Agriculture Committee on Nov. 3rd, 2016

[Ashley St Hilaire]

Absolutely, yes. Sure.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Okay, terrific.

I'm going to switch back to human resources. Trying to address the needs in agriculture, as far as human resources go, is almost as broad a subject as it is for the general workforce. Can you identify where the shortages are? Are they on the farm?

Farms are very different, of course. Commodity grain farms or whatever have very different labour needs than do fruit and vegetable farms. Are they in the processing sector? We know meat, in particular, has had issues in western Canada, but where are the shortages specifically? Where do you anticipate the problem being the worst, and where is it going to be easiest to address that issue?

[Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst]

That's a difficult question to answer. The shortages are across the board. They're being felt in every commodity, especially those that are labour intensive, so that's the horticulture industry for sure. They're being felt as significant factors in the low-skilled arena, but also in the high-skilled arena. We're looking at general farm workers, where businesses are reporting extensive shortages, but they're also reporting extensive shortages for technicians, and for supervisors and managers of operations.

It really is across the board. This is not a targeted problem. It is something that's being felt in all regions of Canada, in the commodities and at all levels of the industry, both in primary production and absolutely on the processing side as well.

All 13 of the value chain round tables of Agriculture and Agri-food Canada have signed on as supporters of the workforce action plan, because this is such an issue for all 13 value chain round tables at various levels within the value chain.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

It is such a challenge, because it goes right from trying to encourage people to take some of those basic jobs, even on regular commodity farms. The level of skill that's needed in order to operate million-dollar machinery is something that most people don't have, and there are no training programs for it, so farmers have to take a bit of a risk even in terms of hiring people. Also, then, you have large-scale commercial operations. I'm glad you're trying to address this, but it is a huge challenge.

You mentioned that the area of labour, business development, and competitiveness needs to be a seventh component there. Do you have any idea of what kind of funding that component would require? There seems to be a set pool of money, and we're adding pillars and trying to figure things out. Our bureaucrats wouldn't give us any answer on whether there is going to be more money or if it's just going to be divided up in a number of ways.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

I'm going to have to stop it here.

Perhaps you can answer it in another question, if you wish.

Now we'll move to Mr. Longfield for six minutes. Thank you.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair

Thanks, Mr. Anderson, for going down that road. It's good to have you on this committee.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

You don't say that every day.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Not every day, but I think that on that line of questioning I'm heading down the same road. Maybe that's why I'm liking it.

On the workforce action plan, I was bristling a little when you were saying that it is the seventh pillar. It should be the first pillar, and it really should go through all pillars.

On the work you're doing on labour shortages, Mr. Chorney, you mentioned the whole-of-government approach, and this goes into ESDC and IEDC, into innovation and immigration, and then into the provincial jurisdictions. I want to dwell on the provincial area a bit to say that in Guelph we have the specialist high-skills majors programs at high schools. We have Conestoga College trying to get people into the food processing centre that they've developed. In many of the programs at the University of Guelph, there are four jobs for every graduate.

How do you see the federal government, through this policy framework, coordinating with provincial jurisdictions where education quite often falls under provincial jurisdiction? Could you just tease that out a bit for us, please?

I'm sorry to take a minute and a half for my question.

[Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst]

That's okay.

Certainly, the whole-of-government approach is needed to address this challenge, with leadership, though, from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. That's the ministry that needs to care most about this problem. That's why we want to see this as a priority, stated in an overt way with a clear strategic attack on this through some kind of plan that gets actioned and managed along the years.

It needs to include partnerships with provinces to get into the game of career awareness and continuing the good work of Agriculture in the Classroom at the primary level, of 4-H, of leveraging those best practices into the high schools, of leveraging green certificates and SHSM, those high school programs that exist, and moving that through the college and university experience.

We need to do a better job of telling the good story that as a graduate there are so many jobs waiting for you, but that story isn't being told right now. To go back to the earlier question around how much it would cost to initiate this, I think we also need to ask ourselves what are the risks of not doing this. Right now, primary production is already losing $1.5 billion. Processing is losing almost the same, if not more. We have a real risk if we don't address this. Yes, it will be costly, but there's a huge risk in not addressing it.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

It sure would help to get some range of cost forward.

[Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst]

Absolutely.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

My colleague to the left of me had a private member's bill that went through the House yesterday on attracting people to Atlantic Canada to try to help with the processing gaps and skills gaps that we have that could be filled through immigration.

The problem we have is data. We've got several problems, one of which is data, getting good labour market data. You mentioned that in your binder that you've left with us.

Also I want to touch on rural broadband. You talked about doing knowledge transfer and doing e-learning. Could you maybe touch on labour market information, how Statistics Canada might help with that as an example, and also investment in rural broadband?

[Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst]

I'll speak to labour market information. It's something that CAHRC has invested a lot of time and energy in doing. We work with all of our commodities associations across Canada trying to gather good details about what's going on in the labour market. We do that with funding from ESDC. We need to do more of that. We need to ensure that we keep track of what's going on with this labour shortage because this is a time when everybody wants evidence-based policy. We need to demonstrate that there is a shortage, that we have a plan, and that we're attacking that plan in a diligent way.

As it relates to investments in rural Canada, Doug, maybe you can speak to the importance of that.

[Doug Chorney]

Yes, certainly we've seen rural broadband improve dramatically in recent times, but gaps still remain, and when you're doing things like developing a job or through CAHRC collaboratively looking at all opportunities for employment, you need to have access to high-speed Internet to do that. I think that's a key piece.

But in terms of getting back to the cost of the programming, I think a lot of it is not new money. It's maybe just as much as redirecting money we're already spending. My sound bite on agriculture is this. We have tremendous opportunities. We've solved a lot of our problems. We've got production. We've got new novel approaches to production. We've got markets in the exports.

What are the two constraints that we can do something about? Number one, transportation; number two, labour. We can do something about those. Let's be proactive. Let's solve that problem.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thanks.

Under the new Calgary statement, we talk about value-added in agriculture and agrifood processing. I'm originally from Winnipeg, and I know East Selkirk quite well. In the south part of the province, there are a lot of equipment manufacturers. There are a lot of equipment manufacturers in rural Ontario. Really across rural Canada, there are a lot of equipment manufacturers. Labour is one of the challenges.

Could you maybe speak to manufacturing as it relates to what you're putting forward?

[Doug Chorney]

Manufacturing has access.... In southern Manitoba for example, a lot of immigrant workers come to be part of the future. I was in St. Brieux, Saskatchewan last year to tour the Bourgault air seeder factory. They are using domestic labour for the most part. They're really an economic boom for the St. Brieux area of Saskatchewan. It's a real success story of Canadian innovation and industry. I think this is a big part of driving our economy. We need to have the economic development to support growth in this country for us to get ourselves in a leadership role.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Chorney.

Thank you, Mr. Longfield.

Now we have Mr. Garrison for six minutes.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thank you both for your presentations.

I know, when you talk in terms of labour shortages, that urban people don't want to get into farming. I don't find that problem in my riding; I actually find a different problem. There is a great deal of interest among young people in becoming organic farmers. They see two big obstacles. One is access to land, and two is access to credit to allow them to get started.

So I guess I'm going to ask my questions to Canadian Organic Growers. What can we do in the strategy to tackle that problem? I see lots of young people who are frustrated in not being able to become small producers in the kind of model that we've had in the past.

[Geneviève Grossenbacher]

I'm really glad you asked that question because we also have done a lot of work with new entrants and we have found exactly what you said. By far, access to land is the top issue and then access to capital. Often, it's also for business development, since there is really a lack there. The third one would be access to training, but that does vary by region.

Another big problem is farming in the north because there is not much agricultural policy in the territories.

We fully support the seventh pillar on labour, business development, and competitiveness, and maybe young farmers or new entrants do fit there or perhaps they are a pillar of their own. Definitely, it is something that we need to address. The average age of farmers is 55 and 85% currently don't have someone to take over. Meanwhile, the paradox is that we have tons of people wanting to start farms and most of them want to farm in more sustainable ways, often organic, and yet they're not able to access the land. We have a huge opportunity here to help them access land, but I think we would need something like a farm renewal pillar within that.

Labour is also attached, so I totally agree with what you said. We don't necessarily need that much money. Sometimes it's just adapting current grants. For instance, with the current focus on labour and to qualify for summer student jobs, people must be under 30 and have specific training, yet what we find is that a lot of the new entrants are coming to agriculture from different backgrounds and often as a second career. Even if we could just remove those stipulations from the grant application, we would really open up the pool that farmers can have access to. Also, if there is any way we can have a top-up to their salary to incentivize the market for people who want to return to a farm, so they don't get only minimum wage, that's something that could be interesting.

I'm not sure if that answers your question.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

In one part of my riding, in the most rural part, there has been some innovative work done. One of the obstacles they found was zoning, which didn't allow a second family to live on the farm if they weren't related. They're trying to get the zoning changed so that a new young family could move onto the farm and actually take over from the existing farmer.

The other question I've had from a lot of the people who want to farm is about the orientation of Agriculture Canada and Farm Credit Canada seemingly geared to agribusiness and the large scale.

I had a fairly receptive meeting with Farm Credit Canada. One of the issues was how much of your income has to come from the farm before you're eligible for the credit and the obstacle this created in the beginning because how can you actually get that income from the farm until you get some credit at the beginning? I don't know if you've run into that with the small organic producers.

[Geneviève Grossenbacher]

Yes, what we're seeing again is that there is a trend of new farmers coming in. There are definitely a lot of people from farming family backgrounds entering the market, but the biggest, fastest growth is people who are not from farming backgrounds. In terms of those situations, access to land is even more problematic and because of that they tend to start medium- to small-scale enterprises where access is relatively easy, where you don't need to have $1 million and up in infrastructure, and where the land doesn't cost as much, so better supporting those farms would be key.

Actually I'm going on a tangent. You were specifically wanting to ask...?

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

In terms of Farm Credit Canada, for instance, the rules about when you're actually a farmer make it very hard to start farming.

[Geneviève Grossenbacher]

We have more recommendations we could send, but some things like AgriInvest are currently available. Would it be possible to extend it to aspiring farmers, so that farmers can put money aside and if they don't start farming, they never get the money from the government, but if they do start farming, they have helped save some money to start into farming?

We have other recommendations that we'd be happy to share.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

I would ask the human resource council if you have any comments on those same problems for start-up farmers.