Thank you. I'm always willing to relinquish the floor to one of our CFIA representatives.
Thank you very much to the committee for, first of all, taking the time and the effort—and the passion—to listen to some of the witnesses you've had. This is a very important subject.
It's great for me to be back with the committee. I've had the pleasure of sitting on both sides of the table. I started my career long before politics on this side of the table, and it's good to be back here.
It is a very important and, I would suggest, overdue subject for us to discuss, and when I say “us”, I mean farmers. I want to speak from the heart today; you won't have any prepared text in front of you to read.
I was involved in farming for 30 years. I grew up on a farm. I was farming for 30 years before I came here in 2004. It's a great life.
Farmers are a tough bunch. We're six feet tall and bulletproof—and don't ever tell us we're not—until we start having troubles. Also, that's not just for men; it's for women as well. I know a young woman who has unfortunately become a casualty, a statistic—but she's not a statistic; she left children and a husband behind, and no one quite knows why. We are very reluctant to speak about it or to anyone about it, and that's our biggest challenge as farmers, and when I use the term “farmers”, I mean farmers and ranchers.
We have many stresses, and so does every industry and every sector have stresses. Some of the farmer's stresses are unique: commodity market fluctuations; trade deals around the world, which we're hearing much about; skeptical consumers who want to know how we're producing this food; government interference, to be very frank; and food trends.
One of these that farmers have a unique challenge with and that creates great stress is the weather. There's no larger stress than watching your entire year's investment and effort become the equivalent of this carpet on the floor in 10 minutes. That's a challenge for any producer, whether there are issues with livestock or grains.
We also have more serious stresses coming from social media right now. I think you've had some presenters who actually reflected on that, on the attacks on public trust. That's one of the biggest issues. How do we gain the public's trust that we are doing the right thing?
We have financial stresses as farmers. There's no doubt about that, but we're such an easy target. Anybody can drive down the road and see the great big equipment out in the field, the big shiny red, green or yellow equipment. Wow, these big farmers: they must be greedy. They must be selfish. Are they worried about the food they're growing for me?
The same people who begrudge a farmer becoming larger to survive used to shop at a corner grocery store and now shop at the big box stores for the same things.
Don't forget that we consume the same food that we sell to our customers, and we do the best to provide a safe and nutritious food supply.
Farming is a solitary life, whether it's on horseback out checking cattle or spending hours in a tractor or in a combine, with 18- to 20-hour days. I can remember many of them myself. In our busy season, there would be weeks on end, days on end, where I would never see a bed; you would just lie down and nap for a while. We're against the weather. This fall was a prime example across the Prairies with the snow, and it wasn't just the Prairies, but Ontario as well.
We have a very unique work-life balance. We live on our factory floor. You look out the window and you see something to do every time you look out—this should be done, that should be done. How do you balance it with making sure that you spend time with your family? That's one of the challenges: the guilt of not spending enough time with your family.
I want to share one experience.
As politicians, you've all given many speeches. The most difficult one that I ever gave was a eulogy to a church filled with over 500 people, two children, a mother and wife, and the grieving parents of my best friend. What do you tell them? Do you say, “I failed because I didn't see that?” You can't tell them they failed because they didn't see it.
Therein lies the importance of what you're studying at this committee, because I still wouldn't know what to tell them, and I don't think many of us would. That's why we need professional help. We need to encourage people to speak up, to stand up for themselves and not succumb to the stigma of it being a mental problem, because it's no different from any other challenge we face or any other disease. It's good that we're talking about this at this committee.
It's not only that, but we can be our own worst enemy as farmers: “I can do this all myself; I don't need help.” I did that for a while, until I got a phone call one Sunday morning from a little girl who said, “Daddy's on the floor and mommy's in church, and I can't wake him up.” And neither could I when I got there.
He was the same age as me. I went home and said to my wife, “I'm going to change my way of doing things”, and I hired a couple of people to help me and I took some of that stress out of my life. If you can't recognize that, if no one's helped you recognize those sorts of things, you continue doing it until you end up a casualty lying on the floor.
I rethought my responsibility to the farm and I rethought my responsibility to my family, and I knew which one needed to take priority.
I'll just wrap up here.