Agriculture Committee on Feb. 22nd, 2007

[Paul Steckle, Liberal, Huron—Bruce, ON]

The answer is no, and I think your answer is also no.

We have a situation where today we are discriminating against people who work off-farm under EI, employment insurance. I truly believe that we need to correct that for those people who work off-farm and find themselves for a period of time devoid of a job, but they can't draw employment insurance because they still have, as partners in the farming operation, a vested interest in that operation. Therefore, they can't draw employment insurance.

I believe that those people who can never draw it should not have to pay it in the first place. Would that be something you could agree with, or is it something you would see as beneficial? Those who can't benefit from EI should not have to pay EI. I don't pay EI, but you, working off-farm with a two-month layoff in the wintertime, can't draw employment insurance if you have an interest as a partner in the farm.

[Annette Aurélie Desmarais]

I think a really good example of this issue of people paying into EI and not being able to benefit from it are the migrant workers from Mexico who come to Ontario. They pay into EI and the Canada Pension Plan and it is absolutely impossible for them to ever recuperate those costs.

[Paul Steckle, Liberal, Huron—Bruce, ON]

I think there are many areas where I think we need to.... I'm a farmer. I'm one of those parents who has lost a child in a farm accident, and it was not necessarily because we didn't have day care, but we lost a child.

There are things happening. There are circumstances in the farming community unbeknownst to those people who have never been on a farm. We live in a different environment entirely. What Grant and Jim have said, and all the others--those are problems we have dealt with for a long time.

Wouldn't you feel better as a farm wife, or as a principal farm-raised male, or whoever you might be, knowing that you are the provider of food for this country, a food security program for this country, where we recognize you as the principal people behind what we think is the glue that keeps this country together, where food security and the sovereignty of our food supply are things we recognize and give due credit for? We're not even getting that today. There's something about being proud of what we do and being recognized and having someone say thank you once in a while. We don't have that today, much as it's a fact that we don't get paid for what we do.

I believe we have to change the way we do it. There are so many areas where we can do it.

There's a program that was--

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Steckle, your time is running out, so a quick question and a quick response.

[Paul Steckle, Liberal, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Just quickly, was the Canadian farm families options program a good program, and should it be continued? What is that? Is that an exit program for farmers and their wives? It's the $25,000 program that came out last fall.

[Janet Smith]

We found in our program that very few people qualified. It didn't apply to enough people in our community.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you, Mr. Steckle.

Mr. Bellavance, please.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you all for your testimony.

Our Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-food often hears technical presentations. That is a normal and necessary thing. However, as a witness said earlier, it is equally very important to discuss the human and social aspects of agriculture. Therefore I thank you for today's testimonies.

There seems to be a common theme in your testimony on the many factors contributing to the increase in stress in the agricultural sector, and that constant theme is financial instability. There is also a fear of financial instability. As Mr. Barnabé stated, even those who are doing fairly well in their area often feel the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.

It has to be said, there is a crisis in agriculture. It's an income crisis. Immediately following the 2006 elections, thousands of agricultural producers came to Parliament Hill. I was there, along with agricultural producers from my riding. Their concern was the income crisis. Therefore it does exist.

In 2005, net income for Canadian agricultural producers went down by a little more than 14%. In Quebec, that decrease was approximately 7%. The share of the budget allocated to agriculture by the federal government in 1991-92, which wasn't all that long ago, was 4%. In 2005-06 it was 2%. These are all true and verified figures.

The Bloc's demands come from people like you, who bring them to us. It's very important that you be heard. There is talk of reinvesting in agriculture and of implementing a real income security policy, among other things, on the financial side.

I have the feeling that we are at a crossroads. There's a political choice to be made. What kind of agriculture do we want? Do we still want family farming? Do we believe in it? And if that is what we want, then we need to take the necessary steps to ensure that this type of agriculture lasts. Do we prefer an industrial agriculture or do we prefer agriculture that provides commodities from elsewhere?

I'd like to hear you on this. Do you feel that, politically, this choice has been made, or do you feel that you are preaching in the wilderness?

[Carmen Ducharme]

We were talking about food sovereignty earlier on. We agree with food sovereignty. Being recognized everywhere, that is a good thing.

Why is so much required of Quebec and Canadian producers? The demands are huge. And yet, we buy agricultural commodities that are sprayed with DDT and all the pesticides that have been banned in Quebec or in Canada for 20 years now.

Why are the standards not the same? If we had the same requirements for imported agricultural commodities that we have for our domestic production, there would be no problem. In that way, no one could overwhelm us so much.

Labelling is also very important. When the contents of a jar of pickles, for example, are worth 10¢ and the container is worth 20¢, people have the right to label the jar "Made in Canada". It's the container that is produced in Canada; it is not the cucumbers because we don't grow those here any more. They come from Bangladesh where they are sprayed with any old thing, and we accept that. It is unacceptable. Our cucumber producers shut down their operations because the produce coming from China, from Bangladesh or from wherever was selling for less. If only we demanded the same quality here and we set the same standards for imported agricultural commodities as for those that we produce, that would already be a big step in the right direction.

We must also stop buying modified milk ingredients which create obstacles for our dairy producers. I work in the dairy production sector and therefore, this greatly affects me. The processors are making a lot of money, millions of dollars, at our expense. Often we are members of our own cooperatives and we are being greatly undermined by our own companies. These are all issues that must be studied, and it is an urgent matter.

[Annette Aurélie Desmarais]

I think that's the question: what kind of agriculture do we want? What kind of food system do we want? Do we want an industrial one? That's what we have right now.

Is it working? Well, we heard a lot of speakers here highlight the fact that it's not working for farmers and farming families, and I would argue it's not working for consumers either. Consumers aren't eating or getting the kind of food they want to eat. We see that, because there has been such a high increase in the demand for organic foods. But the whole organic industry is problematic also, if we don't ensure that it doesn't fall into the hands of the transnationals.

What we want is a food system that speaks to food sovereignty. What we want is a food system that is an approach to food production and food consumption, in which farming families produce healthy food that is grown in ways that sustain the earth. That's one of the things the women in this study kept highlighting: a deep concern for the environment. I think that now the world community is finally acknowledging the problem of global warming.

So food sovereignty offers some important insights into how governments can formulate agricultural policy. It's based on the idea that governments and peoples have the obligation and the right to define their own national agricultural policies to ensure the well-being of their populations, rather than depending on an international institution—for example, like the WTO—to decide what kinds of agricultural policies we want in Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Robertson wants in.

I'll just ask all witnesses to keep your comments brief. Each committee member has only seven minutes in this first round, and they want to get in as many questions as possible.

[Grant Robertson]

I'll be brief.

The central question you ask is about what kinds of farmers we want, how do we want our food produced. That's why the APF II process has been so disappointing. They talk about the vision as though it were some hyped-up, new, exciting policy direction, when in reality it's just a continuation of about 40 years of policy direction that is clearly not working. No matter how you look at it, how you divide it up, how you study it, it's clear that the income at the farm gate is on a rapid decline. Programs like CAIS, which is margin-based, mean that every year in declining markets you're ratcheting down the available pot of money to any particular farm operation, and every year it's a little bit less. There's no talk about changing that.

The APF II process has to be turned around and changed. We have to decide who is going to produce our food, but we also have to be using some of the tools we currently have. We have a Competition Act. We've never used it. We've never enforced it.

As agribusiness gets more and more consolidated, there is more pressure. They become both the buyer of product and the seller of product to farmers, and that's a pretty no-win situation for any family farm. We have sanitary and phytosanitary rules that we can enforce for food coming into this country, but we allow black water, which is sewage sludge, to be sprayed on strawberries in Mexico, and then they're shipped into Canada at the height of the strawberry season to compete on the grocery store shelf with our strawberries grown to our standards.

We need to decide whether we have some backbone in this country and we're actually going to stand up for our farmers, our primary producers, our communities, our consumers, or are we just going to continue down this road that tries to pretend that the U.S. Farm Bill doesn't exist, that it's not there, that we're not competing against these things? The APF II process is a complete disappointment.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Van Tassel, this is the last comment on your round.

Sorry, André.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

That is what I wanted to hear.

[William Van Tassel]

Given the discussions that took place earlier on, I am almost ashamed to speak.

In fact, the coalition advocates programs that will allow family farms to be viable and transferable.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Devolin, you have seven minutes, please.

[Barry Devolin, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

I also want to thank everyone for being here today. As Mr. Steckle said, you're providing a somewhat different perspective on an issue that we, as a committee, have dealt with from many different directions. You're providing a somewhat different one today. The farm income crisis is something that certainly every rural member of Parliament hears about when they go home. It's not a partisan issue or an ideological issue. It's just a practical matter that farm families are dealing with across Canada.

I'm not from a farm. When I was first elected, I was meeting with my non-partisan farm council, and they were asking me what it was like to be an MP with the uncertainties of a minority government, and one of them said that I had to be crazy to be a politician. I looked at him and said, “You're calling me crazy?” We talked a little bit about his life and his job and the risk he was taking.

There are fewer farmers in Canada today than there have been in the past, and that number is declining. I suspect that there are many reasons for this. One of them would be the increased use of technology and automation, and this is nothing unique to farming. I was talking to someone from Sudbury recently, and they were saying that in the seventies there were 20,000 miners there. Now there are 6,000 miners producing more ore than when there were 20,000.

I was at a ploughing match this summer, and they had everything from a horse pulling a single-blade plough to a plough on wheels behind a horse, through to all the vintages. And I was surprised by how much faster some of the more mechanized farm ploughs were compared to the simple ones. A couple of weeks ago we had farm equipment people here talking about the size of the ploughs out there today that run with GPS, and I couldn't help but believe that one of those tractors could have ploughed this entire area, where all these farmers were working for the entire day, probably in an hour or two.

So I see that happening. The fact that there are fewer farmers is one reality. What I find troubling is that the farmers who are left, so to speak, who are working hard, who are efficient, who are using technology, and who are good, competent business people are not making any money. I think that is a big problem.

This is the question I have. Jim Smolik made the comment that government doesn't owe our farmers a living; they owe farmers, I think you said, the opportunity or the right to make a living. I've heard different people here today say things, and I think there are two different streams of thought. One is that farmers should be able to stay on the land, because they can actually make a living from the marketplace by actually being paid for what they produce. I think there's another stream that says that government needs to directly intervene and actually supplement or provide income to farmers in some way so they can continue to farm.

Mr. Smolik, could you start? And if there's anyone else who would like to comment, I'd be interested to hear which of those two roads you think we should go down.

[Jim Smolik]

From our perspective, I think everything has progressed in time. We use GPS ourselves. We double-swathed canola last year for the first time ever. You make a swath, you leave 50 feet of standing canola, and you kind of question what you're doing out there. In the end, it speeds up things. It's efficiency. It's all those things.

I'm not afraid to compete. I'm not afraid to compete with other producers in the rest of the world, because Canada is an exporting nation. We wobble between being the third and fourth largest exporter in the world. We have to export, so we have to be efficient. We have to compete against other countries that have lower labour costs or other issues like that.

So as I say, I'm not afraid to compete. What I need from the government is the regulatory environment that allows me to compete, and as far as keeping people on the land, personally, I don't want it. If somebody were going to give me money just to keep me on the land, I would find a different job.

A lot of the presenters here today have talked about pride. There's pride in agriculture. There's pride in doing what you do well. When you stand at the end of the day and you look down the field and see that you've just seeded 300 acres in a single day, or when my grandfather used to be able to harrow 10 acres a day, on a good day--just harrow with horses--there's real pride in that.

So I think from my own perspective it's a regulatory environment that we need that will allow us.... Yes, there are always going to be niche markets, and if you have that regulatory environment, there will be room for smaller producers who will find niche markets on their own too.

[Barry Devolin, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

Ms. Desmarais.

[Annette Aurélie Desmarais]

Yes.

First of all, in this question of technology, the issue is whether you let technology control you or whether policy controls the use of technology and what technologies get developed. That's an important thing that we have to keep in mind.

Also, how do you ensure the financial well-being of farmers? How do you ensure financial stability? Well, you have to develop regulatory mechanisms to ensure a fair price paid to farmers for agricultural goods, so that—

[Barry Devolin, Conservative, Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON]

When you say fair price, would that be something other than a market price? Who would determine “fair”?

[Annette Aurélie Desmarais]

It would have to be determined by a cost-of-production equation of some sort.

Also, we need a regulatory framework that enhances supply management and orderly marketing. Those are two instruments that allow farmers to have more financial stability.

I think I'll stop there.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Barnabé, then Mr. Robertson. Please keep it short.

[Claude Barnabé]

Last year, I had the opportunity to go to a region of Senegal in order to give some rice producers some training on collective marketing. They told us that people from the World Bank, who are favourable to the market, studied rice production in that region and told them that they were very competitive, that their production methods were very effective and worked well. Unfortunately, they had competition in the form of poor quality rice from Thailand for which the transportation was subsidized. This rice arrived on the Senegalese market at the same time as the local harvest, and the Senegalese, who do not have great purchasing power, were buying this poor-quality rice from Thailand which was probably subsidized. As a result, the Senegalese rice producers could not sell their rice.

In my opinion, globalization implies competition, of course, but as the gentleman was saying, the environment has to be regulated. I feel that it is an utopian ideal to think that we can regulate trade around the world and that Thailand, Mexico and Canada can compete on an equal footing. I have difficulty believing that. I tend rather to think that we should aim for independence first of all, and then, negotiate long-term agreements with countries that need wheat, barley or canola. I'm not certain that opening everything up is the answer.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Robertson, keep it very short, please.