Agriculture Committee on Nov. 22nd, 2016

[James Brennan]

We have developed a fact sheet that I can certainly provide to the committee, if you would like a copy of it. There's no problem with that.

I think the important and distinguishing feature is that existing habitats are mature habitats and they sequester carbon and hold carbon. That's more so in peat-based landscapes than in mineral-based landscapes. Wetlands that are in the boreal areas tend to sequester tremendous amounts of carbon, more than in the mineral soils.

I can certainly provide you and the committee with more information on that, if you'd like.

[Alaina Lockhart, Liberal, Fundy Royal, NB]

Yes, thank you. That would be very helpful.

I think that's almost my time, so thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lockhart.

Now we go to Mr. Longfield for six minutes.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses for coming.

There is a range of topics we could dive into, but I want to focus on the two added topics that the Calgary Statement has, one around public trust and one around value-added agriculture and agrifood processing.

Starting with Mr. Brock, I visited the SGS agrifood laboratory in Guelph and I saw what they were doing in milling and testing wheat that could be used for pizza dough versus wheat that could be used for other ingredients in making bread. There is a value-added component there.

By the way, I should mention that Hensall is just up the road from St. Columban, where my wife's family came from, so everybody knows St. Columban.

Could we talk about the value added in grain production?

[Mark Brock]

For sure. When looking at the situation from an Ontario perspective, we're so close to our consumer base that transportation isn't as much an issue for us. Then we obviously look at further processing or adding value to the products we produce, trying to get more profit or value back to our membership, or value creation through the value chain.

Grain Farmers of Ontario partnered with SGS, a great international company—it's one of their first partnerships with an organization like ourselves—to create this wheat quality lab. We can do analytical testing to ensure that purchasers of Ontario wheat actually know the quality and parameters around its usage, so they can target where it goes, which helps us market Ontario wheat, almost getting to a point of trying to brand wheat grown in Ontario.

It falls to that consumer trust as well. The public can perhaps look at a Canada brand as we go down this road, an Ontario brand, or a grown-in-Ontario brand from a grain and oilseed perspective. We have that on the vegetable side very predominantly in Ontario, but not so much on our side, because we're kind of the ingredient.

I think we're working toward that value creation for our membership, but up through the value chain. We saw some real value in working with a partner like SGS to do this analytical work.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

In the new policy framework, public trust tying in with the value that's being created is a good story we could tell.

[Mark Brock]

For sure. I think there's a certain level of responsibility, too, from producers not looking to government to fund everything, and here's a prime example. Money from my farm has gone into a partnership with a private company. I think some government support could offset that a little bit, but it's not something we sat on the doorstep of the government demanding. We took the initiative and did it ourselves. There's definitely a role government can play in terms of assisting us with that, but I think it's a great example of a public/private partnership.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you.

I want to skip over to Mr. Orb and talk a bit about value-added, agrifood processing equipment manufacturing.

In the industry committee, the INDU committee I sit on, we had Leah Olson, who's a wheat farmer south of Regina. She's the chair of the Agricultural Manufacturers of Canada. She said that there are a lot of small towns in Canada where the employment base for making machines is actually higher than the number of people living in the town. Stimulating manufacturing in rural areas, and how the policy framework might help to create value for new seeding equipment or new headers, or some of the new technologies going into farming in Canada—is all this part of this framework, or do you see a role there?

[Ray Orb]

Yes, it could be part of it. I know that there are a number of small towns in rural Saskatchewan that have more people who are working in manufacturing. I can think of companies like Bourgault and Flexi-Coil. They started in a rural area, and SeedMaster and Seed-Rite. There are a whole bunch of different companies that started there.

The federal government, I think, has done a good job. I'll give credit to them when credit is due. I'll use canola as an example. It's a huge success. It was developed at the University of Saskatchewan. Some of the funding was used to develop the genetics. They took a crop that wasn't very popular around the world because of the poor oil content and developed a product that was really marketable. It's been a huge success. It is, for the better part, a major contributor to our agriculture GDP in Saskatchewan. Livestock is important and the genetic research that went into it to improve that industry is important, but canola is a huge success.

There is, I think, a good way to provide more money for research, to use machinery that's more efficient and things like that. There is a possibility to do that.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

A lot of them are exporting as well.

[Ray Orb]

Yes, the difference with Saskatchewan is that we export a lot more than we consume.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

That's true of machines as well.

[Ray Orb]

Yes. I know there are manufacturers just outside of Regina that have a good market in Canada, but their major market is the European market. The European agreements and things like that are very important to Saskatchewan, and to Canada as well.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Longfield.

Mr. Gourde, you have the floor and you have six minutes.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank the witnesses for being here with us this morning.

My question is for Mr. Brock.

You spoke of the possibility of implementing pilot projects involving risk management. That is an interesting idea. Can you tell us more about it?

[Mark Brock]

Thank you for the question.

In looking at a pilot project, what we're really thinking about is looking at designing something. For example, an insurance product created in western Canada—the western livestock price insurance program, I believe—is used by western producers for cattle. I think it's an opportunity for pork as well. They took some AgriRisk money that's in the existing GF2 and looked at designing and implementing an insurance product for producers that's really just backstopped by government but not solely focused on government dollars.

What we're looking at is this: is there an opportunity for eastern Canada, with a similar crop profile, to create a program that offers something bankable and predictable for producers in eastern Canada as an insurance-type program, through some AgriRisk dollars, that manages the liability put on government? Those were some of the reasons we saw the cutbacks to AgriStability: there was a huge liability hanging out there with the high rates, and that made government nervous about what was sitting there for exposure.

Is there a way to create some private opportunities, outside of government, that could carry some of that liability, with maybe some assistance from government to create that desired marketplace, to create more opportunities for private insurance options? From our standpoint, is there a way to assist the government, now and through the new APF, to create some of these options in the marketplace, or pilot what it could look like from an eastern Canada perspective? Is it something that could be modelled nationally as well? It's trying to think outside the box a little bit.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

I am going to give the rest of my time to my colleague David Anderson.

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

Thank you, Mr. Gourde.

I have a question for Mr. Orb.

Mr. Brock mentioned, as you did, the need to improve the AgriInvest program. Mr. Brock spoke about a two- to three-times improvement in present coverage being something the Grain Farmers of Ontario would appreciate.

Can you tell us what you are suggesting in terms of the improvement that you'd like to see to that program?

[Ray Orb]

We're simply asking to have it returned back to the original coverage that we had for AgriInvest.

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

Thank you.

To Ducks Unlimited, maybe I misunderstood you, but it sounded as though a major component of your presentation was that you're asking for more government regulation of private land use. There's a difference between best management practices and encouraging those on the farm, and calling on government to come in and regulate the use of private lands. Rural people kind of resist that notion. I'm just wondering if you have some comment on that.

Some of us have been working at trying to get local communities more involved in these environmental projects, trying to bring some the responsibility back to the local communities, giving them some responsibility for choosing the research that's done. To hear a major organization seem to be suggesting that what we need is this top-down approach from outside again on rural communities.... Rural people probably need to know that, if that's what you're suggesting, first of all.

Is that what you're talking about, or are you talking about trying to work with those local communities, giving them more responsibility, and having them create the expectations of improvement, or do you want what I'll call the heavy hand coming from above?

[Paul Thoroughgood]

Probably the appropriate way to answer that would be to say both.

An important step is helping people understand. I'll use soil conservation as the example for wetland conservation today. Fifty years ago, blowing soil was a normal thing to see on the Prairies. Today most people would look at soil blowing and say that's not a good farming operation.

Based on the knowledge we have today, draining wetlands is not a good practice, whether from a greenhouse gas perspective, a water quality perspective, etc. Passing that information to landowners is step one, so that we realize what we do when we drain a wetland. The logical next step in the private interest is to drain a wetland on someone's farm, because right now the market signal says to grow more, but if it's in the collective interest to not drain that wetland because of the downstream impacts, there is a role for government, we believe, to act in the public interest to stop the wetland drainage.

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

My argument would be that it's better to reward them than to punish the producers. Each time we've had government come in from outside—and conservancy groups—and tell local people how to manage the environment, it's typically taken about 15 or 20 years to recover from that.

We end up managing it as the ranchers and farmers did in the initial period in order to do a good job of managing it. We've seen that in a couple of big projects in my area in the last 20 years, including the national park.

[Paul Thoroughgood]

Yes, I'm very familiar with that.

Probably management of grasslands is different from management of wetlands, I would assert, because grasslands have a value right now to a rancher as a forage resource, whereas wetlands generally don't have an economic value. In today's marketplace, they're only viewed as a liability and not an asset. One of our comments is that we need to change our policy framework so that it makes them be viewed as an asset rather than a liability.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Thoroughgood and Mr. Anderson.

This will wrap up the first hour. I want to thank the panel for taking the time to come and present in front of us. You've been able to give us very useful information. We will certainly be able to use that in our recommendations.

We will now break before going into the next session.