Agriculture Committee on May 7th, 2014

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

We'll go now to Mr. Lemieux, please, to wrap up.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Let me just say thank you to our witnesses for being here.

I must say I was quite frankly just hoping to learn more about innovation in your opening remarks. I heard a lot about funding and I heard a lot about regulations and processes, but what I actually want to hear about is innovation and how innovation is helping the agriculture sector.

Just to give an example, a few weeks ago I was standing in Maple Leaf Foods' production plant. We were announcing a repayable contribution of $5 million. They're bringing in top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art, first-in-the-world technology to improve their production speeds, to improve shelf life on their products, to improve food safety.

I would have liked to have heard of other innovation like that, which is actually affecting the food industry. I was in Skotidakis maybe a month ago announcing another $4.5 million for them to update their production line. They are a top-producing dairy product producer and they're working with machinery that will better mix goat milk with cow's milk to make their cheese products. This is innovative, and it's actually going to allow them to penetrate markets that they've been unable to penetrate and more efficiently because right now the machinery they use is optimized for cow's milk and it doesn't work well with goat's milk. But they're doing the best that they can.

So I was hoping to hear a lot more on the technologies and all of these different sectors and how innovation is actually making us more competitive so that we can sell our products at a more competitive rate in Canada, which I think is what the Canadian consumer wants. My read is the Canadian consumer is worried about price, but they actually naturally gravitate to Canadian products. If we have innovation embedded in our agricultural sector and our food processing sector here in Canada, to offer that competitive price, the consumer will gravitate to Canadian products. So I think it's a win-win.

Anyway, that's what I was hoping to hear more of.

I want to thank Mr. Payne because I think in the questions he asked we actually got some of that from the sugar beet side and from the fertilizer side. We got, in the answers, the innovation that I wanted to hear about in the opening comments.

So let me just turn to Carla and say, Carla, can you tell us about some of the innovation that's in the food and consumer product sector that's actually strengthening our economy, creating jobs, strengthening our competitiveness either here at home or in our ability to penetrate? CETA is coming up. How is our food and consumer product sector going to penetrate CETA based on innovation?

[Carla Ventin]

Thank you.

It's interesting how it does come back to regulations. What we hear time and again from our member companies is that they are developing innovative products. Do I know what they are? Are they on product shelves? No, they are not, because these innovative products are not being approved in a timely way by Health Canada. So we do have these new products and they are being developed, but because the regulations aren't up-to-date and can't accommodate this, they don't get to product store shelves.

I agree; it's a pretty big thing. Actually it was interesting, I was just reading a statistic on consumers, and yes, consumers do want innovative, more healthful products in our industry. Our different member companies are working toward that.

In a recent study that I read—I think it was a C.D. Howe Institute on the sticker price—it mentioned that Canadian consumers have one-third less selection of products in Canada versus in the U.S. That's interesting. I do attribute the regulatory issues—

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

Surely innovation goes further than new products. Surely innovation penetrates the food and consumer products sector far more than just regulatory changes to allow the rapid introduction of new products.

[Carla Ventin]

Absolutely. You mentioned automation and robotics. That's a really big issue. Right now, we're collaborating with both Industry Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to kind of benchmark, to see what kind of robotics and automation is happening in our industry.

For example, we have robotic arms that stuff muffins, and all sorts of fantastic innovations that are occurring. That's why I discussed the issue of capital investment, and that it is this new equipment and technologies that will help companies become more productive and innovative and competitive.

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

Okay. I could ask the same question of the Food and Wine Institute.

Is innovation taking place both in the way that your clients are managing their product lines, and in delivering products to consumers?

[Dr. Marc Nantel]

Absolutely. It was part of the bit that I skipped to get to the finish line, which was about the mesoscale, bringing stuff to the mesoscale so that it can go to the megascale, so to speak.

Here are two examples. We did projects with a greenhouse grower of hydroponic spinach, one of the only ones in North America growing spinach hydroponically, who needed a solution to harvest the spinach in a way that wouldn't hurt the plant itself, to make sure that it can keep growing. With our advanced manufacturing group, we designed a new robot for this company, Durham Foods, and they are now building more of those robots, to make sure that they can harvest their spinach properly and for essentially other people who might want to do the same thing.

Another example, which is more about agriculture, is that one of the biggest subjects at Niagara College—not necessarily directly involved with the Canadian Food and Wine Institute—is the precision agriculture research we do. We're currently working with major distributors and manufacturers of equipment about taking all the intelligence and the GPS ability they put in their harvesters, their seeders, and their fertilizers, making sure that we connect that to precision agriculture. Various management zones in the field.

A field is not a uniform piece of terrain. It has dénivellation. It has holes. It has knolls and hills. Where the yield is best for your grain or the various crops you grow depends on where you are in the field, and that is a way of—

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

You're going to have to wrap up soon, please.

[Dr. Marc Nantel]

Exactly. So we're working on this with companies to make sure that we can save 15% to 20% of fertilizer on a field and increase the yield. There's plenty going on in innovation.

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

That's 15% to 40%...?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Thank you, Mr. Lemieux.

Our time has come to an end, so I want to thank all the witnesses for coming and hanging around while we finished our duties in the House of Commons. With that, we will see you Monday.

Thank you very much. The meeting is adjourned.