Agriculture committee  Thank you. I'd like to thank the committee for giving me the opportunity to speak on this extremely important piece of legislation for not just farmers but all Canadians. The NFU is Canada's largest direct membership, coast-to-coast farm organization. You have to be a volunta

Agriculture committee  [Technical Difficulty--Editor]...determine the extent of the so-called farmers’ privilege and the erosion of it over time as it's developed. Certainly the UPOV 91 is a template law. Much of this legislation is lifted directly from that template in terms of the amendments, the l

Agriculture committee  Certainly. You have to remember that when you talk about a number of countries using the UPOV system, you have 27 member states in the European Commission. That's almost one third of the countries in the world that use UPOV. They're a heavily subsidized agricultural production sy

Agriculture committee  I think the compromise is UPOV 78. It perfectly fulfills our international obligations. It allows plant breeders to collect royalties on their development. One third of UPOV member countries use UPOV 78, and in the TRIPS agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property

Agriculture committee  That was in reference to the expanded cash advance program and to whom that cash advance system is available. If it's expanded to include defined Canadian corporations that can have outside investment companies that are buying up tracts of land and renting them out or utilizing t

International Trade committee  I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak to this trade agreement, and for their travelling outside of Ottawa to meet with us today. NAFTA, WTO, CETA, Trans-Pacific Partnership, FIPA, TAFTA, TTIP—these are all a progression of agreements that are essential

International Trade committee  One of the big problems—and I pulled out CETA and a good portion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—is that people who haven't read either agreement are talking about it. I have taken the time to read annexes, associated agreements, references, footnotes, and the agreements. When y

International Trade committee  I think that the ISDS mechanisms in particular have been problematic in the assorted iterations, as in chapter 11 and several NAFTA actions, for example, against the Canadian Wheat Board, which no longer exists. This is again the shift of the possibility of governments to act in

International Trade committee  Yes, we have, not in specific numbers, but certainly in terms of the opposition of affiliated groups. The National Farmers Union is part of an international worldwide group called La Via Campesina, of which we are a founding member, and it is comprised of a large number of people

International Trade committee  What I was referencing in terms of the second part of your question was the issues around “tantamount to expropriation”. These sorts of actions can be launched if a regulation or, for example, if the offsets, which are forbidden, require local content or address a balance of paym

International Trade committee  We generally don't disclose our membership. I'm a former president. I'm no longer on the board, so I'm not up to date. However, we represent thousands of farmers. There's a very small number of farmers in Canada, unfortunately. We're the largest voluntary farm organization. Farm

International Trade committee  I think that when we we see debt numbers increasing by several billion dollars, frequently, annually, one has to question when that debt needs to be serviced. We're seeing increasing debt throughout the Canadian population. A lot of it is largely because of very low interest rate

International Trade committee  There is—

International Trade committee  Thank you. First of all, one of the fallacies about many of these trade agreements is that somehow trade is going to come to a crashing stop if we don't sign them.

International Trade committee  There is absolutely no problem on my part, and many of the farmers I represent, with trade. However, these agreements have a very small trade component and the trade-offs inside these agreements for the democratic process, investor-state invasion, etc., is critical. We trade, an