Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today.
I am Mary Robinson, past president of the Prince Edward Island Federation of Agriculture, P.E.I.'s largest general farm organization. Our federation's mandate is to help improve the sustainability of island farmers and farm families.
Today I will focus on the services we are delivering in P.E.I., speak of some specific concerns and give you my two cents' worth on what I feel our Government of Canada could and should do to better protect and fortify Canada's farmers, producers and ranchers.
First off, what are we doing in P.E.I.? In the 1990s and early 2000s, there were a couple of major stressors for agriculture in P.E.I. We had a potato virus that shut us out of fresh markets in the States, and BSE hit our beef producers hard. We saw a significant jump in the number of farmers and their family members seeking counselling services. National research highlighted farmers and their families being underserved with regard to mental health services.
A local counselling firm put these two points together and approached the provincial government in hopes of helping the P.E.I. farm community. Our Department of Agriculture approached our federation to discuss how we could partner to deliver a valuable program to P.E.I. farmers.
In 2004 our farmer assistance program, FAP, was launched. FAP offers confidential professional counselling services to P.E.I. farmers and their family members. Designed to help address issues that impact mental health and well-being, the program offers confidential sessions with a professional counsellor. On the front lines delivering the program we have two registered social workers and one registered psychologist.
The numbers from April 1 to September 30 of this year illustrate how important the program is. In those six months, 47 people used the counselling services and we delivered over 95 sessions. Topics addressed included marital issues, depression, anxiety, grief, life stages, PTSD, addictions, child management, and, suicide prevention.
FAP has been cost-shared between the P.E.I. Department of Agriculture and the P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture, and until recently had been allocated just under $13,000 per year. Uptake continues to grow. In some ways, this is a good problem, but it does result in continued and increasing budget overruns. In 2017 it became clear the program needed at least 50% more funding. We discovered that to avoid disruption of counselling services, the service providers had quietly been absorbing program losses.
For the last two years, the P.E.I. Department of Agriculture has increased its contribution. There were discussions with our Department of Health in hopes they would commit to topping up the program when necessary, but so far nothing has come of this.
After coverage in local media, Farm Credit Canada's Charlottetown office contacted our federation to express their interest in directly contributing this year. Since 2004 over 800 farm clients have accessed mental health services through FAP, with more than 2,000 sessions delivered in total. We continue to have strong feedback on the value found in these services.
Now for some specific concerns.
I know that this committee has been given several examples of producers' mental health issues. I would like to bring you one from P.E.I. Over the past four years, we have watched one farm family in particular be pushed beyond reason.
In August 2014 there was what we now call “a significant weather event”. These are really common now. They're common and they're more destructive. This one dumped three inches of rain in less than one hour. You can imagine that volume of water falling on a field. It resulted in water that was laden with silt and crop inputs—yes, pesticides, fertilizers, seed, what have you—running off the fields, busting through our established buffer zones—because farmers establish buffer zones—and ending up in ditches and streams.
Days later, 1,155 dead fish were found over a 3.5-kilometre span in the river. As a result of the fish mortalities, this farm family has been in and out of court for the past four years facing charges, acquittals, Crown appeals and now sentencing. Ironically, this farm was celebrated in 2012 for its environmental stewardship.
This family is a valued community member. They are employers, notable contributors to our local economy, and they work hard hand in hand with the local watershed group. Recently they took on more debt, reinvesting in their operation to expand it and to access more markets, so they've taken on more financial stresses. Most recently, one of their daughters has been diagnosed with cancer, and her baby's almost a year old. At the last court date, they were told that the Crown, pursuing DFO charges, is seeking a minimum fine of $175,000. I don't know about their farm, but I don't know if our farm could sustain a $175,000 fine and continue to operate. I can't imagine being faced with these stresses.
As in many regions in Canada, P.E.I. producers face many uncontrollable risks: weather, disease, pests, tight margins, trade vulnerability, buyer amalgamation, public trust issues, labour shortages, BRM shortcomings, and the list, unfortunately, goes on.
What can government do?
Now I get to the emotional part of my presentation. I was working on my Christmas card list earlier this week, and I had to remove two names, two producers I know who committed suicide. They died by suicide this year alone. If we want to be effective in quelling the losses and negative impacts resulting from mental health struggles, we must find the resources to implement a pan-Canadian approach to agricultural mental health research and to strongly support mental health initiatives across the Canadian agricultural community.
As a primary producer, I encourage this committee to take into consideration the potential negative impacts from different campaigns, for lack of a better word, such as front-of-pack labelling and access to temporary foreign workers. We know that producers are being held up, because they're being randomly audited. There is increased regulation. I have no trouble with common sense regulation, but it seems unending, and there is a lack of leadership, in particular from Health Canada and PMRA, to help instill a sense of confidence that our food is safe, that our farmers are doing good work, that we should be proud and we should be damn well happy.
I found Dr. Andria Jones-Bitton's statement summed it up well: “We can't have a sustainable food system in Canada if we don't have sustainable farmers.” This historically stoic profession, “six feet tall and bulletproof”, as I heard earlier, is highly vulnerable right now and needs help right now. Canada cannot expect its agriculture sector to grow and expand if it does not invest in farmers' foundational well-being.
Thank you.