Evidence of meeting #83 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was birds.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:35 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Poultry and Egg Processors Council
Farmers, yes, but remember, my members are one step down the supply chain from the farmers. My guys are the egg graders, the egg processors. Farmers are going to be there too, but we're all going to hear it together. It's the full supply chain.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Blake Richards Conservative Wild Rose, AB
Excellent. That's great. I'm glad to hear that.
I have one question as well for you, Mr. Lambert, from the Egg Farmers. I understand that about two years ago you funded the Egg Farmers of Canada chair in poultry welfare. It runs until January 2017. Could you tell me a little bit about that program, why you chose to fund it? What is some of the research being done through that?
12:35 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Egg Farmers of Canada
Actually, we are sponsoring a network of research chairs across the country. We have a chair in agricultural economics at Laval, Dr. Maurice Doyon. We have the welfare chair with Dr. Tina Widowski at the University of Guelph. We're looking at a chair in human nutrition in Manitoba, and we have a couple of ideas, one in public policy and another in environmental sustainability. We do that because we think preparing for the future and investing in research is critical to our future. That was the idea behind it.
We don't want to manage or control. We want Dr. Widowski to be a completely independent researcher, and she is. She is doing research into different types of housing systems: enriched, at different sizes, cage-free, an aviary-type system, which I haven't talked about. She does research into bird behaviour around welfare as well. She is connected with fellow scientists in Europe and the U.S. I know, for example, about a month ago she was in Germany.
Our idea is to have somebody independent who will tell us not what we want to hear necessarily, but what we need to hear. We think we have the right person in Dr. Widowski.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Merv Tweed
I know Blake was still trying to work on an invitation to that meeting in his riding. Thank you for being here.
The one comment I'll make, and it's not necessarily the feeling of the committee, is that according to what I'm seeing and hearing across the world, a small number of people can make life very difficult for the animal producer. Your fight must be constant. I wish you luck in that because it is a huge challenge. We know you do a good job of what you do, and that is to produce safe food.
Thank you very much. I'll advise the committee that Thursday's meeting is in room 7-52 of this building.
The meeting is adjourned.