Agriculture Committee on Feb. 27th, 2012

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Do you have consumers?

[Justin Taylor]

The reason—

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Do you have consumers who come to your group that you represent?

[Justin Taylor]

Most definitely.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Do those consumers have demands?

You can take it out of my five minutes if you like.

[Justin Taylor]

They most definitely do.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Okay.

So he has consumers who have demands and he spoke to them. I don't agree with him either, by the way, and I think that's quite obvious. We don't agree on the supply management piece; we disagree with those folks. They have every right to say it. They're talking about what the consumer demands are in an industry they represent that consumes agricultural products. If that's not related, then I'm not quite five feet eight yet.

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

It's interesting you had to ask the questions to find out. It wasn't part of their presentation.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

That's what the questions are for, Mr. Lemieux. I didn't realize we were going to have a debate with Mr. Lemieux, but we can do this if you want.

The other side of it is I believe what happened earlier...and here's where we disagree, Mr. Chair, about whether we think we're being constrained or not. The issue is, do we want folks to come and give opinions so that we can figure out where Growing Forward 2 needs to have pieces added to it or discussed, or are we going to narrow this focus in and say, here's what we intend to do, whether you like it or not, and this is the direction we are going in? Why don't you just tell us which ones you want us to bring and I'll submit the list?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

That's not where I'm going, Mr. Allen.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

I recognize, Mr. Chair, that you're not going there, but the parliamentary secretary certainly is. He's suggesting that the list of witnesses doesn't meet his expectations.

Sorry, I didn't ask witnesses to meet your expectations. I asked them to come and offer up whatever it is they decided to bring to this committee that talks about meeting consumer demands. So far I haven't heard anything over there that doesn't fit under this umbrella. Now it might scoot out the side, not to people's wishes, and it may not quite fit under the umbrella the way exactly they would like it to, but the reality is it does fit—albeit not exactly as that nice little round peg in the round hole.

If this is where we're headed—we don't like the witnesses because it doesn't quite fit—then how do we ever do a study? It's like doing an experiment and saying, I expect when I strike the match to see fire; I saw fire, but I didn't determine whether the match was wet or not because I never looked. I never asked anybody. I just said the match will light and I'll get fire.

The reality here is if we're supposed to explore Growing Forward 2, which I thought was the agreement we wanted to have, then let's explore it; let's not narrow it.

I don't think we're getting off to a very good start. We're now doing an umbrella with the next piece, Mr. Chair, and if that's going to be narrowing the umbrella, then I guess we need to revisit exactly how we do these pieces one by one.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Allen, I'm not proposing that we narrow anything; I'm just simply reminding the witnesses to stick to the topic at hand. If I thought it was out of the ordinary or not acceptable, I would have stopped it. I didn't stop it.

I'm not going to speak for Mr. Lemieux, but we are here under a topic, and it's as long as we get there. You're right that the restauranteurs have the right to.... They mentioned supply management in their presentation. I just don't want the whole meeting to be there. I don't think it's fruitful. I know their stand on it very well, and I'm sure you do as well. It doesn't matter whether you or I agree with it or not, it's out there.

Mr. Eyking, last comment.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

I guess my comment is a little bit like the NDP's.

I think even though some of the stuff is a little over the top.... For instance, you can tell egg producers how they can make more money and that the consumer...I think it should be known. We brought these witnesses here, and I think they're shaking it up a bit. But I think any good committee would turn over every stone and hear from everybody and then go forward from there. We could get another side of this. We can get another side of their opinion and then we can counterbalance it in the report.

I think we're wasting too much time trying to stifle the witnesses and trying to change the topic. They're here. They came all the way here. We paid them to come here. Let's listen to them and move on.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Amen to that.

With that, Mr. Cran from the Consumers' Association of Canada, 10 minutes or less, please.

[Bruce Cran, President, Consumers' Association of Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members.

You've got me all nervous now.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Bruce Cran]

The one thing we do have is consumers, and I represent consumers and nothing but.

[A voice]

Have a glass of water.

[Bruce Cran]

It's getting to the stage where I want a beer, never mind the water.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Bruce Cran]

My organization began in 1947; therefore, we've been making presentations to the House for 65 years.

I'd just like to start by making a comment on Growing Forward—I don't know whether they call it Growing Forward 1, or whatever it is, but Growing Forward as opposed to Growing Forward 2. I thought it was a very good program. I'm not going to deal with it minutely, but it's the best program that I've ever been involved in that actually accommodated federal, provincial, and major stakeholders all as a unit.

I know over the period of years that I've been involved with it, which is from its inception, I've met many times with people I wouldn't have normally come in contact with. There were a lot of side issues that were resolved outside the meetings, and we had some influence on the way that program proceeded.

I'm assuming that the next Growing Forward program will be somewhat similar. The only comment I would give is that I would like to see some caution used in regard to the way we engineer things. We don't want to get to the stage of not giving farmers or consumers enough input. I think we can all hold our own if we're at the meetings, and I think that works well from the point of view of my association.

Consumers are mainly interested in food at the table level, and I think that's probably what you're heading to, what we're getting at here. Safety is the issue. We've just done some polling, and food safety is the number one issue for consumers, whether it's coming into the country or whether it's manufactured here. We do have control over what we produce here, and I think there are a lot of things we have to do that we're not doing. We have to prevent—and take more action to prevent—disasters.

An item we're involved in at the moment is irradiation. Irradiation, oddly enough, was invented in Canada. It was sold to a company in Vancouver some 20 years ago, and it has never yet been used on food in this country. We know from our own research that there are quite a number of people in Canada who would like to have irradiation available so they can be absolutely sure that there are at least some bugs that aren't going to get to them.

Price also comes into what consumers want. That was the second biggest issue. We all know there's something wrong when you can buy a gallon of milk in the United States for half the price of what you can buy it for in Canada. You can buy chicken for half the price. This is particularly exacerbated when the dollar reaches parity, which it has. We've been fighting that one for five years, but the reality is that you can still buy these products for half the price across the border. We'd like to see something done on that issue. I have absolutely no idea what you do these days with that.

I don't think I can completely drop away from supply management. We're very familiar with supply management, but I don't want to go into that too much at the moment.

We're big exporters. I think consumers are also interested, and they're telling us that they would like to have the same standards applied to food that's consumed locally and manufactured locally as to what is brought in. It's a two-edged sword; you have stuff coming in and you have stuff going out.

At the moment we get the impression—or people believe—that Canada's exports get far more inspection attention than do the foods we eat here. We've had one big scare: the listeriosis one is the one I'm thinking of. I think we were very fortunate there. We only had 24 or 25 people killed—if you want to talk about it in that language—but we could just as easily one day have a thousand. I think those things have to be taken care of.

I'm going to cut what I was going to say a little bit short here, but I certainly would like to answer any questions. I can assure the honourable members that I'm in touch with consumers on a daily basis. I think we have probably the most accurate gauge in Canada, from an organizational point of view, as to what consumers want and would like to see.

Again, as I say, I'm very much in favour of Growing Forward 2 as long as it has the ability to be tempered by the people who interact in the coming together of the provincial government, the federal government, and major stakeholders.

Thanks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to questions.

Mr. Atamanenko, five minutes.

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

Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all of you for being here.

I'm not sure if you folks are aware that in the United States the taxpayer has just contributed $300 billion to bail out the chicken industry—in other words, to buy up the chickens that farmers couldn't sell. As a result.... It's a cutthroat industry: the prices are low, and obviously the prices are going to be lower there than they are here. I'm just wondering if we really want that for our farmers. We have a stable system and it doesn't cost the taxpayer any money at all.

According to a recent survey, two litres of milk in Canada cost $3.15, in Los Angeles $2.40, and $3.73 in New Zealand, a country that wants to devastate and destroy our supply managed system. Canadian farmers only make 21¢ on a $2.25 glass of restaurant milk, like you folks have in your restaurants.

So as we look at trying to get prices lower for you folks, the question is, do we really want to do it at the expense of farmers, who are trying to make a living, and who are making a living?

The main question I want to ask you, because I'd like to get on to the other witnesses, is on the frozen pizza makers that you mentioned. Should we be regulating and applying the same standards to frozen pizza makers as to regular pizza makers? Yes or no?

[Justin Taylor]

As far as pricing of cheese...? We're just asking for a level playing field. Both groups are major buyers of Canadian cheese, and we find it incredibly unfair that one competitive group gets a significant discount versus what restaurants get.

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

Okay. Thank you.

Ms. Thurston, thank you for your presentation. I'd like to reinforce that it does talk about consumer demand, because you did mention it. You had a whole graph on people who favour buying cage-free eggs, and pigs that are out of intensive confinement. A lot of companies and supermarkets are taking this up, so this obviously shows that consumers want this type of practice to continue.

What should we be doing? Should government be doing something to ensure that there will be mandatory labelling legislating what we've seen on a voluntary basis?