Agriculture committee  Well, a lot of the tools are in place. Regardless of whether there's a marketing board, a lot of the tools are in place to stop the dumping. You've made the agreements. We just don't have a mechanism there, such as AgriStability. It's $300,000 to get an anti-dump in place that wo

Agriculture committee  It's going back a ways now. I don't think I'll pick off the year, because I wasn't personally involved in that, but it was half a dozen years or so ago. And the same thing could happen any year. Our industry has just said that we're not wasting the money trying, because even if w

Agriculture committee  Well, that's certainly on the table right now within the organizations. As a representative of the tree fruit organization, I would say yes. As a long-term strategy for the country, I don't know. It is pretty scary to be that far out of the world market if you're trading in the w

Agriculture committee  No, far be it from anybody to say that. We don't supply anywhere near enough.

Agriculture committee  I don't know. I've never thought of it going in that direction before. All I'm looking for are things that respond to the consumers' desires. Consumers put higher food safety regulations on us than some of our competitors have. So the consumer, or the taxpayer, needs to share tha

Agriculture committee  I don't know the details of how the tax would work, but I think it wouldn't be as big a difference over time, on the face of it. If you're paying tax on one side, you're developing a loss carry-forward on the other. I don't think that's such a big factor. Cost of production in o

Agriculture committee  Recently, the administration of the programs for B.C. has been moved regionally to Kelowna and out of Winnipeg. This is the beginning of it, but early indications are it's more responsive. The people in the office, to a large extent, are the same people who were transferred from

Agriculture committee  Beyond that, when a young person gets in, quite often they're looking at the numbers as to what they would do to be a viable farm, but whenever they make a move in the direction of being viable through diversification or upgrading, they're cut out. I'm in the tree fruit industry.

Agriculture committee  There are two parts to my answer. Just in simplistic terms, the programs that exist now need to take into account ways to trigger in years where margins drop for those producers who are doing the right things: diversifying; expanding their operations to reach an economic unit; or

Agriculture committee  Yes. As I say, this is my first time to a committee. However, I've been involved in the risk management advisory committee in B.C. and the first of the federal consultations this spring. We always talk about changes to the program, and I wonder if someone could explain the heig

Agriculture committee  Thank you for inviting me. This is a new process for me. I'm a tree fruit grower from the Okanagan in B.C. Contrary to my winter look for pruning, I'm a young farmer. The issue I have with the programs in place now is that the young, expanding, and diversifying farms are quit