Agriculture Committee on Feb. 29th, 2012
Evidence of meeting #27 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was food.
A recording is available from Parliament.
On the agenda
MPs speaking
Also speaking
- Ted Johnston President and Chief Executive Officer, Alberta Food Processors Association
- Rick Culbert President, Food Safety Division, Bioniche Life Sciences Inc.
- Anna Paskal Senior Policy Advisor, Food Secure Canada
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
February 29th, 2012 / 4:45 p.m.
Conservative
Brian Storseth Westlock—St. Paul, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Johnston, you're basically talking about an interest-free loan, I believe, as being one of the most needed things to help the automation—the lack of automation—in your sector right now, but there must be different needs at different levels. I mean, you represent an extremely large number of processors, some of them quite large and some of them quite small. What are we talking about for the smaller guys? Do they have the same needs? Clearly they do not. What kind of dollar figures are we talking about?
4:45 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Alberta Food Processors Association
They essentially have the same needs, although the very small ones, the “fives”, don't. They need some help. Their primary issue is related to meeting safety standards versus putting in significantly larger plants.
As an example of the others, the gentlemen I referred to as the largest gluten-free baker is now opening up European marketplaces. He's going to need to do a significant expansion to be able to do that. That's going to be totally capital-intensive. His challenge will be to come up with the capital to be able to do that kind of expansion. As well, in Ontario today significant plants are having great difficulty just trying to make the changes to the facility that are required to meet these multiple safety standards, and they cannot get financing support to do that.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Brian Storseth Westlock—St. Paul, AB
I don't mean to be rude, but we just have five minutes. Predominantly what size are you talking about that will benefit from the loan?
4:50 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Alberta Food Processors Association
Do you mean in terms of companies?
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Alberta Food Processors Association
All sizes would benefit from it.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Alberta Food Processors Association
Even the small businesses, because—
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Alberta Food Processors Association
If you want to go from being small to medium-sized, you need to be able to go into that kind of a jump. Again, we have Alberta. We have a lot of things in place out there. We have this business incubator. We have the development centre. We built the business incubator so that people could move into development to get to production, the theory being you could build orders and then go out and build your plant.
The problem is how to finance building the plant. I've proven that I can make this product and that I can make it in volume, but now I have to come up with the millions of dollars to be able to put that plant in place. That's the other thing that API does not do. It does not deal with start-ups and it does not deal with safety.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Alberta Food Processors Association
At the end of the day, it's whatever the defaults were—
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Alberta Food Processors Association
—and the time value of the money.