Agriculture Committee on April 17th, 2007

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Thanks very much, gentlemen, for being here.

Mr. Kirtzinger, in one of your three points, you mentioned farming and profit focus, pruning farmers, business principles, and how this is not a social problem. My question to you—and I wouldn't mind comments from other people—is whether government at any level has a role in supporting rural Canada or the small farm. Does it have a role in supporting some kind of rail infrastructure? Or should it just be a side that's there to assist in disaster?

The implication is that if there's no other support, many of our farms will continue to die out. That will have an effect on small communities unless we bring something else in. We're left with efficient farms, but not a lot, and those are big ones.

I'm wondering if I could get some comments from you and others on this topic.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Kirtzinger.

[Darcy Kirtzinger]

As Mr. Thompson said earlier, in some places the government doesn't have a role. Certainly in my family, I know the older generations think that way.

When you look at new farmers and talk about learning marketing and learning the markets, agriculture has to be seen like any other form of production. It has to be market-driven. In that case, no, but in terms of education, certainly. That's where I was going to address Mr. Gaudet.

One solution the government can provide is better education aimed at urban people, and certainly at all Canadians, to decrease that divide between urban and rural about the importance of agriculture, about the value of agriculture, and about the environmental impact.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Dr. Landals.

[Dr. Duane Landals]

It's very difficult to comment on whether or not the government should support the small farm, because I guess it would be a very social kind of question. But there's no doubt in my mind that a lot of the animal health industry or animal industry agriculture is public good related.

There are issues and there are infrastructure items. There's education and there are laboratory services, both of which need government support or they will not survive. As an industry, we cannot survive while expecting the industries to support all of those things themselves. There are people who consume the food and there are people who live in the environment and don't even eat meat. However, they are impacted by the health issues that might be around meats.

So there is a public good issue at stake, and there is definitely room for government support in a lot of these programs.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Anybody else?

[Jurgen Preugschas]

On that, in its attempt to help small farmers, I think government policy unfortunately has actually harmed them. I know I sound like a broken record, but the regulatory things that government keeps putting in place harm small farmers much more than they do the larger farmers. We therefore just keep becoming larger in order to become efficient and to cover those costs. By doing all these things to protect whomever or to increase the bureaucracy, you actually have created policies that kill the small family farm.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Dobson.

[Bill Dobson]

I'll be very brief.

The “family farm” is a term that we start to get too nostalgic about. The family farm is a unit that has proven, for centuries, to be the most efficient way to feed the people of the world. The maintenance and preservation of the family farm is absolutely vital. That doesn't mean they have to be hundred-acre farms with chickens and pigs and ducks and everything else. They can be very specialized, and that's exactly what we have.

But I'll tell you another thing. Small farms or medium-sized farms have survived through this period of time that we've been over because they're of a size that they have some time to have some off-farm income. I don't promote that idea, but they've survived.

We tend to think the solution to everything is to get larger, more efficient farms. But when you get larger farms and they don't pay, they go down.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Thank you.

I'm going to move on to the WTO, and pork specifically. It's my understanding that our access to the European market is something like 0.5%. They're allowing imports at 0.5% of their production, but we would like to see it around 5%, which would be more realistic. That's what we're trying to negotiate. At the same time, our government has said it will be protecting supply management. I'd like to get your comments on this.

We want to increase our market, and specifically in this area. At the same time, we have this area of our agricultural sector that we want to keep strong and preserve. We've said that publicly, so how do we reconcile the two?

[Jurgen Preugschas]

There's no question that this is a dilemma and a difficulty we have in this country. The view of Alberta Pork or Canadian Pork is not that we're against supply management at all. It's fine if groups want to remain small and not add to the bigger picture of exporting out of this country. That's their choice. But the difficulty comes when the government puts in place policies that support one sector but affect the other ones detrimentally. That's the argument we have.

Last year, when Canada stood alone against 148 countries in protecting sensitive products, it hurt our negotiating ability at the WTO. We need to keep that strength in the WTO, along with the respect we have there, to encourage exports around the world, not hurt products like ours to the benefit of another product. We don't want to play one against the other; just don't hurt ours.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you, Mr. Atamanenko.

Mr. Easter.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thanks.

I'll start off by disagreeing with Jurgen right off the bat. Our biggest problem with supply management is within Canada.

I've been at the negotiations. I don't hear supply management talked about by other countries. I've only heard the argument you just made, Jurgen, from the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance and others using it as an excuse for our not being successful at the WTO. I don't hear those arguments from New Zealand, Australia, or the United States. I don't hear them.

We have got to learn to take a united stand. When we go to Europe or to Geneva—and I've been there—and get people in a room, it's Canadians who are making the arguments with their enemies in the other countries in terms of trade, saying that supply management is our problem and that we've got to get that off the table so that we can get to free trade. That's one of our biggest problems. I say that respectfully.

Mr. Landals, you said we haven't had a strategic plan in place. That's true; we haven't. I think if you look at us compared with the Americans, it's really true, especially as we're getting into the ethanol and biodiesel areas in this country. They have a strategic plan. They're looking at ethanol and biodiesel from a national security point of view, from a national food strategy point of view, and from an assistance to the primary production industry point of view. We don't tend to do that.

There are opportunities; I agree with Jurgen on this point. As a country we're looking at ethanol and biodiesel at the moment as if that's our answer, whereas we should be looking at wind energy, we should be looking at small hydro energy, we should be looking at the biogas you can produce from manure biomass and everything else, and the pine beetle waste in terms of forestry, but we don't seem to do it from a national strategic point of view as a country as a whole.

The example I'll use, which is a bad one, is that in the removal of specified risk materials from animals, the federal government set aside $80 million two years ago to come up with a solution for how we could get rid of this material—maybe use it for energy and other means, and make it an economic generator. Our deadline is July 12. This committee finds out 17 months later that the feds and the provinces hadn't even come to an agreement on the allocation of money. That's 17 months after the $80 million was set aside. I think part of it is jurisdictional.

Folks, how do we somehow move in terms of safety nets to getting a national strategy that looks to the long-term vision? Where are we going to be 20 years down the road in this industry when we've got the complexities of the provinces, the mixture of farm organizations, and the feds working at it—and, coming to Bill's point, how do we ensure that there's some farm ownership and control in terms of that development?

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Go ahead, Dr. Landals.

[Dr. Duane Landals]

That's a very difficult problem. I think part of it is the issue we talked about, a transparency of leadership. With a lot of the programs and a lot of the policies, we don't know who's on first. We don't know who's in charge.

We have very clear mandates for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency when it comes to foreign animal disease incursions; that's their role. When we get to other diseases that aren't a named disease on the list, we don't know who's in charge. With foreign animal disease we have a very significant provincial participation in a program, and then it always seems to be that competition between the provincial and the federal jurisdiction.

I'm tending to agree with you. I think a lot of it is jurisdictional. I think that plan has to be a plan not only for where we want to go but for who's in charge of which areas; the leadership is partially what we need to define. I think it's going to take a lot of communication to do that. A lot of people are going to have to compromise their own authority and be willing to give it up to a higher authority when we need to get to a common outcome, whether that's between industries or between governments.

Again, one of the challenges of our coalition is to make sure we have industries talking to each other so that we have that common goal.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Preugschas.

[Jurgen Preugschas]

I have a quick response on the WTO for the Honourable Mr. Easter. Canada is part of the Cairns Group, which advocates trade access around the world. For those of us who like to trade, the frustration is that it seems every time the Cairns Group issues a communiqué, Canada puts a little asterisk beside its name for not agreeing with the communiqué. That is really unfortunate, and you sometimes wonder why we're even part of the Cairnes Group.

You say that no other countries espouse access like CAFTA. I've also been in Geneva and talked to New Zealand, Australia, and many of the other countries. Time and again, I heard the frustration over Canada's non-negotiating position. So that's very small.

In addition, in addressing the farm ownership of the energy things, I think this is critical, and I totally agree. How do you do it? I guess by not giving all the available moneys out to the big multinational companies, which are able to suck them all up. Maybe the German example isn't a bad one. They have 2,200 biogas digesters on farms in Germany. Does that make sense? To me, it makes a lot of sense.

Those are the kinds of things we can do, if we're serious about it. If we're controlled by the multinational companies that suck out government dollars, then we do what we do today.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Dobson.

[Bill Dobson]

Thank you for your questions, Mr. Easter. You asked, how can a safety net program get to where we need to be in 20 years? It can't and won't. I don't think that's the way a person should look at it.

A safety net program is for survival. At the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, we proposed the Canadian farm bill, which I'm sure you're all familiar with. We were not naive enough to think the document was going to be accepted. There was a strategic growth pillar, one pillar out of three, and that's the way we need to start thinking—not how safety nets are going to get us where we need to go, but how that money is going to be put strategically into place to get the growth we need to make sure this industry works in the complicated world we now have.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Mr. Thompson.

[Myron Thompson, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

I'll speak quickly because time is running out.

I want to thank all of you for your presentations.

I agree with my friend from the Bloc that solutions are what we need. We hear a lot of debate about the problems, but we need solutions.

I appreciate hearing some pretty good ideas, particularly Jurgen's idea of eating up the cost by some form of eco tax, as I believe you mentioned. Of course, the problem is that in this country, the first complaint you hear from ordinary people about government is that taxes are too high. Immediately, when you say, well, it's only going to be 1%, it's going to be for the cost—and I can understand—a lot of people throw their hands up and say, no.

So I think there has to be a way of incorporating money into the idea of looking after the costs. Your industry shouldn't be expected to eat it all up.

I'm really keen on farmer ownership. I'm just not too sure how that should transpire. What should that entail? What kind of strategy do we need to put in place to lead to that? If you have anything you'd like to say about this, please do so.

In terms of animal health, I'm curious. I live in Sundre, where there's quite a bit of animal industry. There are a lot of cattle, and you name it. There are elk on top of haystacks, gobbling up a lot of the hay. We're trying to make the best use of the hay later with the cattle and the livestock. Migratory birds are coming and going.

I wonder, where does wildlife fit into any kind of strategy that may be under way to protect our animals?

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Who wants to go first?

For the committee's information, we are extending this sitting, because we started about 15 minutes late.

Mr. Preugschas.

[Jurgen Preugschas]

I'm not going to discuss the eco tax anymore, but I think we need to take a look at it and address it properly. You put an idea out there; it's very easy for people to say it's no good, or it's another tax. We need to look at how to promote it.

I've talked with individuals about it, and when you compare an eco tax to the tire tax, most people are not really opposed to it.

Regarding the farm ownership of these projects—whether it's a biodigester, ethanol, wind power or all of these—this is critical. We need to look at how we can keep them small, and make the supporting funds that you're going to provide available and set the criteria, so that we have farmer ownership. I don't think that's out of line at all, and it's quite workable.

Our organizations would be more than pleased to work with you to develop a plan.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Landals.

[Dr. Duane Landals]

Thank you for that question, Mr. Thompson.

This really brings up the point we were trying to make, that there is a need for a strategy for wildlife health in Canada. We have a partially developed strategy for aquatic animal health. We need a strategy for farmed animal health, and then we need an overarching strategy to see how they integrate.

If each area of interest develops its own strategy, and there is no communication between the areas, we cannot deal with the problem. If we're talking about national biosecurity, where there obviously is a relationship between farm poultry and migratory waterfowl, but the authorities are different—perhaps one is under fish and wildlife and the other is under agriculture—we need to make sure the linkages between the individual strategies are there. That's why we need this high-level, overarching animal health strategy that talks about all animals. Then, specifically within agriculture, we need a farmed animal strategy.

We also need to know how we relate to these other species and the other risks. Truly, it's the same as it relates to human health. We talk about humans as sort of non-animals, but in fact public health is also part of an overall strategy.