Agriculture Committee on April 16th, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

I want to welcome to the table today, from the B.C. Landscape & Nursery Association, Tim Loewen, chair, and Hedy Dyck; from the B.C. Cattlemen's Association, we have Ernie Willis; from the B.C. Agriculture Council, Steve Thomson; and from the British Columbia Grape Growers Association, Hans Buchler. I welcome you all to the table, to bring your ideas.

We have an hour and a half this morning. We're going to hold you all to a ten-minute opening comment, and then we'll start our rounds of questioning.

With that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Loewen.

[Tim Loewen, Growers Chair, B.C. Landscape & Nursery Association]

Good morning. My name is Tim Loewen, and I'm from the B.C. Landscape & Nursery Association. Today I'd like to talk to you about business risk management issues within our industry.

Honourable Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, the B.C. Landscape & Nursery Association represents over 700 garden centres, retailers, landscapers, and nursery growers in British Columbia. Ornamental horticulture plays a significant role in the B.C. economy. The B.C. production sector of the nursery industry generates an estimated $175 million at the farm gate annually in the B.C. economy. The landscape and retail sector provides about $500 million worth of plants, garden products, and services to B.C. consumers annually. The nursery production, landscape, and retail garden centre industries employ over 17,000 workers in B.C. The total value-added B.C. industry is estimated at $1 billion annually, including landscaping, installation, and sales of lawn and garden products.

For business risk management, there are three major issues that impact the ability of B.C. nurseries to plant and maintain growth and prosperity. The first is natural hazard risk. Weather and weather-related damage are two of the biggest risks. For example, on March 11, the Fraser Valley encountered record rainfalls that flooded several nurseries. Today, the snowpack in B.C. is at an all-time high. With a sudden surge of warm weather, all that snow is going to melt and wreak havoc throughout B.C. There is no insurance for flooding. What are agricultural producers going to do to survive?

Secondly, we have quarantine and regulated passes. The new buzzword is “invasive alien species”. Whether it's plant pests, diseases, or weedy plants, there's a whole new level of concern across the industry when a new pest is discovered. But these pests do get in even after thousands of dollars have been spent by nurseries to implement nursery certification programs, including biosecurity, that minimize the risk of importing and CFIA-regulated plant and disease pests.

This is when the industry needs help: when the disaster occurs. Growers need to know in advance that help is there, so that they can continue to plan their business. Very recently, the industry has received word that compensation may possibly be available for the massive losses incurred to the industry due to the quarantine-pest sudden oak death. These losses go back to 2003. One nursery has already closed and another is on the brink of bankruptcy. If this compensation comes through, it will save the industry in B.C. from this one pest, but what about the next pest? Will we need to wait another four years to get help?

We need a solid disaster relief program for when the next regulated pest comes along. The industry is doing its utmost across Canada, through their participation in domestic phytosanitary certification programs, to stop incoming invasive alien species. When the situation does occur, though, nursery growers need guaranteed disaster relief, short- and long-term, to ensure that we can continue to function.

Another issue we cannot deal with ourselves is the registration of safer, more effective pest control products. We take environmental stewardship seriously, but our efforts are hampered by the Pest Management Regulatory Agency's reluctance to use U.S. data to prove product efficacy and safety. We want safer and better. Why do we have to wait so long to do better?

There's also a labour shortage. To put the labour shortage in B.C. into context, by 2012, over one million jobs will need to be filled in B.C., including 500,000 new jobs and 500,000 through attrition. During the same period, if all the B.C. high school, college, and university graduates immediately went to work, they would only fill 650,000 of these vacancies. This leaves a shortage of 350,000 workers for B.C.

The industry has been trying to access workers through a Canada-first solution, with little success. The booming construction industry, as well as the oil industry in Alberta, pays very well for start-up labour, taking as many of the workers as possible.

The B.C. nursery industry requires seasonal and long-term unskilled and semi-skilled workers. It is presently accessing them through seasonable agriculture and other import worker federal programs. We urge the committee to support the continuance of these programs to help to deal with the severe shortage. For the long-term solution, we need the government's support of the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council to attract new workers to the industry, to ensure continuity, and to build a high standard of skilled people entering the industry as owners and managers.

The ornamental nursery industry develops its own solutions for many of the challenges it faces, but there are issues that we cannot solve alone. That's why we need a good agricultural policy framework: to enable producers to solve issues where they can, and to get the federal government's help where they need it.

Thank you for the opportunity for the B.C. nursery growers to provide comments for the APF discussion.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you, Mr. Loewen.

Mr. Willis will speak on behalf of the B.C. Cattlemen's Association.

[Ernie Willis, British Columbia Cattlemen's Association]

Welcome to Penticton. Instead of going to Ottawa to meet you all, it's nice to see you here in B.C.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing on business risk management, and inviting us to advise the committee on policy views of the B.C. Cattlemen's Association, an organization that represents over 1,200 cattle producers.

I'm an elected director of the B.C. Cattlemen's Association as well as the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, and I serve as chair of a domestic agriculture policy regulation committee. My family and I ranch in the Princeton and Williams Lake area. We operate a cow-calf, backgrounding, and yearling operation.

Canadian agriculture is exposed to many risks, and the cattle industry is no exception. While many of these risks are difficult to mitigate, some could be managed with reasonable effectiveness. Risk management options include diversification, private insurance, stockpiling feed, and a robust vaccination program.

The B.C. Cattlemen's Association sees these and other private sector means as the preferred tools for business risk management in Canadian agriculture. B.C. is unique from other provinces, as we have a very small feedlot sector and no large abattoirs, and most of our yearlings and calves are shipped to either Alberta or Washington state.

Some of the options available to other parts of the country, such as commodity hedging and forward contracting, are not practical in areas of B.C. where there are limited amounts of grain and corn grown for the finishing sector.

We acknowledge that government programs play a role in agriculture risk management, and we believe that in exceptional circumstances this role is legitimate. There are a large number of producers who believe that the current CAIS program is ineffective and unresponsive in times of disaster, and are currently in opposition to our stated principles. These are: normal income fluctuation risk should be the responsibility of the producers; programs must be as market-neutral as possible and structured to minimize influence on business decisions; programs should not alter the competitive balance within industry between regions, sectors, and operation structures, including operation size; programs must allow industry to be driven by clear market signals; programs must be structured to minimize risk of foreign trade action; and programs must be transparent and predictable.

The B.C. Cattlemen's Association's first priority regarding government's involvement in business risk management is that Canada develop a national disaster program framework with federal-provincial agreement in place for funding of the program.

When Canada experienced its first case of BSE, the industry struggled in the following weeks and months to avoid a complete shutdown, and worked with government in attempting to address the issues. If a predictable disaster framework had been in place, solutions to the issues would have been more timely and the industry would have functioned with more certainty.

A national disaster program would address both natural disasters, such as floods and massive droughts, and “like natural” disasters, such as border closures. This framework would pre-emtively define a disaster setting and set out funding parameters, governance, and, to the extent possible, program details specific to the disaster.

Producer groups and organizations could work with government to proactively develop plans that could fit into this framework. The predictability created by this type of framework would reduce industry's uncertainty and encourage investment in Canadian agriculture. Without a disaster program framework in place, some disasters receive ad hoc support while others do not. Just last spring, in areas of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, farmland was flooded out. It was not seeded, and a disaster that nobody could plan for occurred. The government stepped in with a program to partially offset the producers' losses incurred as a result of the disaster.

This type of program is something that cattle producers in the Peace River region and the Bulkley Valley of B.C., as well as other parts of the country, look at now when they consider the drought they have experienced for up to three years. They wonder why one disaster qualifies for aid while the other one does not. Without a framework in place, governments do not treat events consistently, and tensions and competitive imbalances occur.

The CAIS program is the government's cornerstone income disaster and stabilization program. While it has undergone some recent improvements, it fails to comply with a number of the principles I outlined earlier, particularly as the program applies to income stabilization. The CAIS program can be intrusive on business decisions, including organizational structure, breeding herd buy-and-sell decisions, and crop rotations.

CAIS is complicated, unpredictable, and non-transparent. While efforts are being made to improve the program in this regard, margin-based, targeted programs that adjust to structural change will tend to be complex, poorly understood, and difficult to access on a timely basis.

The support in the stabilization tiers of CAIS is amber, which is always a concern for trade action.

It is our opinion that sound industry planning and innovation, along with other private sector tools, will provide a viable cattle industry. Government programs will continue to play an important role in the stabilization of the cattle industry, especially through a national disaster program. The recent announcement made by the Prime Minister and the federal agriculture minister on contributory-style producer savings accounts appears to be a step in the right direction.

Thank you for the opportunity.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you, Mr. Willis.

Mr. Thomson is next, please, for ten minutes.

[Steve Thomson, Executive Director, B.C. Agriculture Council]

Thank you. Bonjour.

Welcome to Penticton and the Okanagan Valley. It is a pleasure to see you out here. As Ernie said, we're really pleased that you've taken the opportunity to come around the country and hear the views of producers.

I'm the executive director of the B.C. Agriculture Council, which is the province's general farm organization. We represent over 12,000 farmers and ranchers in B.C. through their membership in the council. This includes probably the great majority of farm organizations in B.C., and the great majority of the farm cash receipts' value in the province is represented through our council.

We have a formal submission, which I've prepared, and also a submission that we've made to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada on the agricultural policy framework. We weren't able to get it translated in time for the presentation today and we apologize for that. But I talked to the clerk earlier, and we will provide a copy of it and a translated version to you that he can circulate to all the committee members. We apologize for not being able to get it done in time for today; time constraints didn't allow it.

I want to give a quick overview of the agricultural and agri-food industry in B.C., just so that you understand it. We're a part of a cluster that produces and generates products that have a value of over $35 billion in revenues. We employ more than 290,000 people. We account for 2.3% of the provincial GDP and 14% of the provincial workforce.

At the primary level, which we represent, we have annual sales, or farm cash receipts, of over $2.5 billion in B.C., and that continues to grow. We are a growth industry and we employ directly, at the primary production level, more than 35,000 people.

While the industry in B.C. generally remains optimistic and positive, we have faced a significant number of challenges in the past year, some of which you've heard about, which have affected producer incomes and stability in the industry. This includes the serious drought situation in the Peace River area and the central interior, low market returns in some sectors—tree fruits, raspberries—as a result of pressures and the impact of imported products and low prices coming into the B.C. market, very significant issues around invasive plant species, and quarantine and disease and pest issues, as was mentioned earlier. The ongoing impact of BSE for market recovery in the cattle sector continues to provide significant challenges for the B.C. industry.

But we do have a real potential for growth. We have 13% of the Canadian population, yet we at this point count for only 7% of national farm cash receipts and about 8% of food and beverage manufacturing shipments. We see real opportunities for growth within B.C., but it's important to note that while we remain optimistic and look at the opportunities for growth, this is all against the backdrop of some disturbing trends, which I'm sure you've heard about and are aware of, around realized net farm income continuing to decline and farm profitability being on a continuing downward trend. I'm sure you've seen the numbers and the figures across Canada that impact this. That's why the agricultural policy framework discussions that are currently going on are so important to the future of the industry, in both B.C. and in Canada.

We have some major constraints to our growth in B.C. There are the increasing pressures of government and societal goals of environmental and food safety requirements, which at this point add cost to producers, but we haven't seen those initiatives add returns to producers. It's been a situation of adding cost at the farm level but not yet seeing the incremental returns in the marketplace for the benefits of this environmental programming and food safety programming at the farm level.

There are the increasing pressures and costs related to farming in the rural-urban interface, B.C. farms in the urban shadow. It's important to note that the majority of our farming and 81% of our farm cash receipts are produced in 2.7% of our provincial land area, and that same 2.7% is where 81% of the B.C. population resides. I'm talking about the Fraser Valley, the Okanagan, and Vancouver Island. So we farm in the urban shadow, and to do that provides tremendous challenges and costs to B.C. producers.

And there is continued uncertainty about the outcome of international trade negotiations on marketing systems and market development, and the ability to provide domestic support is a constraint and a challenge to growth.

As I said, we've developed a submission to Agriculture Canada that outlines the views and ideas and concerns of our member organizations regarding the policy direction in the next agricultural policy framework. It's attached as an appendix to our submission and details all the areas of the APF. I just wanted to make some general comments about the APF.

We support the need for increased emphasis on strategic investment in the sector, to move away from the continued reliance on risk-management programming. We believe that elements of the Canadian farm bill proposed by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture around the three pillars they're talking about provide a good framework for that. We strongly support the emphasis on increased strategic investment in the sector, as I said, to move away from the continued reliance on a risk-management program. We think there needs to be greater integration of the pillars of the framework. We know that the framework needs to be developed in full consultation and in a full partnership with industry. We think B.C., particularly given the unique nature and the diversity of our industry, can play an important role in the development of the framework.

With respect to risk-management programming, you've heard some of the comments already. We support the need for the continued reform of the CAIS program. We do need a program that's predictable and bankable and flexible enough to accommodate regional differences and needs. We support the current direction of the NISA-like components in the top tier of the CAIS program in order to meet some of those objectives. We feel that's, as Ernie said, a good step in the right direction.

We support the recently approved framework for a disaster relief program, and we urge the federal government to move forward in full consultation with industry towards implementation of the program. We support the current direction of enhancements to production insurance for edible horticulture and the inclusion of the livestock sector in production insurance, in full consultation with those sectors.

With respect to environmental policy and programs, as you may know, we continue to proactively support and lead the delivery of the environmental farm program and the national farm stewardship program in B.C. We hope that the emphasis will remain on this program in the next policy framework, and we urge direction to ensure that there is a smooth transition between the current agreement and the next policy framework so that we don't lose the momentum and the good work that's been done in that program to date.

We support the continued development of policy for recognition of ecological goods and services, which must have the flexibility to address the unique regional differences in environment, habitat values, land values, and approaches to environmental management in B.C. The types of programs, for example, that have been talked about in the prairies--the ALUS-type model and other things you've heard about--don't work here. So we need regional flexibility to make sure that the type of programming fits our unique industry and the unique nature of the environmental issues in B.C.

I wanted to make two quick comments on a couple of other areas while I have the chance. One area is transportation policy. In recent years we've seen an erosion in the reliability of rail shipments that feed ingredients to the B.C. livestock industry. The current labour issues with CN, which are affecting delivery, are something that really needs to be addressed. We think the federal government needs to work with the livestock and feed industry and the railway industry to deal with issues of reliability of service and to ensure priority for the feed industry, which is facing very significantly increased costs currently, as a result of those labour disruptions. We need to get to the point where we're not facing that uncertainty and risk in the future.

With regard to the renewal of the Fisheries Act, we were part of a coalition that recommended changes for amendments to the legislation. We hope that the review process will continue for this legislation and that there will be a recommitment to consideration of the amended legislation, because it really needs a good look at, and it has a significant impact on our industry. We supported the fact that a new bill was tabled, but we are disappointed that it's currently being “hoisted”, or whatever the term is. We hope there's a recommitment to getting back to looking at that piece of legislation.

Again, thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Mr. Buchler, please.

[Hans Buchler, Director, British Columbia Grapegrowers Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for the invitation.

I have to apologize ahead of time, since I'm a bit unprepared. I received notice of this meeting only yesterday, so I'm a last minute stand-in.

I am a director of the B.C. Grapegrowers Association, and I'm chairing the B.C. Wine Grape Council, which funds and develops research projects for the viticulture and oenology sectors. Today I will make some comments on the environment and land use.

Generally speaking, the grape and wine industry in British Columbia is thriving. While we have some issues in common, especially in terms of the labour shortage, we are doing fairly well. So I'll make some comments of a more general nature, in terms of the environment and agriculture policy, and the way we see that this should be developed for the longer term. If I go over the ten minutes, please shut me up.

In terms of the agriculture policy frameworkand the development of different pillars of interest, I see a bit of an issue, in terms of overlaps among the different categories. It's important to find a message to keep track of this, in order to ensure that these pillars do not operate in isolation.

In terms of the environment, the major challenge will be caused by climate change. We have some fairly accurate climate models, specifically for the Okanagan. We have run three different models with predictions for 2020, 2050, and 2080. Even the most moderate one sees a fairly considerable increase in average temperatures by 2080. So there are definitely going to be some challenges.

One of the major challenges in this area will be water. We live in a semi-arid area, which is a problem we share with many other areas in Canada. We foresee that water will become more and more of an issue, as climate change evolves.

We foresee that spring runoff will happen much earlier. There might be more moisture over wintertime and more accumulation of moisture, but the water will be out of the watershed almost a month earlier than in the past. So we have to find ways of storing more water for agriculture.

Increasing temperatures will also mean higher demand for water. As evapotranspiration of crops increases, we will need to have a fair bit more water available. This is going to be very difficult in areas such as the Okanagan Valley. There are opportunities for increasing upland storage, but they are pretty limited. So it will take a fairly large amount of capital input to improve the water storage capacity in arid areas.

There is very little groundwater that can be drawn from. There is a huge lake here that looks like an enormous water reservoir, but if you draw it down by one foot, it will probably take ten years to replenish that amount of water. You can't look at this as a water reservoir. So we need some other options.

Climate change will also bring changes in disease and pest complexes. We are already starting to see this in the south end of the valley. We brought pests into the grape industry that were unknown ten years ago, and this is probably going to continue. We see an increasing migration of pests from the south, not to mention the importation from other areas through propagating material. Unfortunately, we have not been able to keep these out, despite all the recent quarantine regulations.

Phytoplasma disease has been brought in on French plant material, bois noir, which is a serious concern in the European grape industry. We hope it will not spread; we hope we've caught it in time. But this is an indication of things to come.

Another aspect of climate change, which I personally see becoming a serious issue, is the increasing demand for biofuel. Biofuel production will end up competing on a very large scale with food production in Canada. For the agriculture industry, this is probably good news. I predict that food prices will increase fairly dramatically over the next 20 to 30 years because of that competition. But from a policy point of view, this poses a serious challenge, because food production should come first. It is of primary importance to ensure that food is available for the population at large in the long term. I foresee this becoming a bit of an issue, in terms of planning and competition.

Also, climate change will have an impact on the production capacity in the areas we now depend on for food imports. In British Columbia, I believe the estimate from government is that we produce only 48% of the food that we consume here. A lot of the imports come from California and Mexico at this time. If these areas suffer from a serious setback from climate change, British Columbia will be in really serious trouble. I think the same goes for probably most areas in Canada. This is one area that will need very serious attention from the federal government, from the provincial government, and from local area planning in terms of our food supply.

The federal government probably has, apart from long-term planning, also a responsibility in terms of renegotiating trade agreements, because in the long term, I believe there is a need to protect agriculture, to put tools in place that allow for the support of agriculture production for the supply of domestic food products to the population. I realize this is going to be a huge challenge, and will not be popular to bring to the World Trade Organization. On the other hand, I believe that all other countries will eventually be in the same position as we are, and will have to find ways of ensuring that there is a minimum production of food secured within their own regions and borders.

In terms of land use, land is of course obviously very intimately linked to production capacity. We see more and more competition, especially in terms of real estate development, competition in the use of land. The unfortunate side effect this has brought with it is a substantial increase in land prices, to a point where it becomes almost impossible for young people to get into farming. The succession in the farming sector is going to become a really serious issue, primarily because of the financial issues but also because of less and less available land, especially in British Columbia. I really can't speak for other provinces here, but in British Columbia the estimated amount of land that is arable and could potentially be used for agriculture is in the neighbourhood of 5%, and by now there is about 3% of the land mass used in agriculture in B.C. This is going to become a very serious issue.

Also, going back to biofuel production, there will be more and more demand on land for biofuel production, especially if there are very substantial financial incentives in this sector. I believe this will happen. We see this in the U.S. already, and it is happening around the world. It's a good news and bad news story at the same time. Biofuels can contribute to climate change and the mitigation of climate change through carbon sequestration, although probably not in the form that is being done right now in the U.S. The U.S. is banking primarily on the production of corn, which probably is not the way to go. But there are other crops that are very promising for the future that need just a little bit more research in terms of the breakdown of the cellulose matter, materials like switchgrass, which will probably have a much more beneficial effect in terms of climate change and greenhouse gas mitigation.

The other issue in terms of land use that we cited is there is a large amount of land sitting idle, which has been bought up by developers. We need some policies that will allow this land to be farmed by bona fide farmers. We have some precedents in other jurisdictions where there is a squatter's right, and if any agricultural farmland in an agricultural area sits idle a farmer has the right to occupy it and farm it, without any side effects from the jurisdiction.

Thanks very much for the opportunity. I think I might have overstepped my time.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you very much.

We'll open our first round of questions--seven minutes each, kicking off with Mr. Easter.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, folks, and thank you for making the presentations.

First, on your point, Steve, on the new Fisheries Act, although it's not related to this hearing, I do know, having chaired the fisheries committee before, that habitat is a huge issue in B.C. and trying to deal with DFO in that regard. Our position at the moment on the bill--why we put the hoist motion in place--is do we want the bill to go to committee before second reading? The bill clearly was developed by the bureaucracy in Ottawa, which doesn't understand what things are like on the ground. It's a lot easier to change a bill if the consultations are held first, rather than after, so that's why the position is there. So certainly if you want to write the minister and tell him to come to his senses and do some consultations and let it go to committee before second reading, we'd welcome that.

The pressure from imported product, which you also mentioned, is a huge issue that's not directly related to the agricultural policy framework discussion, but it is one we hear about consistently. I was talking to some people the other day in the apple industry, and maybe you can fill me in on what the situation here is. The apple industry in some areas is basically going under because concentrated product is coming in from China. They're adding 80% Canadian water and calling the product a “Product of Canada”. We're going to have to deal with this issue. It's the same with honey from China.

There were a couple of others that I think Tim mentioned as well, such as the difficulty of products coming in here with which our competitors can use a herbicide or pesticide or fungicide that we can't use. We restrict it for safety reasons, yet product grown with the use of that herbicide or pesticide in other countries comes in here just the same. It's an issue we've grappled with for a while. I'd like to know what you propose as a solution on that end, because obviously we haven't found it yet. The Pest Management Regulatory Agency I think has improved in part because this committee demands that they come before us every six months for a progress report. If you have anything in that area, I'd certainly welcome hearing it.

The last question, before I go to answers, is on your point as well, Tim. In fact I dealt with one of the greenhouses out here that is in the process of going under over a pest. The difficulty is with CFIA in that regard to a certain extent. I understand why they have to do what they do, but in the dairy industry or in the cattle industry, if we have a cow with tuberculosis, it's immediately pulled out of the herd, and compensation is right there, right now. Why can't we do the same thing with pests in the horticulture industry?

That's my series of questions to start.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Who wants to start?

[Steve Thomson]

I'll respond first, if you want, and I'll leave the pest issue to Tim.

You raised some very good points. Those are the major challenges we have faced.

I'm not sure what the solution is to the issue around labelling and things, but we certainly think that being able to import product, do something minimal to it, and then label it as a product of Canada needs to be addressed. We hear from a lot of our members and from consumers that the situation needs to be fixed. If we're going to have a food security policy and support local and domestic food production, consumers need to be confident that they are actually supporting Canadian or B.C. production. So I think the regulations around labelling need to be addressed.

In terms of the imported product, I think we have seen some improvements in the PMRA process. Still, I think we need to have more effective regulations to deal with the issue around importing product with pesticides and herbicides that aren't licensed for use in Canada. Or conversely, we need to have access to those same products. If they are safe to come in and we're going to have to compete with it, then we should be able to give our producers the competitive advantage in being able to use those products.

On the trade issue, in terms of dumped product and those kinds of impacts, I think we need to look at more effective trade remedy measures that allow us to respond faster when we get into those situations. The current process, through special import measures, CITT, and anti-dumping kinds of things, is onerous and costly for producers. So we need more effective trade remedy measures where there are clear situations of low-cost dumping of products into our marketplace.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Do you want to address it, Tim?

[Tim Loewen]

There were two questions: one was regarding PMRA, and the other was regarding compensation for quarantined pests.

I'd like to defer the PMRA question to Hedy. She's our technical person, and she could answer that much better than I could.

[Hedy Dyck, Contract Industry Coordinator, Nursery Industry Development, B.C. Landscape & Nursery Association]

With regard to PMRA, in Canada we have less effective, more toxic pesticides than the U.S. In some cases we will not be able to ship to the U.S. because PMRA has not kept up with what's going on. We're actually stuck with pesticides that are now outdated, and we cannot in fact get the pesticides that should actually be used. It's actually creating a trade issue for us with the U.S. We ship 60% to 65% of our stock to the U.S. It's becoming a big issue.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Please make a very short response, because we're almost out of time.

[Tim Loewen]

We'll talk directly to the second part of your question, on sudden oak death.

We need the compensation quickly. As you mentioned, from the minute we find out there's going to be a quarantine, our costs start to incur far beyond the cost of the plant that's destroyed. There are customers, employees, cleanup, and it goes on and on. For us, a timely response would be good.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

That would be on the product, though.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Your time's up, Mr. Easter.

Mr. Gaudet.

[Roger Gaudet, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am very glad to be here this morning. I made a call to Quebec earlier, and I was told that there was six inches of snow, that the roads were blocked and that many people didn't go to work. So, I am all the more glad to be here. Your region is very beautiful.

In your opinion, what would be the wisest way for the federal government to invest in the agricultural and agrifood policy? Investment in agriculture in Canada currently focuses on programs. Rather than investing in general agricultural programs, wouldn't it be better for the federal government to provide targeted financial support?

I would like all the witnesses to give me their opinions on this issue, starting with Mr. Loewen.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Go ahead.

[Tim Loewen]

I missed the first part of the question. Could you repeat the first part?

[Roger Gaudet, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

In your opinion, what would be the most judicious way for the federal government to invest in the new agriculture and agrifood policy? Investment in the area of agriculture in Canada currently focuses on programs. Rather than investing in general agricultural programs, wouldn't it be better for the federal government to provide targeted financial support for certain initiatives? When the government invests in programs of a general nature, not everybody ends up getting their money.

[Tim Loewen]

That's almost a tricky question.

[Roger Gaudet, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

I'm asking you this question to help you. You're the farmers, and we're here to ask you questions so that the government can help you as much as possible. In the United States and the European Union, farmers get far more subsidies than they do in Canada. That's why I want to know your opinion on this issue.