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.