Anyway, that's number seven.
Moving along to number eight, one of the concerns that has been raised in a particular part of my riding in central Ontario is that some farmers are in a tight spot and they're being offered payment to put sludge on their land.
In some cases, it's sewage sludge that comes from sewage treatment plants. I'm told by some people that's a good idea. I don't know enough to argue that. There's also paper sludge being used in Brock Township, which is in my riding, and that causes a great deal of concern to farmers, neighbouring farmers, to members of the community, and to me. This paper sludge results when they recycle paper over and over. After a few times you're left with this stuff that you can't even recycle into the lowest quality of paper. This is some of the stuff. Now, there is organic material in it. I recognize that. But there are concerns that spreading that on the land, in the short term, possibly because you could use the money, may not in the long run be the best for the land. As I said, I'm not a farmer myself and I'm not an expert on soil, but I certainly think that identifying potential revenue streams, and the use of this is proof of the tough spot that some farmers are in, and quite frankly, having some regulations around what can or cannot be added to the soil in terms of long-term implications or in terms of run-off is something we should look at.
In that area, most of the run-off goes into Lake Simcoe. Just recently, in fact, the government announced $12 million to look at water quality in the Lake Simcoe basin. I'm pretty sure that one of the issues that's going to get looked at is what's being put on the land upstream a little way, particularly paper sludge and where that might lead. Anyway, I don't want to spend too long on that. That was number eight.
Number nine, something that I've heard in my riding and we've heard different places is it seems impossible for local farmers to get their produce into local supermarkets, into local retailers. I don't know what the answer to that is. I know it's true where I come from. I know my wife and I have tried to be good consumers and support our local farmers and support Canadians, but she has a hard time sometimes. We go to the local grocery store at the end of August or in September and we want to buy corn on the cob and it doesn't look like the stuff that's being grown in the fields that we had to drive past to get to the store. We find out after the fact that it's actually been imported from somewhere else, and the local farmers who produce sweet corn can't figure out how to sell it. So that's another area.
I go back to the point that Roger made, which is that $246 million can't fund all of these ideas or solve all these problems, and I agree with that. But I think that sometimes there are things the government can do that don't necessarily have to cost a lot of money because government has fiscal levers that it can use to influence people's behaviour. We have other regulatory and legislative tools that we can look at, and I can't for the life of me figure out why I can't get local produce in some of our local stores. So I can tell you, if we want to send a signal to a lot of small farmers that we're their friends and we're going to try to do something for them, I think that saying that we're interested in this issue.... I appreciate my colleague Larry, who has raised this issue before, and I know it's an issue in not only his and my riding but across the country. So that's number nine.
Number 10 is related to that--I appreciate that I may be, in this one, wandering a little further from a direct connection than I have up until now, but I still think it's valid--and it is to look at labelling. We've heard this, that you buy a jar of pickles that says “product of Canada”, and then you find out that the cucumbers were grown in China. I'll bet if you went into a supermarket and asked 100 consumers where they thought those cucumbers were from, 99 of them would say that they must be from Canada because it says “product of Canada” on the label.
While I appreciate in the modern economy the importance of value added and what it means and where the value is added, I also suspect that the pickle company probably doesn't want to put “grown in China” on the label. That to me in itself is proof that they know consumers would not want to see that. So they carefully chose their words to say produced in Canada, which is technically true and meets the current legislative and regulatory requirements. But I would say it fails to meet the kind of simple honesty test that I think Canadian consumers expect, not only from food processors and corporate citizens in Canada, but also from government. I think this is a related topic. That's number ten.
Concerning number 11, recently a farmer in my area who is doing a variety of things.... It's a kind of what I'll call a modern mixed farm. This couple do everything from producing maple syrup to doing some logging on their property to running a harvest share program that my wife and I participate in during the summertime, whereby every week we go and get a box full of whatever was harvested that week. It's great, because we always have fresh local food. My kids are actually figuring out that the stuff that shows up on the supper table had to come from somewhere and are getting to see where it's coming from.
This couple wanted to start what you might call agri-tourism or agri-education. The idea was that they use organic farming principles, and they think there's a business opportunity to bring in people from other countries and from other places who would come and stay on their farm and work alongside them for a period of time, almost in an apprenticeship, to learn more about it.
They were well down this road and had launched a website and had developed a program and had marketed a little bit, and at the eleventh hour, right before they were about to start this little program that they had invested in, the insurance company came along and sabotaged it. The insurance company said they would discontinue their insurance if they brought these people onto their property to work there.