Agriculture Committee on March 12th, 2015

[Gerald Keddy, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS]

Welcome, witnesses.

Mr. McAlpine, you hit on several issues, all of which I think are important. I have to side with Mr. McCallum on the idea that I'm not sure they're all trade barriers, but they're definitely barriers to production and they're barriers to running a seamless company, without question.

One issue you talked about was the accelerated capital cost allowance. I realize that is an issue for corporations and for food processing, especially in Canada. Again, I'm not sure that it's a trade barrier.

Maybe just to ease your mind a bit, the finance committee did put forth a recommendation that we adopt the American standards, whereby the accelerated capital cost allowance would be on a permanent basis, or for a minimum of six years, so corporations would have an opportunity to do some longer-term planning. It would be preferable to make it permanent but to do longer-term planning in their acquisitions and upgrading of equipment.

[Rory McAlpine]

That's very good.

[Gerald Keddy, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margaret's, NS]

I want to go to the Canada Grains Council. I can't help but be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but one of the other problems, of course, of transporting grains across provincial borders occurs when you turn that grain into things like malt whisky or rye whisky. That's almost impossible, at least for an individual, to transport across provincial borders.

With regard to the whole pest management regulatory regime, I recognize the need to have the federal government there. I think it's extremely important. The neonicotinoids situation is a prime example of how other jurisdictions in Canada do not have the bee die-off, and it seems to be just a situation of application. It would be extremely dangerous if one provincial jurisdiction banned an entire pesticide and took that tool out of the tool box of the grain industry, especially of the canola industry in the province of Ontario.

At the same time, do you not separate that out from the big cities' and municipalities' use of cosmetic pesticides? I can tell you, as someone who has taken a pesticide applicator's course, as someone who used pesticides in my former life, I always felt it was unfair that urbanites, city people, could simply go out and buy the same pesticide in a diluted form and apply it when I would have to take an applicator's course to use it.

I do see a difference there. I'd like your comments on that.

[Tyler Bjornson]

I will answer in a circuitous way, so forgive me for this.

I want to come back to a comment that Mr. McCallum made about whether this really is a trade barrier. The fact of the matter is that the World Trade Organization has a series of agreements in respect to regulation. Two of the key ones that we are talking about here today are the agreement on sanitary and phytosanitary measures affecting trade and the one on technical barriers to trade. That affects all kinds of regulatory actions. What those agreements are trying to do is to discipline governments to not put barriers into place that affect trade without a legitimate reason for regulating in that area. That is why we are very focused on the issue of science and risk-based measures. It's the foundation of the federal regulatory agencies, through legislation, to do those things. We find that a lot of the provincial approaches have a lot more vagueness and opacity to them in the criteria they have to use, unlike the federal government's regulatory approach, which is bound by international trade agreement obligations to make sure it doesn't do anything that isn't science-based.

So coming full circle to your comments about urban versus rural, in the context of trade-related barriers it really doesn't matter if it's urban or rural; it has to be science-based, it has to be risk-based. Whether that's covering the eyeshadow women put on their face, it doesn't matter if the women happen to be in downtown Toronto or in Prince George, B.C. It shouldn't matter; it should be a science-based, risk-based approach on the safety of that product for use by Canadians.

The same thing goes for agricultural products. We should have no different approach whether or not that product is being used in the countryside or in the urban areas. The PMRA, and Health Canada's food directorate, and the CFIA all have very stringent science-based approaches to looking at these things, so I think it's dangerous if we start splitting it up for socio-economic reasons.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Keddy.

Now we'll go to Mr. Choquette, please, for five minutes.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses for their very interesting testimony.

I am a guest here, at the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. So I am not an expert in this area. Nonetheless, as I was telling the other witnesses, agriculture is still important where I live. My riding mainly consists of the city of Drummondville, but we are surrounded by all kinds of farms—poultry, pork and dairy farms. There are also field crops in Drummondville. We grow a lot of berries.

People often come to my office to tell me about a shortage of farm labour in the region. I am wondering if that's something you are also concerned about. It's a problem at home, in the greater Drummond area, as well as in Quebec. I hear about it a great deal. Another thing people talk to me about is the temporary foreign worker program.

In this context of improving the agricultural economy, do you also have that problem in your sectors?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Why don't you go, Mr. McAlpine? Were you able to hear it, Mr. McAlpine?

[Rory McAlpine]

Yes. Thank you. Yes, I can respond briefly.

Indeed it is. The labour availability issue is chronic across both agriculture and food in Canada. I think it's true in the seafood industry as well. The problem has been, as I said, compounded by the changes to the temporary foreign worker program. It's not that we ever in our sector had used that labour as our a first choice; absolutely not. It's been a result of the only option that we've had, given the challenge of hiring enough workers domestically, particularly in the rural locations where the meat industry operates. The problem has been that there's been no economic stream of immigration that will make up for the labour shortage we face, particularly in lower-skilled occupations, so we defaulted to the foreign worker program, and have used it very successfully to bring in workers and, by far, to transform the majority to permanent residents. But that bridge has been severed by the recent changes, so we need a solution to that. It is definitely real and it does threaten the viability of individual operations across the meat industry and other sectors.

[Tyler Bjornson]

I'm going to restrict my comments to the interprovincial barriers that I raised. I think Mr. McAlpine raised labour-related issues, so I think it's more appropriate for him to respond to those.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Okay.

So I will put the question to Mr. Bjornson.

What kind of a strategy do you recommend and what type of leadership would you like to see from the federal government to stimulate domestic trade?

[Tyler Bjornson]

I think we would like to see the provinces and the federal government come to the table and negotiate an internal agreement on trade that has teeth to it, and repercussions for not following the provisions of that agreement. Specifically in the case of the regulatory barriers that we're particularly concerned about, we'd like to see an agreement that forms part of that, or perhaps a separate agreement where the provinces recognize the food, feed, and environmental safety decisions of the federal government by the relevant regulatory agencies.

That could very much be in the context of the federal government initiating strong discussions for an internal agreement on trade—or even separately, among agriculture ministers—to come to the table and have an agreement of this nature. I perhaps don't have the full history on this, but I think it would be the first of its kind. You would see the provinces coming together and agreeing to remove barriers to trade in regulation and not wanting to see duplication, and so therefore signing on to that.

I think a parallel example of this would be the approach to environmental assessments for major development projects that the federal government announced a couple of years ago. Something similar in nature to that, which sees duplication as an unnecessary evil between federal and provincial regulation, would be a good example in a parallel sector.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Thank you very much, Mr. Choquette.

I will now go to Mr. Zimmer, for five minutes, please.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

I'm going to share my time with my colleague beside me who's a real-deal farmer, Mr. Dreeshen.

I have a very brief comment about the issue of the neonicotinoids. We were just discussing it here.

It may not be an overt interprovincial trade barrier, but when you have different other government levels starting to make decisions not based on science, and they get concerned about things that might be out in social media somewhere, then it does become a trade barrier. It becomes a trade barrier if they start to make decisions that go counter to what we follow at the federal level of sound science and making sure there's just cause for things that are banned and things that are not banned because we know that these pesticides are very important to the industry and to your bottom line.

That's all I had to say. We're with you, and, again, we understand.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Mr. Dreeshen.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have just a couple of things. Of course, there is this main difference between physical science and political science.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

In physical science, if there is not a zero chance, you're not going to say it, and that's the part the political science group takes on as its reason for expanding....

It's the same sort of thing with low-level presence and GMOs. You see all of these kinds of things, and the rhetoric gets cranked up. Then when you start to look at other issues, the non-science part starts to come into it and starts affecting it. It's exactly what you said with the neonicotinoid seed treatments; they have to be looking at this very carefully and recognizing the sources of things that are happening.

Again, it's the same sort of thing with licensed crop protection products that were mentioned earlier, and the concerns we have as far as different types of seeds that are coming in. If we start looking at things and acknowledging the restrictions and the limitations, all of the other opportunities that we're trying to find for other sources of science and research coming to Canada, or to set the science and research here in Canada, are going to be limited.

That's the comment I have in that regard.

As I say, Tyler, you deal with that on a regular basis. I just want a quick comment from you on that, and then I'd like to come back to Mr. McAlpine with a couple of questions.

[Tyler Bjornson]

Absolutely.

We believe that the ability of any jurisdiction to have arbitrary regulations for reasons other than sound science and risk-based systems is insidious, to steal the word from Mr. McAlpine, and should be rooted out. One way to do that is to have an agreement between the provinces and the federal government respecting the federal government's jurisdiction over food, feed, and environmental safety assessments. The industry is 100% supportive and absolutely believes in very rigorous safety assessments of these products, so long as they're based in science.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Mr. McAlpine, here are a couple of things.

Earlier this afternoon, we were speaking with individuals from the Canadian Sheep Federation, and of course we started to talk about different meats, meat products, and so on. One of the questions was whether or not people such as you are going to be purchasing provincially inspected meats versus federally inspected meats. I'm just wondering if you could give us a bit of an idea of what the industry thinks along that line.

[Rory McAlpine]

Maple Leaf Foods is a completely federally inspected business. All of our plants in Canada are under federal regulation and licensing and, of course, we fully support that.

I guess the issue we're speaking to is the problem of a small but still important piece of the business under provincial licensing, under different standards, and in many cases not nearly the same level of inspection oversight, not necessarily having the same levels of pathogen testing, and so on. Meanwhile, a Canadian will purchase a meat item, not being aware that there is actually a difference in the levels of inspection and food safety oversight.

This is an example, in our view, that needs to be addressed. It's been talked about for years. We need to assure consumers, because if a problem occurs in any plant, whether provincially or federally inspected, it undermines the confidence of consumers and the confidence of our international trade partners. You know, in this day and age, it's pretty hard to explain that we have a two-tier system of food safety in Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

That wraps it up.

I want to thank the witnesses for being here this afternoon.

And I want to thank my colleagues for the questioning.

With that, the meeting is adjourned.