Evidence of meeting #52 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was provinces.
A recording is available from Parliament.
February 24th, 2015 / 4 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Seed Trade Association
Yes.
4 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Eyking Liberal Sydney—Victoria, NS
Could it take a year or two years? Do they have to test it somewhere in Atlantic Canada?
4 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Seed Trade Association
What generally happens is if a breeder has registered a variety and believes there's potential for it in a region, CFIA goes to that region and asks if they object to the registration in that area, and the numbers that I gave you show that in most cases they do. So there aren't a lot of varieties that are nationally—
4 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Seed Trade Association
They object to registration.
4 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Seed Trade Association
A lot of the concerns, especially in Ontario and Quebec, are over susceptibility of varieties to fusarium, which can be an issue because the climates are damper there. But fusarium is pretty prevalent, so in most provinces now a lot of the breeding is focusing on trying to develop varieties that are resistant to fusarium.
4 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Eyking Liberal Sydney—Victoria, NS
If I wanted your grain seed and went to my Atlantic council, would they bring it in and do a test run of it on test plots? Would they grow it for a whole year?
4 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Seed Trade Association
If they haven't accepted the variety for registration, they would probably put it through the regular trials. Those are also different for different regions, so in Atlantic Canada they may require different things as part of their merit testing, which can be up to three years.
4 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Eyking Liberal Sydney—Victoria, NS
Ideally, if we took off the restrictions provincially, we would need the federal government to put more into it to do studies for certain regions. Say for some reason it was deemed in law that they couldn't restrict seed from going into provinces, the federal government would have to step up to the plate to make sure certain varieties that were registered nationally were good for the whole country; would they?
4 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Seed Trade Association
Not necessarily. In corn that isn't subject to variety registration, the developers and the breeders do that themselves. They either do that by contributing to industry trials, or they do their own trials.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Eyking Liberal Sydney—Victoria, NS
Thanks.
To the wine growers, because it's brought up quite a bit—we're going to have more witnesses speaking on it—on the spirits side, it seems that the wine issue is the biggest issue. In the United States, Australia, and other growing regions, even in Europe, there are no barriers to interstate movement of wine, are there?
4:05 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Vintners Association
In the European Union, you have 500 million resident consumers and there is no restriction on shipping wine from France to Germany, or vice versa.
4:05 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Vintners Association
It just moves around.
In the United States the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that it was unconstitutional to allow wine to be shipped directly to the consumer within a state, but not to allow an out-of-state winery to ship into that state. So between 2005 and 2015, the past 10 years, with the exception of eight or nine states, everybody has put in place rules—they're slightly different—to allow for winery-to-consumer delivery, and it has been extremely successful.
Small producers in the U.S., which represent probably less than 10% of production, represent about 63% of the volume sold through direct-to-consumer delivery. It's their primary channel.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Eyking Liberal Sydney—Victoria, NS
They don't sell to these big liquor stores that you see in the United States. The small guys can't sell to them, but they have another avenue. They can go directly to the consumer.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bev Shipley
Thank you very much, Mr. Eyking. We're well over.
Now we'll go to Mr. Payne, please, for five minutes.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
Thanks to the witnesses for coming.
I'm from Alberta, and you know what? My colleague across the way wanted me to bring some whisky, but I do like wine, as well as some Scotch. In your notes you talk about how the laws were amended to eliminate courier delivery of wine from one province to another. Is that for personal use, or are there other pieces in there as well?
4:05 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Vintners Association
The law was amended for personal use only, and it was extended to beer and spirits. On February 13, we participated with the Minister of Revenue in announcing that extension. Beer and spirits can now also be shipped interprovincially but for personal consumption. The provinces will now determine what they want to do with beer and spirits.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
I'm still a bit confused here. What if I want to ship a case of wine from Ontario to my home in Alberta?
4:05 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Vintners Association
In Alberta, you'd be able to carry that one case or 20,000 cases back on your person, but you would not be able to have that one case shipped to your home.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
LaVar Payne Conservative Medicine Hat, AB
Okay, I think I'm in trouble.
That just doesn't make any sense to me.
You talked about some of the barriers with wine. I don't totally get it, because we know that with the fewer barriers the competition has been great. If we go back to the international market with what happened with other countries being able to ship wine into Canada, we know what happened with the Canadian industry. It's now really able to compete worldwide with other countries and it's opening up, obviously, investment opportunities.
I travel to B.C. quite often and an unbelievable amount of wineries have opened up in the valley, from Osoyoos all the way up to Kelowna. The number of wineries is just unbelievable .
Do you have any feel for what additional investment would happen if in fact the provinces opened up the regulations to have wine flow freely?
I think you said that around 60,000 litres is what the estimate would be for being shipped across the borders? Is that correct?