Agriculture Committee on April 29th, 2010

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

I hope that your comments will be of use to all members of this committee, whatever their party. These programs really have to be overhauled. You mentioned one program that worked quite well, but you also talked about programs that were less successful because of some of their particular features. We cannot completely meet everyone's needs, but there are certainly ways to improve these programs, AgriStability especially. That is the message I have been getting since we began this tour.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, André.

Mr. Atamanenko, you have five minutes.

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

Thank you to all of you for being here. It's refreshing just to hear what you're saying, but it's also very depressing, so obviously we have to do something. It seems to me that everybody has good intentions. Everybody around this table and all governments want to help, yet at the same time we're seeing that something's not working.

Ian, I think you mentioned export at all costs. We're a trading nation. We're trying to open up markets, to the credit of the minister. On the other hand, in the beef industry exports have tripled over the last 20 years, yet the beef producers are making less than half of what they made 20 years ago.

We've signed on to trade agreements with NAFTA. We were just in British Columbia, where we talked to representatives from the fruit industry. Before NAFTA there were in-season tariffs that protected the vegetable and fruit producers in our country, and they could make a living off the land, but most of them are in dire straits now because of the dumping of American produce.

We see that the Canada-European Union trade agreement that is being discussed now is going to hammer our communities and open up contracts so that in municipal governments such as Portage, local workers will have to compete with European workers. We know that supply management and the Wheat Board are on the table. It just seems that rural Canada is constantly being hammered by these trade agreements, but on the other hand, we're a trading nation.

My question to you is this: how do we arrive at a compromise to help strengthen rural Canada so each one of you can make some money, not have to work 90 hours a week, and take some extra time and do what most people take for granted? How can we both maintain our trade and ensure that you get a fair price for what you're doing? It's a philosophical question, but that's the crux of the matter.

We're talking about band-aid solutions. We're going to help with AgriStability and AgriFlexibility. Some programs are working and some are not, but the crux of the matter is that we just keep sliding. We're losing rural Canada and we're losing farms, which are, as one of you mentioned, the basis of this.

What's the answer? Maybe we'll start at Kate and work down.

[Katharine Storey]

I think we're all addressing the cost of farming, because that's what we see most, and, of course, you're not asking about that; you're asking about trade.

I think that Canada's value is in quality. We're not a low-cost supplier in any market, and now our dollar value has risen. We heard driving in that the European Union is starting to have problems, and they're one of our big markets. We can't compete on cost. We can compete on quality, and I think the programs, whatever the Canadian programs are, should be directed at maintaining quality in Canadian commodities.

That means addressing the GM issue. Look what it did to our markets when the GM flax decimated the markets. As well, use the Canadian Wheat Board to market wheat quality. Do whatever it takes, but we aren't a low-cost producer, and we have to come to grips with that.

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

Thank you.

Drew.

[Drew Baker]

Obviously we need to keep young farmers around. If there are no young farmers, then there's no farming in the future.

Allowing the young farmers to borrow at rates that are lower than those for other farmers is a start. Through MASC, the young farmer rebate, I believe, is half a percent right now, so it's not a really big difference. Allowing us to borrow at the prime interest rate through FCC would be a huge help, because then we're not subsidizing the use of these programs for other farmers. I don't understand why we're being punished for trying to enter this industry. People say they want us in it, but we're paying the same rates as everyone else. Why would we want to? Everyone else is getting punished, and we're getting it because we're young. I see that as a big barrier.

The other thing is to allow farmers to choose what they're going to do with their product, whether it's through the Wheat Board or whether they want an open market. We need that choice. We don't need someone else making the decision for us. Stability is an issue; not a lot of people want to get into it when you don't know where your next pay cheque is coming from, or when.

I think that's probably the main way to keep this industry afloat.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Alex. Your time has expired.

Go ahead, Mr. Tweed. You have five minutes.

[Merv Tweed, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, everyone, for being here.

Having heard what you said, I think being discouraged by family to enter the business is not an uncommon refrain in every professional field right now. If you look at the health care field, I would say that for the last 15 years nursing has been a profession that hasn't been recommended by nurses, simply because of the duress, the strain, and the new challenges. I would suggest it might be the same in education. I think that's part of the challenge we have: trying to find optimism when there isn't a lot in sight currently.

Pretty much to the person, you talked about the family farm. I have a couple more questions to follow, but very briefly, could you give me your definition of what a family farm is today?

[Katharine Storey]

My definition is that it's owner-operated. The owner is in the barn or on the tractor at some point. There may be hired help and it may be a very large operation, but the owner is right there on the ground.

[Drew Baker]

I would have to agree with Kate.

[Kyle Foster]

I would agree. You'll see now that in Manitoba the hog operations are not family-owned anymore. It's all owned by feed mills and packing plants, and that's not a family farm operation as far as I'm concerned.

[Joe Bouchard]

I'd have to agree. The owner is the one doing the work. I don't think it should be based on size. Guys are going to the size they are so that they can make a living farming without working off-farm. That's why they're doing that.

[Ian Robson]

A family farm is run by an owner-operator who does the work and makes the decisions, but if you want to have a discussion, we have the technology that would allow 25 guys to farm all of western Canada. It's happening in other parts of the world. They would do so on a hired-labour model, and still might call themselves a family farm.

We have to start limiting the size and the scale of farming if we want to have a vibrant rural economy. Otherwise, as has been pointed out, the lateness in these AgriStability payments is causing farmers to leave the land. The system is almost designed to expand the size of a farm, so you cannot ignore a discussion about the size limitation on what a farmer can operate. Some guys will operate a big spread, but other guys will be satisfied to try to stay at a smaller scale.

My objective is to try to stay at a smaller scale, and it's been getting more and more difficult.

[Merv Tweed, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Thank you.

Obviously that is the challenge in every industry right now. I've been a small business operator, and even at that time the challenge was to maintain. You had to either grow or back out of the market. I know it's a challenge, for sure.

In your comment, Drew, you talked about a farmer's choice, and I agree with you there. I respect your position on it and on the Wheat Board, and I think you have that right, but if you're a young farmer who wants to get in and you want to market your own product, as you talked about, and choose how you market your own product, how do we balance that? You're new in the industry, you've got some new ideas, you've maybe found some new opportunities, but you're restricted simply because a certain marketing board, in this particular case the Wheat Board, gives you limited choices.

[Drew Baker]

I think maybe I was misunderstood when I said choice. I meant the choice to either vote for or against it, not the choice to use either the board or the open market. I don't believe in a dual market.

I would say that Canada is a democracy. It's always been the case that the majority rules, and I don't think the farming industry should be any different on this issue. I don't think we deserve special rules.

Having come from a farm where I don't have any real problems with the Wheat Board, I don't know what I would say.

[Merv Tweed, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

No, and I fully understand that. I think it's just important that.... You know, we're looking at the future of agriculture and what we as policy-makers can change to encourage more investment in the industry and more young people to get in. You only have to look east of Manitoba to find out that there isn't a Canadian Wheat Board, and people seem to be facing the same challenges, so obviously there isn't a definite fix one way or the other.

I often think that when you're trying to get into something, sometimes the rules that are set around that entrance may discourage you from even considering it at that point too. I think those are some of the challenges we have to address, and I think that's why we're here today to listen.

Joe, you talked about insurance programs or programs that pick up during disasters and things, and I think that has been a challenge for all governments. We tried to move it out of agriculture relief into a disaster assistance program, simply because it's very easy to see.

In 1997 we had a tremendously wet spring; in fact, a lot of the crops didn't get in until really late June. As a provincial government, we were being pushed hard at that time to come forward with a program. The challenge we found was that if you come too soon with the program, guys back away from trying to do what they're supposed to do; if you come too late, often you go in and they've ruined their fields, so it's a delicate balance.

We could see the disaster. We saw the disaster in your area, and it's hard to get the mechanisms in place to deal with it until it almost hits the wall. Do you have any thoughts on how we can maybe pre-empt that in some way? Is there a formula or is there a process we should be doing better to make sure we're ready to respond more quickly?

[Joe Bouchard]

I fully understand your position as government. You want to have programs to help people, but you don't want programs abused, and I fully understand that.

That help came out in March. I think in November or December, once the ground was frozen and it was pretty much game over, if we could have had confirmation that there was something coming, it would have been huge. Nothing was known until, I think, March 3 that year.

No, I understand the concepts and the timelines.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you. Your time has expired, Mr. Tweed.

Mr. Easter is next, for five minutes.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Just on Merv's point on the Canadian Wheat Board, there's no question the government has done everything to the point of illegality to try to get rid of it, but I'd just ask people where getting rid of all the provincial marketing boards on hogs has gotten us in this country. I'd say we'd better think before we leap, because we've lost our hog industry in Atlantic Canada. It's gone. It's gone. We've lost hundreds of producers, so we need to think clearly about that.

There are two issues, I think, with young farmers. One is the current situation of a lack of profitability in the industry. That's a problem, number one, and I think you all mentioned it. The second problem is intergenerational transfers and how you bring people into the industry so that they can compete with established farmers.

First and foremost, we've got to get to a point where the industry is profitable.

What do we do with current programming? You people mentioned AgriStability and AgriInvest. One individual said here the other day that they just don't work, that “if you have two or three bad years in a row, that's it, you're done”.

In Ottawa and in the provincial capitals--and guys, this is not political--this drives me nuts. The ministers of agriculture held meetings last June and in February. You had NDP ministers, you had Liberal ministers, you had Conservative ministers, and coming out of that meeting, you'd think everything was wonderful. You'd think there wasn't a problem in agriculture in this country when those ministers came out of those meetings in February and June.

So what's wrong? It's not us at the political level. I mean, I'll argue with those guys over there, who are the government, but there's a huge problem in terms of policy, regardless of the political stripe in this country, as it relates to the farm.

My first question is how do you see us fixing AgriStability? We'll get the old argument back that, oh, it's the province or, oh, it's the feds, but the programs aren't working. They didn't work under us with CAIS--I was parliamentary secretary--and they're not working under those guys with AgriStability. All we did was change the name.

What do you do to make that safety net system work?

[Ian Robson]

In my opinion, fixing AgriStability, if it's not functioning, means changing the structure. The reason for it to be there is to provide some kind of support, but obviously it doesn't provide any support, and I think that might be the real reason for it to be there: it's designed not to put any support into farmers' hands.

The reason for that is that maybe they want to encourage farm size to increase and make use of whatever farm income happens to come along as a result of trade. It's trade, as I mentioned, at all costs, but that trade has to come at a profitable level for farming. As was mentioned, costs are high in Canada compared to a lot of other places in the world, and consumers seem to want a cheap product, so there's a conflict between producers, whose interest is in making a fair living, and consumers, who want to buy as cheaply as they darn well please. If so, what do you need us for? You might as well buy your food from some other place.

It comes down to the whole idea of what we want as a national economy, and that has to be fundamental in the minds of our legislators. They cannot be listening to corporate processors, who want to buy cheap milk somewhere else and not support our local producers, which is what we need.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Ian, in terms of AgriRecovery, should there be a disaster program?

Am I out of time already, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You have just a few seconds, Wayne.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Joe, you mentioned AgriRecovery and you said it saved your bacon, but I submit to you that it wasn't the AgriRecovery program itself but the changes that were made for your situation. AgriRecovery should be a disaster program. It didn't work in Atlantic Canada in the potato industry; it worked in your area in beef, but I think that was because the minister made additional changes to AgriRecovery to make it pay out.

Do we need a disaster program that actually kicks in and supports the industry when there is a disaster? AgriRecovery doesn't even cover costs.

[Joe Bouchard]

Well, as I said, it's a double-edged sword. It needs monitoring; otherwise, these programs can be abused.

In all fairness, we had to do a lot of hard work with our own provincial government to get that moved forward to the feds. It's a new program, with some of these others. There's no perfect program, and it takes a while to get all the bugs out of it too. Since it's a new program, I'd be a little easy on it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You mentioned the provinces. We had a tornado go through our area less than a year ago, and of course it kicks in through the province. There was a lot of frustration over how slowly bureaucracy works. It's very slow, not just at the federal level but at the provincial level as well. There are always some glitches in there.

Go ahead, Mr. Richards, for five minutes.