Agriculture committee  I can speak as a farmer; that's my expertise. I'm not an international trade lawyer or a politician. It seems that they would have more to lose than we would if we have a trade deficit. With respect to putting more pressure on them, I don't know what the answer is to that. That'

Agriculture committee  If I may add one comment to that, I think sometimes the numbers are a little behind. I'll give a quick example. We have probably about 600,000 bushels of storage on our farm, times about $2 a bushel; it may be even 700,000 bushels, so just call it 1.4 million dollars' worth of gr

Agriculture committee  I think it's nice for things like that to be market driven and not be government driven. At the end of the day, we want things to be market driven, so I just worry about what the consequences to that would be later on, but yes, that would help with demand. There's no doubt. It's

Agriculture committee  Okay. It's a huge concern because if tomorrow there is a new deal with China and the United States, there goes potentially 25% of the canola market. They might bring in soybeans or whatnot because they're easily interchangeable. It's a huge concern that we may be on the outs bec

Agriculture committee  I'm not sure I want to dig a deeper hole and take on more debt. Yes, I guess it helps with cash flow, but is that the answer? If you don't have enough money to put your crop in, you just take on more debt and they allow you. Even if it's interest-free, hypothetically, it's not a

Agriculture committee  If the markets aren't there, all you've done is take on more debt that you can't pay back.

Agriculture committee  It is a tough one because you can speculate that maybe a specific executive could have been tipped off and not taken into custody. Maybe that would be part of what this is. That's all speculation, so it's hard to say. We know China has done this in the past, but we need to get t

Agriculture committee  Mr. Chair, members of Parliament, thank you for the opportunity to be with you today. My name is Stephen Vandervalk, and I'm a fourth-generation farmer from the Fort Macleod area of southern Alberta. I've been farming my whole life. I'm past-president of the Grain Growers of Can

Agriculture committee  Yes, definitely. In western Canada, numbers change, but probably 80% to 85% of our product is exported. It's all-important. When it comes down to what you were talking about, the work the federal government does through CIGI, who do trade missions around the world, and some of th

Agriculture committee  Sure, that's every bit as important. Sometimes I'm on trade missions, and I always bug my farmer colleagues who I go along with. I ask what they are doing going on a trade mission when we can't even get this product to port. There's no doubt that is a huge bottleneck. A new term

Agriculture committee  No. I would agree that it depends on regions. In western Canada, there is no doubt that farm income, in the last seven to eight years especially, has increased significantly. It has to do with a few things. World prices have increased. In the last 10 to 15 years, with a lot of th

Agriculture committee  There are a few things. Agri-invest has been something that's also bankable. Agri-insurance, as far as a grain and oilseeds farmer is concerned, is the be-all and end-all for the business risk management suite. We get coverage, we know what we're going to have, and we're able to

Agriculture committee  The grain companies now and some of the crop researchers, the Syngentas of the world, are doing a lot of research. We do have the fund, which I think is upwards of $60 million, in the Western Grains Research Foundation, and they are doing some research as well. It's a very toug

Environment committee  It's coming from the marketplace and therefore it's usually going to be profitable for both parties involved. That's far more sustainable than a program that's just paying somebody to do something from a government that may disappear in the future and then it just goes back to th

Environment committee  Sure. I've been fortunate enough to travel around the world, and I've seen what farmers around the world want as far as new genetics go, and it's fairly consistent: drought tolerance, greater yield with fewer nutrients. That's something that is very sustainable going forward if