Agriculture Committee on Sept. 28th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Welcome to this meeting of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are resuming our study on a food policy for Canada.

Please excuse our tardiness. Things went on a bit longer at the House because of the departure of one of our colleagues.

We have with us Mr. Nick Saul, who is President and Chief Executive Officer of Community Food Centres Canada.

Welcome, Mr. Saul.

We will also, via videoconference, be hearing Mr. David Connell, who is Associate Professor of Ecosystem Science and Management at the University of Northern British Columbia.

Mr. Connell, can you wave at us, to make sure we are connected? We're good. Okay.

We will also hear, via videoconference, Mr. Evan Fraser from the Arrell Food Institute of the University of Guelph, who will be speaking as an individual.

Could you also wave at us, Mr. Fraser? Okay. We're all good.

We'll start with opening statements.

Mr. Saul, as you are here, if you don't mind, please give us an opening statement, for up to seven minutes.

[Nick Saul, President and chief executive officer, Community Food Centres Canada]

Thanks for the opportunity to address the committee today.

I'll start by saying who we are. Community Food Centres Canada builds health, belonging, and justice in low-income communities through the power of food. We work with over 120 community-based partners in 60 cities across the country to establish welcoming places where people can come together to cook, grow, share, and advocate for good food.

We're interested in the development of a national food policy because it offers an opportunity to create a more systems-wide or joined-up approach to our food system, one that brings together economic, agricultural, health, and social concerns.

In our view, our country's long-standing focus on growing and exporting ever-increasing amounts of commodity crops is causing great damage to our collective health and to our planet. That being said, any national food policy worth enacting in this age of climate change, food insecurity, and burgeoning chronic disease must ensure that food production nurtures the environment and supports public health. We believe this is achievable so long as a national food policy views food as a basic right, and always through a health and sustainability lens.

At Community Food Centres Canada our policy interests lie first and foremost with food insecurity and poverty, the key drivers in determining whether lower-income Canadians can put good food on their tables. This priority falls mostly within the first pillar of the policy, but addressing this issue requires a whole-of-government approach with mechanisms that lie largely outside of an agricultural framework. That is to say, the current framing implies approaches or solutions that will not necessarily help to solve the problem.

Currently, over four million Canadians are food insecure because they don't have the income necessary to purchase the food they need to thrive. Think of inadequate minimum wages, welfare rates, increasingly part-time and precarious work, and unaffordable housing.

Food insecurity is unnecessary, unjust, and from a policy perspective, has great costs associated with the toll it takes on physical and mental health. Depending on the level of severity of food insecurity, research has shown that health care costs are anywhere from 23% to 121% higher in food insecure households.

We also know that poor nutrition contributes to billions of dollars in costs that come from diet-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes—$14 billion—and cardiovascular disease—$28 billion. We also know that diet-related disease disproportionately affects the poor. For example, type 2 diabetes is four times higher in the lowest-income group versus highest-income group.

We have a massive problem that we need to get right, and yet the language of the first pillar, which is to put more healthy, high-quality food on the tables of families across the country, is concerning. This implies that either more food needs to be produced, that food needs to be more affordable, or that it needs to be distributed better. This may be a natural tendency for a policy that is placed within the mandate of the Ministry of Agriculture; however, with a few exceptions, such as in Canada's north where distribution monopolies and physical supply of food exacerbate poverty in hindering access to food, a lack of availability of affordable food is not the issue. The issue is the lack of income. This necessary shift in framing is important to understand for any policy that aspires to impact on the issue.

The mandate of the Ministry of Agriculture has traditionally focused on commodity production at scale. When we ask agriculture to produce more food at lower prices, however, certain types of policies are implied, i.e., significant subsidies for large commodity producers, more chemicals, and higher yields per acre. This often amounts to a race to the bottom, where farm income and wages suffer, as do the types of careful stewardship that are required to ensure that our agricultural economy is environmentally sustainable. That is the third pillar.

Another pitfall of this framing is that it can lead to an increased focus on charity as the solution to food insecurity, specifically as it pertains to food waste. As food waste becomes recognized as a bigger and bigger issue, there has been a temptation to create a win-win by finding ways to further connect sources of waste with charitable distribution channels.

We would strongly suggest that further entrenching charitable responses to food insecurity is the wrong path. Waste needs to be addressed and deincentivized at source, and not redirected into the households of low-income Canadians through a partial or patchy charitable system.

If the answer is not cheaper food or reducing waste through charity, then what is it? Canadians need to be able to afford more and better-quality food, and there are no shortcuts to this end.

The types of policies required to advance the income security and food security goals are properly pursued through ministries that have the mandate to attack the problems at the level of scale and investment that they require, for example, the national poverty reduction strategy being driven by the Ministry of Families, Children and Social Development.

Moving people out of deep poverty will include policies like increasing transfer payments so the provinces have the means to increase social assistance rates and investing further in existing income security programs such as GST/HST credits for low-income earners. Given the role income plays in addressing food insecurity and improving health outcomes, this is an opportune time to explore the idea of a national basic income guarantee.

Despite the constraints that arise from the agricultural lens to address food insecurity, there are significant opportunities that can surface from a national food policy that takes a holistic approach to looking at issues across the food system, i.e., bringing together the ministries of agriculture, health, environment, social development, and indigenous affairs, and that also views these issues with a triple bottom-line lens as a guiding principle, that is, a lens that looks at policies from the vantage point of economic, environmental, and social sustainability.

Where we can readily see the value of this type of approach is where food and health policy intersect. Orienting our food system to health means looking beyond food simply as a commodity, and demands that health and food safety, the second pillar of the policy, be examined in a holistic and expansive way. Food safety is not simply food that won't make you sick tomorrow; it's food that won't make you sick in the long term, as a steady diet consisting of the sugar, fat, and salt contained in processed foods almost certainly will.

If our system of agricultural subsidies supports commodity crops that ultimately underpin processed food, which is at the heart of the chronic disease epidemic and is costing us billions in health care spending, perhaps under the rubric of a joined-up national food policy, we can examine this system to look at reducing harms and increasing benefits across the food system.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Mr. Saul, we're just but about out of time. Can you conclude?

[Nick Saul]

Well, you guys were pretty late.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

I have to leave it at seven minutes. That's to be fair to everyone. You're going to have to conclude. I can move to the next—

[Nick Saul]

I waited nicely for you guys, but if that's the way we're going to play, sure. That's okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Saul.

We will now hear from Mr. David Connell.

You have seven minutes.

[David J. Connell, Associate Professor, Ecosystem Science and Management, University of Northern British Columbia, As an Individual]

Thank you.

I'd like to make sure you can hear me okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

We're good. Go ahead.

[David J. Connell]

Thank you for this opportunity to present to the committee today. I was asked to share my views about whether anything is missing from the pillars of the national food policy. To me, the obvious answer as to what is missing is farmland. The pillars mention soil, water, air, and the production of more quality food. The four pillars also highlight the need to protect the environment, but there's no mention of land as a finite, non-renewable resource on which our food is grown, and there's no recognition that in spite of many years of efforts, we continue to lose farmland, including a lot of our best farmland, in every part of the country. With this critical gap in mind, I have two main messages that I want to share today.

The first is that protecting farmland should not be an afterthought of a national food policy. It must be recognized as a precondition for all four pillars.

The second message I want to share is that the federal government can play a critical role in helping to better protect Canada's agricultural land base. Specifically, the federal government could adopt a clear, direct statement of policy to protect the agricultural land base and to support its use for farming. Such a statement would ensure that the public interest in protecting farmland is integrated across provincial, territorial, and local jurisdictions.

In the policy brief I submitted to the committee, I included some statistics about the loss of farmland. These statistics show that there's significant conflict over competing land uses, especially between urban development and prime agricultural land. These conflicts will continue to contribute to the direct loss of farmland, declining agricultural activities on farmland, and price increases.

To address these issues, we first must recognize that farmland protection is part of a much broader question about where farmers, food, and agriculture fit within our society. That's what a national food policy needs to address. When adopted, the national food policy will be a statement about the importance of agriculture and food to Canadian society. The question I put to you is this: where do you think farmland protection fits within a national food policy?

To help you answer these questions, we need to look at the current state of farmland protection in Canada. The information I shared with you is from an ongoing national project engaged in looking at this. One of our main objectives was to assess the overall strength of farmland protection at both the provincial and local levels. In our view, a strong legislative framework is one that protects farmland.

In our policy brief we documented how each province takes a different approach to agricultural land-use planning. We also documented how these different approaches lead to very different outcomes—from very strong provincial legislation to very weak provincial legislation. These results are included in the table on page 1 of the additional materials which I submitted. Page 1 is the one with the pie chart on it.

The pie chart shows the relationship between the strength of provincial legislative frameworks and the amount of prime farmland in each province. We can see that at the provincial level, at most, only 9.9% of our best farmland is protected by very strong provincial legislation. This leaves most of our best farmland highly exposed to non-farm development. Furthermore, when we look at local governments, we find that the situation actually gets worse. This is evident on page 2 of the materials that I submitted. When we look at local legislative frameworks within each province, we see that a strong provincial legislative framework is not a guarantee for strong local legislation.

British Columbia, unfortunately, is a very good example of this, as shown on page 3 of the documents I sent. British Columbia is very strong provincially, yet a full range of strengths exists among local governments, from very strong to weak. When we look at the whole picture, we see that the strongest farmland protection is more likely to be in places where we have the greatest historical loss of farmland, and where the pressures for non-farm development are also the greatest. This is the after-the-fact situation that we must address. We must improve the strength of legislation that protects farmland before we lose it, and before we lose most of our agricultural lands.

As I stated at the outset, my position is that farmland protection should not be an afterthought. It must be a precondition for an effective national food policy. Therefore, I recommend that as a foundation of a national food policy, the federal government adopt a clear, direct statement to protect the agricultural land base and to support its use for farming. For example, as a starting point, I recommend that the name of the theme change from “conserving soil, water, and air” to “conserving land, soil, water, and air”. It is my strong belief that a national perspective can provide a unified direction to other levels of government, help integrate public priorities across jurisdictions, and help to ensure we protect farmland for future generations.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you. You're right on time, Mr. Connell.

We will now move to Mr. Fraser for seven minutes.

[Evan Fraser, Director, Arrell Food Institute, University of Guelph, As an Individual]

I would like to thank you for the invitation, and also congratulate all of you, and Minister MacAulay, for taking leadership on this. I have been involved in a number of the consultations and I've been delighted by this. I was delighted by the discussion that I heard, both in the Ottawa summit in June as well as the regional consultation that we held here at the University of Guelph earlier this month.

I'm really pleased by the four priorities that you've identified, with complete acknowledgement that there could be some tweaking done. I think improving or increasing access to affordable food; improving health and food safety; conserving soil, water, and air; and growing high-quality food are all laudable interdisciplinary cross-cutting objectives, and they signal to me that the government is serious about trying to create a comprehensive policy that applies across Canada.

I actually would like to use my time to make three specific recommendations.

The first is that within that framework you focus on a couple of doable, specific programs. Don't try to boil the ocean here, but figure out a few targeted areas to focus on. I think the food policy provides an ideal opportunity to show leadership in a couple of key areas. If you're taking recommendations right now, under the theme of increasing access to affordable food, I would recommend programs that address chronic food insecurity and safety among Canada's first nations and indigenous peoples. That would probably be my top priority, and then focus on other vulnerable and marginal groups.

Under the heading of improving food safety and health, I would recommend programs aimed specifically at improving childhood nutrition and focusing on food literacy through our public school system.

In terms of the conserving soil, land, water, and air theme, I really recommend that you prioritize programs that are geared at reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from the Canadian agricultural sector.

Under the final theme, which is about helping producers grow more high-quality food, I think there's a real opportunity here to align the food policy with the federal budget, with its emphasis on innovation superclusters, and develop the technologies and governance structures to establish a brand Canada which would demonstrate to our trading partners that Canadian food is the safest and most sustainable in the world.

This brings me to my second recommendation, which is that I really urge you to do everything you can to align the national food policy with other government priorities and programs. For instance, I urge the committee to seriously think about how the national food policy can support our research strategy, for instance, by including agrifood as a priority area amongst our research councils.

Similarly, and as I said a minute ago, I think there's a huge opportunity to support the national food policy and have the national food policy support our economic and trade policy. This harkens back to my comment a minute ago about the innovation superclusters. I think that inasmuch as funding is directed to the agrifood sector through the innovation supercluster fund, it should be aligned with the federal food policy. Similarly, I think there should be a direct and explicit alignment between the national food policy and the recently announced economic strategy tables for agrifood growth.

Then there's the new Canadian food guide which is going to be launched soon. We all know that. If two components of the national food policy are increasing access to affordable food and improving health and food safety, I suggest they should be explicitly linked between the food guide and the food policy, and that the food guide becomes one vehicle by which you consider implementing the food policy.

Finally, by using the national food policy to address food insecurity amongst indigenous communities, I think it should be possible to align the food policy with efforts to meet the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with a specific emphasis on nation-to-nation consultations.

My third recommendation builds on this and is actually the most important of my three recommendations. I strongly urge the government to take this opportunity to create a long-term and durable governance mechanism to help establish food policy on an ongoing basis.

As members of the committee may be aware, a number of attempts have been launched over the last few years by civil society and by industry to develop food policy. In one way or another, many of these attempts have not really had the long-lasting impact that we hoped they would. Although there is debate as to why, my own feeling is that one of the reasons past attempts have failed to achieve the lofty goals they've set is simply because the federal government was never at the table and never willing to show leadership. But this is changing, and with your efforts we're making serious progress here.

I strongly urge you to consider that one of the outcomes of this entire process be the creation of a long-term and durable governance mechanism that would promote the future development of food policy in Canada. Governance for food policy has to be underpinned by principles like transparency, participation, accountability. It must be multi-sectoral. It must be multi-stakeholder. It must explicitly include indigenous peoples' participation. I believe you have an extraordinary opportunity to develop such a governance mechanism. Possible models could be a national round table for food or a national food policy council.

I'd like to highlight that a group of stakeholders, some of whom you've already met in committee, along with my own institution, the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph, Food Secure Canada, the Maple Leaf Centre for Action on Food Security, and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, are about to launch a white paper on governance of food policy in Canada. I'd be delighted to share copies with committee members, if you're interested. This particular white paper will call for the creation of a national food policy round table. I am happy to take questions on that.

I'd like to quickly wrap up. I applaud the government's efforts to engage in food policy. It's complicated, difficult, and it's time that we did it. I am also very supportive of the collaborative vision that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has put forward, and through the regional consultations and the summit in June. I also think we can use this as an opportunity to take advantage of important trading opportunities while protecting our environment and ensuring safe and sustainable food for consumers.

I share the vision laid out by the report from the Advisory Council on Economic Growth that we can work to ensure Canada is the world's trusted supplier of safe, sustainable food for the 21st century. I believe that developing a national food policy which must include some sort of durable governance mechanism like a national food policy council is the right way to proceed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Fraser.

We will now begin our question and comment rounds with Ms. Boucher.

Ms. Boucher, you have six minutes.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

I thank all of you for being here with us. We are very sorry for the slight delay, and we do apologize.

My question is addressed to you, Mr. Saul. I don't know if I am pronouncing your name properly.

Sorry for that; I'm a francophone.

We are familiar with the broad themes of the mandate of the Minister of Agriculture. You focused particularly on the third one, which consists in preserving the quality of the land, water and air. That is what most of you said.

Do you think you will be able to serve the same number of people in the context of the new tax reform, while protecting that objective and adopting greener practices than the ones currently being used?

[Nick Saul]

Excuse me, I don't speak French. I apologize for that, but—

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

Okay, I will try.

[Nick Saul]

No, you don't have to speak English. I just want clarification on your question.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

No, it's okay.

[Nick Saul]

You can speak French. I'll listen to it in translation, but I didn't quite get the gist of the question.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

Fine.

The party across the way has a new tax policy. However, we know that small businesses and farmers will pay a high price because of that policy. You talked a lot about water, air, the quality of lands and access to affordable food.

Do you think you will be able to serve as many people as before, while adopting greener practices than those currently in use?

In your opinion, is it possible to arrive at a consensus?

As we know, a tax increase implies that there will be price increases.

[Nick Saul]

I hope you picked up in my comments that I don't think we have a problem around food. We have plenty of food out there. This is not an issue related to production. My main point has been about how we fairly and equally distribute the food that we already produce.

Globally we produce way more calories than we need. I have a deep concern—and I'd love Evan's comments on this as well—when you look at a goal of $75-billion export. I'm not sure where that's going. If you want to try to underpin a more sustainable agricultural system, when you are pushing more and more food out the door, it puts huge pressure on the land and the soil. Therefore, I want to push back against the kind of “get big or get out” approach that we often see in our agriculture policy, often aimed at export.

I would like to see much more focus on supporting organic and sustainable farmers and helping people to transition, and acknowledgement that that's an important route to go. I don't see much evidence of that when you see where the expenditures in agriculture go. There are huge opportunities to create land that is nurturing, that creates really good food.

I am trying to triangulate the idea of health, sustainability, and a good economy. A national school nutrition program is one of those approaches that brings together all three. You can support kids to eat well, do well in school, and build food skills, but if you put a mandate in on how you procure that food, you can also support a local rural economy.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

I have another question for you.

Personally, I eat a lot of organic foods. When you buy these at the supermarket or in other places where this type of product is sold, you see right off the bat that their price is higher than that of other foods.

If there is a new tax, do you think you will be able to serve as many people as before?

[Nick Saul]

That's what it costs to produce organic food in a way that takes care of the land. Those are the real costs of food.

We have a system where we privatize profit and socialize cost. We pick up the tab on cheap food. There's no way in the world that a burger, shake, and fries costs $4.99. We are just swimming in cheap processed food that I hope you heard me say is costing us billions of dollars in our health care system. We need to figure out a way to democratize better food. We need to reallocate our subsidies to support a more sustainable ag system and then create social infrastructure—whether that's provincially around increased minimum wages, or increased social assistance rates, or basic incomes—that allows people to actually access the best food that's out there.

I'd probably take local over sustainable, and there are lots of ways you can skin this, but the cost of the food you see, say, at a farmer's market, is the cost of growing food in a way that takes care of the land. We need to pay more for our food. We have to pay more for our food. The question is, how are we going to democratize that food and bring more and more people to being able to afford the best kind of food that's out there?

You're looking at me as though that's weird—

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

No.

[Nick Saul]

—but our race to pay seven or eight cents of every dollar on food—and we have the cheapest food system in the world next to the United States, where it's about six cents on the dollar—has driven us into the ground from a health perspective. When you look at the fact that 40% of greenhouse gases and emissions are directly related to the way we move food from field to table, a lot of that stuff is happening on farms in terms of—