Evidence of meeting #16 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 43rd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was money.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Alistair MacGregor NDP Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Mr. Forbes, I know you have some figures on the uptake of the various COVID-19-related programs. On behalf of the department, would you be able to table the exact figures with the committee? How many dollars have been accessed by how many producers, and so on?
We could go through the motions of putting forward a request for those papers, but I'm wondering if you could do that of your own volition.
Deputy Minister, Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food
I'm happy to provide updates. From our end, it's early for some of them. They'll roll out, obviously, even the ones that are launched. It takes time to take applications and so forth.
I think we've already had a request from the Parliamentary Budget Officer for similar information, so that may be a way of assuring ourselves that this information is shared.
NDP
Alistair MacGregor NDP Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC
That's perfect.
I want to ask about the transfer of just over $16 million from the science and innovation operating expenditures in the estimates.
I've had the honour of visiting one of the research stations in British Columbia. They do fantastic work. I'm wondering how that's going to affect the number of staff you have and their ability to do this really important work.
Deputy Minister, Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food
It's absolutely not affecting the research agenda or staff in any way. The goal in these extraordinary times was to look at, for example, travel budgets and international conferences. Nobody is going to them. Otherwise, some of our research has been slowed down because of respecting physical distancing on site, since we can't have the same number of people moving through.
We looked at our budget and saw there was money there that we didn't think we could spend. We were very comfortable that this money would lapse, because things like travel would obviously not happen. We wanted to get this money into the hands of the sector, and that's what we've done, but we certainly aren't creating any restrictions on our expenditures otherwise. People who want to undertake projects can do it in the context of public health guidance. When travel resumes and people are going to conferences that open up, there will be no restrictions on that later.
Alistair MacGregor NDP Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC
Were there no ongoing projects that might have been able to use an increase in funding?
Deputy Minister, Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food
There are some for sure. When we looked at this situation, we saw that we still have flexibility within our budget to make sure that those can happen. This was spending on stuff that we didn't think we would otherwise be able to support. Quite honestly, we did not want to lapse that money and not use it for the benefit of the sector at this time.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Pat Finnigan
Thank you so much.
That takes us to the end of this meeting.
I want to thank Colleen Barnes, vice-president of policy and programs, and Dominique Osterrath, financial officer, from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, as well as Chris Forbes and Christine Walker from the Department of Agriculture.
I want to remind our vice-chairs that we have another short meeting after this one. We'll break for 15 minutes. You have to disconnect and then reconnect. You've all received a password. Francis, John, Alistair and Yves, we're going to see you in 15 minutes .
This meeting is adjourned.