,000 kids across the country have fuller, fuller bellies as they study,” Trudeau said, declaring that this would reduce grocery costs for the average Canadian family by “about $800 a year.” 

Poilievere countered that Trudeau had implemented his own version of “trickle-down economics” that “takes money away from small businesses and workers. It will go from one level of government to another level of government to another level of government, it will trickle down.”

The Opposition leader also referenced documents that reveal Trudeau has “covered up his own data showing $25 billion of extra costs with the carbon tax – nearly $2,000 in carbon tax cover-up for every single family. How can we trust anything he says about taxes, poverty or money?”