Agriculture Committee on Oct. 5th, 2017

[Pierre Breton, Liberal, Shefford, QC]

Is there enough time for Mr. Davidson to answer the question?

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

You have five seconds left.

[Pierre Breton, Liberal, Shefford, QC]

You may have another opportunity to respond, Mr. Davidson, if another colleague is generous.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Breton.

Thank you, Mr. White.

Ms. Brosseau, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Ruth Ellen Brosseau, NDP, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for their participation at committee in this study and consultation on the food strategy.

Canada produces the best quality food, and other countries want some of it. We have a safe food system, but once again, we have a lot of people who live in food insecurity. We have 900,000 people who use food banks every month. Food banks were created to be a short-term solution. Every time I meet with my community groups and food banks, I hear that every single year the use of these banks goes up. It changes a little: it's seniors; it's young families; it's the working poor; it's precarious workers.

We talked about social policy and ag policy, and we have an ag panel on right now. As you said, Mr. Lemaire, I think the government needs to look at making sure that people can afford the food. Farmers are working hard, and they are struggling sometimes to make ends meet. We have to make sure that Canadians can afford the food. Looking at $15 an hour minimum wage, or basic income.... There are other things that the government needs to do to reduce poverty in Canada.

I would be remiss if I didn't bring up PACA. I bring it up a lot at committee. I know Bev was around when we talked a lot about PACA. We've been on the committee for a few years.

PACA is still.... Who knows where PACA is? This is something we brought up quite a few times at committee. We've had many meetings on it. There have been studies on it. I think all parties were okay and promised it during the election campaign. I know things change when you form government, but it's been two years. I must admit that I'm getting frustrated, even more so because we are renegotiating NAFTA. We know that, with Trump, anything can change in a tweet. Do we believe him, or do we not believe him?

Mr. Lemaire, could you talk to us about the importance of PACA as a tool, even more so now? I would like to have your comments about PACA, please.

[Ron Lemaire]

Thank you. PACA continues to be within our top two issues: it bounces back and forth between one and two in our sector. It's a lost tool, especially when we're looking at how we expand and grow our trade. With our largest trading partner being the United States, the privileged access we had to this trading tool was a leg up on the rest of the world. Without it, we compete like everybody else, and it is a challenge. We know growers who are selling in the U.S. who are not getting 100% of the payment for what they're selling because they can't leverage the preferential access they had in the past with the PACA tool.

We are working with Innovation, Science and Economic Development, where we understand the file is currently being held. The minister of ISED, Minister Bains, has the power and authority to look at this and determine how we can best move forward. The proposal stays the same: a stand-alone piece of legislation to address the tool at no cost to Canadians, and a significant cost to ensuring that farmers get paid when they sell their product here in Canada in the event of a bankruptcy, and then being provided access to the tool in the U.S. when that bankruptcy protection is enabled here in Canada. That mechanism is still necessary to move forward. If we can create the bankruptcy tool here, we will regain access to the U.S.

Under NAFTA, we were anticipating that the U.S. would bring this forward, but there are so many shifts and movements around the NAFTA negotiations that we haven't heard anything yet. I would not hold the NAFTA negotiating process to be the sole solution to finding access to PACA. This is in our court, in Canada. We have to create the bankruptcy protection for farmers and fresh fruit and vegetable growers here, and provide them with tools so that in the event of a bankruptcy, they can access some form of protection.

Currently we are seeing a bit of misinformation flowing through ISED, and we're working at providing the correct information so the right decisions and the right information can be given to the minister.

[Ruth Ellen Brosseau, NDP, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

I'm hopeful that it will get cleared up and we will see legislation coming forward. I know it sometimes takes a long time to get things done in politics, especially when you're in opposition or the third party. I'm really hopeful and I think all the members of this committee will agree. We've written letters to the Minister of Agriculture. We've written letters to the Minister of Innovation—sadly, with no response. Maybe we'll be talking about that in our 15 minutes at the end of committee today.

Mr. White and Mr. Davidson, in my riding I have Atrahan and Aliments. They have made investments. Currently we're slaughtering and transforming one million pork a year, and in 2020 we will be doing two million. One issue that is brought up quite often is they have trouble with finding people to work. Can you speak about some solutions? I would like to have your input on that.

I know that in areas across Canada, too, the slaughter capacity is an issue. Sometimes the distance those animals have to travel is quite long. Can you talk about Canada's slaughtering and processing capacity? These trade agreements are great, but do we have the infrastructure necessary?

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Madame Brosseau. That's all the time we have, unfortunately. You had a question, so they may want to answer.

Next we have Mr. Longfield for six minutes.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Thanks to everybody for coming and helping us with our consultation at committee, working on the four pillars plus any we might be missing.

I want to start with the Canadian Meat Council. I recently visited Cargill in Guelph, and talked about where the gaps are that could help them with the first pillar—producing adequate food, not only for Canada but for the world. They talked about there being a shortage of butchers. When we look at our support for the middle class, and the jobs we're trying to create and support in the middle class, jobs like being a butcher or other trades jobs within the meat industry are an area we're really having trouble filling.

If we're looking at an all-of-government approach, education and getting people into skilled positions have to be part of it. Do you have any comments from the Meat Council on whether or how labour could be included in a food policy discussion?

[Christopher White]

Yes, I'll also have Ron jump in, and I think this will address part of your question.

It's a huge problem, and not exclusively for Canada. It's a big problem in the States, as well. I think one of the things we're encouraged by is that from talking to government, we see that there's increasing recognition, on the one hand, that they want full employment and full capacity because they recognize the importance of this in the food chain. On the other hand, I think they've begun to appreciate that certain policies they've had in place around the foreign temporary workers' visa, in particular, are impediments. There are some consultations that government has begun to have with industry.

Ron's been leading those discussions on behalf of the Meat Council, but it's a problem, and having visited a couple of the abattoirs—I was in the Olymel plant when I first started—the work is remarkable. It's really physical and very demanding, and the investment that the companies make in these workers is not just at the plant, but also the English-language training and family reunification. The longer they stay in the plant, the greater investment they make in their ridings, as well. There's a net benefit for the Canadian economy.

Ron, do you want to jump in a bit?

[Ron Davidson, Senior Vice-President, Canadian Meat Council]

Yes. Until the invitation to this meeting came, I was in Montreal with Asta, Olymel, and the rest of the Quebec industry. We've already been in Mississauga. We've been in Calgary, and there's one more meeting coming in Winnipeg, so we've been working on this since about March 2013 trying to demonstrate, first, that we are turning over every leaf in this country to try to find Canadians who want to do the work.

I have spoken to many, and our first problem is that these jobs at slaughter plans are in rural Canada for the most part. We no longer have a whole lot of kids coming off the farms, and we no longer have access to immigrants who don't have college education, which we used to have up until the 2000s. These two big sources have dried up. We had to find a new source. Temporary foreign workers were there.

We ran, I would argue, the most successful pathway to permanency program in Canada for many years, in which we provided language training and settlement services. When they got their permanent residency, these people would then have a job and a skill that was in permanent demand in their communities, and they spoke one of the languages. That's become really difficult in the last couple of years to do, and we have, in just 15 plants today, 1,500 empty positions that we're looking to fill, including at Asta and Olymel.

Not only does that affect the 1,500 jobs in the plants, but it also affects all the other jobs in the economy that a butcher on the line creates. We have had four years of discussions about how to either get meat cutters and butchers approved as doing an in-demand, semi-skilled job—these are not unskilled people, because if you've ever gone there and looked, you'll find that they're not unskilled—under the IRCC program for express entry—

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Yes.

[Ron Davidson]

—or to continue to get them through the temporary foreign worker program with a pathway to permanency to follow.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Okay.

[Ron Davidson]

That's what these discussions are all about. Those are the two solutions we have on the table.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you. I'm glad I asked the question.

Cargill had a group of immigrants who had just arrived under a new program we introduced in June, and they're going through the language training. Hopefully we'll get through that in our food policy.

Maybe for Dennis from CropLife, looking at the other parts of education, what about educating people in urban Canada about farm productivity and how important it is to do the work that CropLife and your members do, in terms of education around urban and rural, if that's part of our food policy—

[Dennis Prouse]

Yes, and that's been a huge focus of ours the last number of years. We recognized a few years ago that, frankly, the industry had fallen behind on that. We hadn't done a good enough job educating the public and talking to them.

We're not going to have large numbers of people coming from the farm. That's just not where the economy is going, so we have to communicate better. We support agriculture in the classroom now. We work with farm and food care. These are the people who are more directly connected. They're doing a good job. We're out there using the best tools we can. We're on YouTube and Twitter. We're out there on social media talking about benefits. We generally find that when we talk about the benefits of modern agriculture, as opposed to getting into arguments with people, we tend to have a better outcome. That's the approach we've taken. We're finding that, slowly but surely, it's paying dividends.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you.

Sorry, Ron, but we're out of time. I had some questions for you, too, but I'll pass it back to the chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Longfield.

Mr. Peschisolido now has six minutes.

[Joe Peschisolido, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Mr. Chair, thank you.

Chris, you talked earlier about the importance of economic return and profitability. One thing we've heard from past witnesses is the whole concept of externalities, that the industry is very efficient, yet society as a whole, government, is subsidizing that efficiency through the environment, animal welfare issues, and health.

What factors do you think we should be looking at to deal with the whole issue of an agriculture industry that's efficient, yet a society overall that's perhaps dealing with the externalities of that efficiency?

[Christopher White]

Well, fortunately I wrote my thesis on that.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Joe Peschisolido, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Then it may have been a good question.

[Christopher White]

No, I'm just kidding.

I think that's the fundamental challenge. We've all alluded to the fact that much of the export market is dealing with those issues. For example, when we were in Belgium in the spring, we chatted with officials from the Canadian embassy. They had no sense that from a beef producer's perspective, CETA was a problem: most Canadian farmers aren't going to raise beef the way they do to export to that market.

In any food policy you look at, I think there has to be an element not just of self-awareness in terms of the domestic market, but also, when you're looking at export markets for Canadian products across the board, what are we facing? It's such a range. When you look at China and Japan, the standards are here and here. Then you have the EU, where the standards are much different. What would be very beneficial, from our perspective, is anything government could do to....

I was down in the States last week, and I was talking to the board of directors of NAMI. One of the things Trump has done well is the “two for one”. For every one regulation you want to introduce, you have to take two off the board. I think that would be a really healthy review for the Canadian government to look at. One of the criticisms that I've certainly heard from our members is that while CFIA does a fantastic job in terms of regulating, there's just so much regulation that it's really hard to keep up with it. Sometimes there's a feeling that there's no consultation. A regulation is imposed from Ottawa, but there's no appreciation for what it's like on the farm. There's no thought process. There's insufficient consultation.

With all of the externalities that Canada faces, I think that would be a really important consideration. If you could take a look at all the regulations facing industry and sort of evergreen them, I think that would be very helpful.

[Joe Peschisolido, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Okay.

Dennis, you mentioned earlier the importance of science-based decisions. The problem that I and maybe others face is that we're getting competing scientists now. You get one report that says this is good, and then another report that says this is bad. Given that, what factors or variables can this food policy take into account to deal with these competing scientists?