In regard to the strategy, there are a number of initiatives. The Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute has one; the Federation of Agriculture has one: and now the Conference Board of Canada is starting into this space. The common themes you see in a national food strategy are that somehow we have to make sure this industry remains competitive on an international scale, because we do compete. We sell a lot globally and we have to compete with imports. That's come up very clearly.
The second leg of that whole thing tends to focus on the issue of food and health. So what are we doing, first, to take the unhealthy ingredients out of food and, second, to add more healthy ingredients, and what are we doing to change the way people consume food and think about food as well?
Looking ahead, whatever we do needs to be sustainable, and farmers understand sustainability because they have to. But it's becoming much more significant, and it's going to be driven from a number of sources; for example, the Walmart initiative is going to change the way a lot of people have to deal with it. So there are those three elements.
In terms of the benefits to the country of having a national food strategy, first of all, a national food strategy has to be a pretty big picture and say these are the large targets. We want to increase our exports by so much. We want to expand organic local agriculture by so much. We need to have some specific targets, but at a very high level.
If you do that—and this is why I've been talking to industry leaders a lot—then it's easy for government to ask what policies would align with that strategy and make sense and what policies would actually impede that. Some of the regulatory issues are obvious impediments to achieving a healthy diet, for example, and the ability to even talk about a healthy diet.
So there's that interaction between the two. I've been encouraging the three main groups that are doing it to get together—and they have been slowly coming together, but not very quickly—and come up with a national food strategy to say here's what we're going to do. I think the CAPI one is probably the closest, but the Federation of Agriculture's aligns very nicely too.
Realistically, is that going to reshape Growing Forward? I've been involved with the national consultations on that, and I don't get a huge sense that the national food strategy is going to come into play fast enough to really influence the Growing Forward policy framework. But there are elements that are very clear: what can we do to support more innovation through the Growing Forward; what can we do to support more international market development; and what are the things we can do as programs that will support sustainability? It's those elements, and also, within the BRM programs, looking at those to see which ones make sense and which are probably not doing exactly what we want.