Agriculture Committee on June 11th, 2009

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

On a point of order, maybe Mr. Lemieux doesn't know this. Yes, he asked me, and I said, “No, we're doing the food safety study.” But the Liberal Party offered Bob Rae to pair, so he could go to Sri Lanka and other places, and your party refused. It did not have to be me or Pierre or the NDP. Bob Rae was offered and your party refused.

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

Chair, this is inconvenient, because I don't believe Sri Lanka is where the international meeting is on agriculture. It's nice of Bob Rae to want to take Minister Ritz to Sri Lanka, but that has no impact on the agriculture industry.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

All that was required was pairing. You didn't have to be in the same location as Ritz.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay, fair enough.

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

Let's get back to business. You have to stop Mr. Easter interrupting here.

[Louis Roesch]

What we need to know is, what are you going to do to help these guys right now?

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

We've done things like the advance payment program. We have put in place mechanisms for farmers.... It's better access to credit, but it's meant to get them through this difficult time that they find themselves in now.

[Louis Roesch]

They've run out. They've run out.

In one of the statements that just came out this week--and you have to think about this--they said our income was up 27% from a year ago, and this came fromRitz. Well, that's pretty good, because a year ago we were losing $70 to $80 and now we're only losing $50 to $60. There's no cashflow. Somebody has to do something immediately. This is moving into the fourth year of negative margins, $30 to $80.

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

I guess what I'm telling you is that we are taking all the action we are able to take right now, and it's substantial action. Some of it takes time to bear fruit, but some of it that looks like an immediate solution is not actually an immediate solution, because if it's trade-actionable it will be detrimental to the country, to the agriculture sector in general, and certainly to pork producers, and Wayne Easter knows that.

[Louis Roesch]

If you let 50% of the hog production in Canada go down, what are you going to do to the tax base of this country, because you're also going to lose about another 20% to 25% of your tax base on land, because those prices are all going to come crashing down.

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

These are challenging times. No one is arguing that these are very challenging times.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

We want the leadership.

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

You're getting leadership.

[Some hon. members]

No, we're not.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time has expired.

Let's have some order here.

On this topic here, Mr. Roesch, let me ask you a quick question.

As a farmer, before I got involved in federal politics, I remember every time I'd read or hear about U.S. beef or Argentinian beef or Australian beef coming into the country, because I'm a beef farmer, it used to tick me off. I'd think, what the heck, this just doesn't seem right. But once you get in government and you get to the realization and fully look at it.... Quite often, as farmers, we get out there and we're into the everyday work, which is what we love, and sometimes we're our own worst enemy when it comes to marketing. Normally we're not known as good marketers. But when you get to see the actual percentage of beef and pork production--particularly those two, and lamb to a lesser degree--in the livestock sector, we export huge amounts of it, and you soon come to the realization that because we produce so much here and we have a small population base in relation to the size of our country, we have that.... If you want to send products around the world and into other countries, the last thing you do is start closing your borders and what have you.

The bottom line is that we have to compete. I quess the simple question is this: do you think the taxpayers should subsidize overproduction? In essence, when you can't compete and you can't get a fair value on the world market for that, basically, you're putting a product out there, and if you're not getting enough, all of a sudden you're in trouble. It's akin to gambling. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't.

I'm not trying to be factitious on this, because the issue is that if we want to export, we have to compete out there. Right now we have the Canadian dollar rising, which we all know is the worst damn thing for agriculture. That 75¢ dollar is perfect. Could you comment on that a bit?

[Louis Roesch]

Yes. I don't disagree with that at all, everybody's in the same bind at the same time. But the livestock industry is a little different from manufacturing. You can't just shut it off, so somewhere along the line somebody has to take the initiative to say, this is what has to be done, and then you have to work it through.

At the same time, as far as I know, ethanol can be exported, can it not? They gave them $72.7 million at the Chatham plant, and the rest of them got some too. They guarantee them a profitability for 10 years with the $72 million at 10¢ a litre. I relate that as pretty close to the same thing as a hog walking on four feet.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Perhaps I could just point out that, not to beat you on it, there's a big difference. They have that guarantee for those 10 years, but we don't have that in livestock. I wish we could get that guarantee. If you know where we can get that, I'd sure like to know, because I have a younger brother who's not just farming his own land, he's farming my land right now and having a hell of a time to survive. I wish we could get that kind of 10-year agreement.

Anyway, we have about five minutes left of the time, actually. If we go to more questioning, we're going to have to go to both sides of the table. I would suggest that we thank our witnesses at this time. We really appreciate your input. This competitiveness study is something that we're...I can tell you that all the parties realize there are some problems in it, and we truly want to try to fix them and recommend some things to the government in a report.

So thank you very much for being here, gentlemen.

Mr. Lemieux.

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

I just wanted to raise a point before you gavel the meeting.

When we were down in the United States, Mr. Easter and I had a conversation that I think would be worth pursuing. We had met with representatives from the slaughterhouse and packing industry. The message we got from them regarding COOL and the implementation of COOL, and the impact it was having on their sector, what was driving their sector, was completely different from what we had received from other sources. On the one hand, they were saying that their slaughterhouses and packers were not going to implement the voluntary requirements of COOL. They left us with the impression that they had no intention of doing so. We had heard that, no, they were, but there was confusion, and the confusion was actually driving down the costs they were paying for our cattle. It was turning off our exportation of pork. Both Mr. Easter and I were saying that these were two very different messages we were getting.

We're wrapping up here before we get to the end of the year, and I think it would be worthwhile having witnesses come in so we can explore this before we break for the summer. We picked up what I would call a significant discrepancy here, and I think it would be useful to get packers back in here before the summer so that we can explore this in more depth and find out what is going on, and what is driving down the price they're paying for our red meat, if in fact they're not implementing the voluntary letter of COOL.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Bellavance.

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

As for our time frame, don't forget that the Subcommittee on Food Safety will present its report to the main committee.

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

Mr. Chair, if I may, I would suggest that we do that. That's a priority. That's just coming out of the food subcommittee now. We've an agreement in place. If that's going to be tabled before the summer, then absolutely, yes. But I'm worried that we're going to run out of time. I think maybe we should do the report first, but after that, we should have a look at this major discrepancy that we uncovered. I think it's important.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I'll go through what we have here.

We are committed right now to dealing with the subcommittee report on Tuesday, André. I think if we get as much willingness as we had last night, we could probably finish that report that day. I'm suggesting that in order to go along with what Pierre and Wayne have talked about, we get some of these packing industry people that they're talking about to be here for Thursday.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I agree with that, Mr. Chair.

I guess it's impossible to do. There are some things coming out of this competitiveness study about which the chair or somebody needs to write letters to someone. I've been keeping notes while we've been going along. For example, the issue of organics came up today. There needs to be a push, and the fact of the matter is—this not a criticism of the government—that if Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada have not responded, they mustn't take that issue too seriously. I don't blame the minister in this. The letter might have gone to the minister, but somebody else in that department.... The minister probably has not even seen the letter yet. That's unacceptable.

The fastest-growing industry in agriculture is the organic sector, and they're not getting a response out of the department because the department probably doesn't see it as a priority. The minister may, but he doesn't know what's in the bowels of that department. There are a couple of things like that, I think, that we also need to maybe have you a write a letter on in order to push the issue.

I agree. I think we should tune up these packers. I'd be in agreement with their coming in. I think we can finish the report.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Easter, would you or somebody on the committee be willing to draft a notice of motion to try to get it in so that we can deal with it on Tuesday? Something else you can include in that, if you can, is the issue we had—I believe it was last week—about trade embargoes being put on equipment manufacturers by Russia. They're asking that we write a letter to the trade minister on that.

I'm willing to do that, but I want instructions to do that on behalf of the committee, if you would include them.

Mr. Atamanenko.

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

I'm not quite sure what's happening here.

I thought that once we heard all the people, we would be doing a report and going through the report and making recommendations. As usual, if we don't agree with something, we do a dissenting report. There are a lot of issues that I'm taking note of that I think need to be addressed. I'm wondering about the time. It's possible that we're not going to be here after the 19th or so. That's next week.

That means that we're here on Tuesday looking at the subcommittee on safety, and then on Thursday it's possible we'll be here. Who knows? We have to look at this realistically.