Agriculture Committee on March 26th, 2009

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

I will try to be brief. Where do most of your exports go? Do they go to the United States? While we are on that subject, what do you think of the COOL labelling program? Does it affect your stock and your farm's profitability?

[Cameron MacDonald]

We weren't using the United States a lot, but it was an option. The way in which it hurts is that it's bringing down the Canadian price, because you can't move western cattle into the States easily. So it's bringing down the price to us.

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

What would you like the government to do to help you out of this major crisis in beef and pork. We have cattle and hog producers in my constituency. They are finding it difficult too. It is very difficult for farmers. More and more young women are going into agriculture and a lot of farmers are committing suicide as a result of the crisis. I would like to know what you expect from the government.

[Cameron MacDonald]

One thing that could solve a lot of our problems is education. People do not understand the food industry. They do not understand where their food comes from—the food comes from the supermarket. I've spoken to people in their 60s and in their 40s and in grade three, and I got exactly the same answer. They all thought their food came from the supermarket.

We need a huge campaign out there showing that farmers are important and that it's from them that your food is actually coming.

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

I understand. When my daughter was four, she said that milk came from the store. That is when I realized that people do not know.

Have you thought about developing local markets in order to establish food sovereignty in your villages and towns, to tell people that it is good to buy local products, because that also reduces greenhouse gases? The two things go together nicely.

[Cameron MacDonald]

We do have a buy local campaign, but P.E.I. is an exporter. We make more food than we could ever imagine eating our way through. We would need very few beef producers, very few hog producers, very few potato producers to feed us. We are an exporter.

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

I see; it is more difficult for you. In my constituency, we do secondary processing; a lot of dairy farms are involved in processing. That is why I asked. You are primarily exporters.

[Cameron MacDonald]

When we met with Minister Ritz in January, that was one thing that he was quite intent on, that we get into further processing. He rather waved the carrot, that there could be some funding for it.

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Right.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Madame Bonsant. Your time has expired.

Mr. Atamanenko, you have five minutes.

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

Thank you for being here.

We're talking about exports and imports in P.E.I., or exports and domestic market in Nova Scotia.

In Nova Scotia and P.E.I., what is the percentage of cattle that are exported and what, roughly, is the percentage of the domestic market? Let's take Nova Scotia first.

[Henry Vissers]

As we said initially, we are only producing 10% of what we consume. That said, there are a number of producers who ship cattle to an Ontario plant, and in the past there's been some going into the States as well. But we don't nearly meet the demand of our own population within Nova Scotia.

On the hog side, when the industry was producing 220,000 hogs a year we were in the 60% range of producing what we consumed. At the same time, the Canadian dollar was a lot lower relative to the U.S. dollar, so some pork products were being exported into the U.S. as well. In the last couple of years that hasn't been the case. It's been the opposite. There's been U.S. pork coming into Canada, because it's strictly on price.

Of course, the other side of this is that you don't see this when you're in the store, because there's proprietary store labelling on product. There's no indication of where the product came from, which is the other side of the labelling issue, the COOL issue: we can't identify local.

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

Am I right in understanding that 90% of the beef consumed in Nova Scotia comes from outside Nova Scotia?

[Henry Vissers]

It would be in that range. We don't have exact numbers on it, but it would be in that range.

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

And in Prince Edward Island you produce more beef than you consume.

[Brian Morrison]

Technically, in Prince Edward Island, because of what he said about beef moving across the country and from country to country, we only produce through our P.E.I. plant about 15% of the beef that's used on P.E.I. We have a captive market, if we could just get tapped into it through—

[Cameron MacDonald]

It's 15% of the Maritimes.

[Brian Morrison]

I'm sorry. We produce about 15% of the Maritimes' usage. As everybody has said, things get moved around so much that.... Our plant in P.E.I. could certainly expand tenfold, if we could get the local stores to take on all our products.

To make another point about our plant in Borden, they have been aggressively trying to get into niche markets and are having trouble obtaining funding through ACOA to do this. Things are in place, but it's at a stalemate, waiting to get some ACOA funding flowing.

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

If I understand correctly, if some support were provided, the producers in the Maritimes could sell locally without having to export outside the country. Is that correct?

[Cameron MacDonald]

Yes, but it's the hard-to-sell cuts. We don't have the ethnic groups to consume some of the products that we as Maritimers don't ordinarily eat. Those are being sold at a discount just to get rid of them. Having those markets would put more value on the carcass and would return more value to the farmer. Because of BSE, we're just starting to get back into many of those markets.

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

Thank you. There have been many reasons given, and many people are trying to explain why beef producers aren't making money, or why it's difficult. Have you read, any of you, the report by the NFU on the crisis in the cattle sector?

Could you comment on it briefly, perhaps starting with Nova Scotia and then dealing with P.E.I.?

[Henry Vissers]

I read the report, briefly. There are some good points in it. There are some things we would certainly agree with. One of them was to balance the production with the consumption in Canada. I am sure there are other jurisdictions that would disagree with that, but not being open to all of the risks with currency and border closures due to disease and other such things would certainly help our industry. If we simply have a domestic market and we're eating what we produce, then our prices are established in Canada and our own population eats the food.

Another point in that report talked about buying locally, which is something we certainly agree with. Part of “buy local”, as I mentioned before, is that there has to be some way we can identify “local” on the labels in the two major chains, the Loblaws and the Sobeys. Until we can do that, it doesn't matter whether consumers want to buy local or not; they can't identify it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Atamanenko, your time is up, but thank you, Mr. Vissers.

We'll move on to Mr. Lemieux, for five minutes.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you once again to our witnesses for being here in front of the committee today, talking about this important sector, the beef sector. Oh, and pork of course is in there, too—the red meat sector.

There are different markets. Certainly there is our domestic market. As you know, we're trying to encourage Canadians to be able to identify Canadian product and to buy local. We think that's very important. But there is the international market as well. Mr. Atamanenko brought up the NFU report. One of the concerns we certainly have with the NFU report is that they diminish export markets. They would rather we had almost no dependence on export markets. I know Mr. Easter, who sat as the president of the NFU for many, many years, agrees with the NFU, but we don't on this side. Minister Ritz has been outside of Canada at every opportunity, kicking open international doors, encouraging other countries to open their borders to beef and to pork, applying pressure when necessary. He's had tremendous success in Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Mexico, India. Now we read he just came back from Korea, and he's applying real pressure there, saying, “Listen, you're blocking our beef. It's been long enough. It's time to take Canadian beef back in.”

The question I have is perhaps a slightly different orientation on Mr. Atamanenko's question. The NFU report really discourages reliance on the export market, and yet the way I see it, and I think the way Mr. Ritz sees it, is that the export market is a market.

Mr. MacDonald, you were just talking about niche markets and how that can raise the value of the carcass. That's money back in the pockets of producers, and a lot of these export markets offer niche markets for things that we would not normally consume here in Canada.

So I wanted to ask your opinion on all this emphasis on export markets and what impact you think it'll have on the red meat sector.

[Cameron MacDonald]

Just going back to what you just said, we do need those niche markets because Canadians, historically speaking, have not eaten those products. Until we get more value out of the carcass, we are in trouble.