I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you. I didn't have a written submission because I found out about this from Kevin Sorenson on Thursday of last week, so it's fairly short notice.
What I'm going to do is talk to you about the history of my ranch and why my children aren't coming back to it.
We started in southeastern Alberta in what was called the dust bowl of the 1930s. My parents came out in 1951. Today we ranch 41 homesteads.
Ranching only survived through the decades because it was on large tracts of marginal land. It was either too hilly, too wet, too dry, too many trees, or too rocky for any other type of agriculture. So we have vast tracts of land. There are some ranches in my area with over 100 sections. It takes 100 acres to run one cow. Where I ranch, it's pretty lush. We're down to 40 acres to a cow.
Over the years, with a ten-year cow cycle, if you kept your operating costs down, you made a decent living. You didn't get rich at it, but you had a good living and a good life, with common-sense regulations. About ten years ago, the floodgates for those regulations opened up and it hasn't slowed down since. It was not BSE. It was not the reason for the regulations; it was the excuse. If you go back to the sixties, my father fought Mr. Whelan, the agriculture minister at that time, to try to put in a marketing board for cattle. Then on-farm food safety came in, and it's just been one after the other--regulations, regulations, regulations. Every one of these regulations costs us money.
Right now, it's about $100 per calf lost every year on our operating costs, to what we can sell for. That's average. Some places are higher than that, some places are lower than that because of how your operational costs are. Extra regulations right now, according to the industry, is over $80 a head, over and above our competitors. So if those regulations were even brought down to what our competitors were--the United States--we would come close to breaking even. We wouldn't be making any money, but breaking even.
The regulations have just about brought this industry to its knees, and it will kill it. There is more coming out all the time. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, in my opinion, is a runaway with itself, with regulations. They've come out now with what they call a bio-security plan. The first point is to control visitor access to your animals. Will you tell me, on a ranch that's 100 sections, how I am supposed to control access when the provincial government mandates me to allow hunting on there? Number two is prevent contact between production animals and wildlife. Again, would you tell me how I'm supposed to prevent wild animals from being in contact with my animals?
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is a runaway. I'm going to put it back on your shoulders. You are the ones we elected to keep things like that under control. You're the ones letting go.
The second part is the lack of property rights. In this country we don't have the right to own, we have the right to enjoy. That's all we have. You look in the Constitution and that's what it is. I've been on three different boards on property rights in this country over the last 13 years, both federally and provincially. The Species at Risk Act came into force in 2006, I believe, in June. Because of these vast tracts of land that have not been farmed or have gone back to native grass, guess what attracts them? We get all kinds of endangered species. Of the list in my area of 14, at times I've had at least 12 of them on there. I figure I'm pretty lucky. There are two that I don't have at one point in time. That act, if you get into it, is very intrusive on property rights. They can come in, and Mr. Pearce, who's the head of the compensation part of that act, felt--and I had a personal meeting with him in Calgary--that it was our duty because we're on the land to protect these species for the rest of Canadians, with no compensation. If it got down to impacting us at least 50% of our production value, we might get some compensation.
On the Navigable Waters Protection Act, in Alberta we have a lot of navigable water. I see ships going up and down here all the time. But it affects every part of this land in Alberta, and any stream you can float a vessel down at any given time of the year--in other words, in flood conditions. And a vessel has been relegated right down to a rubber dingy.
I have a creek at my place that runs from nowhere to nowhere. Once in a while there's a few fish in there. With stock ponds, the ducks and geese will go in, scoop up some mud, and deposit eggs. They hatch but they don't live long. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans controls that creek, so if I want to put a bridge across it or do any development, I have to go to them to get permission. That's not a pleasant deal.
Between the federal government and the provincial government in this country, they've relegated people on the land back to being serfs in a feudal system. If you look up the definition of a serf--and this is a World Book definition--it says that as a peasant in a feudal system was midway between a free man and a slave, “serfs were generally bound to the soil...and required to provide certain payments and services to their lord”. To me, we're serfs.
Property rights are fundamental for us. I make plans on my grass and water for ten years out. I have to in that dry country, because if I don't I'm in trouble. So to me and the ranching community that makes their living off marginal land, property rights are fundamental, and I think they should be fundamental for every Canadian. Part of a free and democratic society is the right to own and benefit from that property. We don't have that in Canada. You guys can deregulate and put property rights in. I'm not looking for subsidies; I'm not looking for anything. I'm looking for less government to help our industry.
My daughter came back to me a year and a half ago, after her marriage broke down. She has a daughter who has a learning problem. She said, “Dad, I want to come back to ranch”. Good, I said, because if I raised a rancher it was her. Two weeks ago she came to me and said she didn't want it. It's strictly because of the regulations and the lack of security. It's not because of money. I'm very fortunate that I don't owe a dime to anybody. We're working on a way to transfer the place to her without costing her, and we'd have a retirement. But because of regulations and no property rights, she said “No thank you. I'll go do something else.”
Thank you.