Agriculture Committee on May 5th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you.

If our witness will allow another five minutes, I think we'll get through the round. We're a little bit behind.

Mr. Forbes, is it okay for you to hang with us for another five minutes?

[Chris Forbes]

It's a pleasure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Okay.

Mr. Perron, you have two and a half minutes.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

I want to thank the witnesses for staying a little longer. This gives us the opportunity to have a second round.

I'll confess my disappointment. As result of the skilful questions asked by Mr. Soroka and Ms. Rood, I learned that new money wasn't put into the AgriRecovery program. In the details provided to Mr. Seppey regarding the Canadian Dairy Commission, I learned that the credit capacity may be increased to $500 million, whereas the proposals were to increase the capacity to $800 million. I don't know whether this will be different. You can tell me. It seems very difficult to put new money into agriculture and to support the agricultural sector, which is really the foundation of everything.

Here's my question. Is compensation for supply-managed sectors being considered? This doesn't involve new spending. This money was promised. The amounts are established. The dairy farmers could receive payments for 2020-21. It's easy. Cheques can simply be issued.

All the other supply-managed sectors have shared their requests and specific circumstances. They want investment programs, and so on. This seems to be a good time to invest new money in farms. As Ms. Rood said earlier, farmers need financial assistance, and not more debt, which is already huge.

I don't know who wants to respond. Mr. Seppey can talk about compensation for supply-managed sectors.

[Chris Forbes]

I'll try to respond.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Go ahead, Mr. Forbes.

[Chris Forbes]

As the minister said last week, this issue is still one of her priorities. The government made a promise and she'll follow through on it, as she said. This week, she has been focusing on issues directly related to COVID-19. That's the priority.

I can briefly say that the Canadian Dairy Commission's credit limit has been increased to $500 million. The sector made this request, and the government responded.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

I gather that we can expect an announcement in the coming weeks regarding compensation for supply-managed sectors. Is that correct?

[Chris Forbes]

No, that's not what I said. I said that this issue was a priority for the minister.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Usually, when the issue is a priority, the implementation is quick.

Thank you.

I lost my audio.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

I'm sorry about that.

Mr. MacGregor, you have two and a half minutes.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you very much, Chair.

I also have a number of small-scale farms in my riding. Many of them have developed a really neat business model over the years where they supply fresh local produce to a lot of the local restaurants in the area up and down Vancouver Island. Of course, because a lot of those restaurants are now closed, they've lost a huge share of their market.

I have two questions.

For the $77.5 million that has been allocated in support of food processors for refitting, for buying new equipment and PPE, how do you ensure that small-scale processors are still going to get an adequate share of that money?

Has the department ever considered giving additional funding to programs like CanadaGAP? Then maybe small-scale fruit and vegetable growers could get the certification of safe handling of food they need to start selling to major grocery outlets in local communities to try to compensate for the loss in market share they've had from the closure of all the restaurants.

[Chris Forbes]

On the first part, I'd say, Mr. MacGregor, that when we develop a program, one of the things we certainly will look at is how we make sure that it's not all directed to large players and that certain groups are not excluded. We will do our best to make sure it has as broad an application as possible and works for the range of stakeholders in this sector. That comes from a mix of dialogue, as Frédéric was talking about, and our experience in delivering programs in terms of what works.

In terms of your second question, these are the kinds of suggestions that we can certainly always look at, whether it's with provincial programming or federal programming. Under the agricultural partnership, we have programs that can look at providing support to organizations to develop standards or to support companies looking to achieve standards. That's certainly the type of suggestion we can always look at with stakeholders, as I say, either provincially, because they have agricultural partnership funding, or federally.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, all.

This brings our question period to an an end.

We shall break at this time for five minutes and will come back at 6:30 my time.

Alistair, is it 3:30 in your neck of the woods?

Anyway, at the half hour, we will all come back.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

I think we're all here.

I would remind people that we are in public. I'm not insinuating that you don't behave responsibly when we're not, but we are still in public because we cannot go in camera with this app.

We want to plan for the next couple of meetings. We tried to get a bunch of names of witnesses from organizations. I believe you all submitted them. If I can get clarification from the clerk, I think the whole list of witnesses that was submitted by every party was sent to all of you.

We need to decide a couple of things.

As for the panel itself, usually we have two full hours. Is it the wish of the committee to separate that into two different panels?

I think three maximum per panel would be as much as we could do with all the little breaks we get along the way for technical issues.

I'll finish by saying we have been told we can meet at least once a week. If we meet twice a week on Fridays and Tuesdays....

We also wanted a deadline for submitting new witnesses. That deadline would be May 7, which is Thursday, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Having said that, we may need to get a new round of witnesses. We don't know how long this study will last. If you could submit all the witnesses before Thursday, that would be great. It would help the analysts prepare the list.

If it's okay, we'll use the same formula as we did in our first study where we go with the percentage of the House: 50% Liberal Party, 30% Conservative Party, 10% Bloc and 10% NDP, give or take a few. That gives an idea for the clerk to prepare the lists of witnesses.

That's about all I have to say. I can take some comments, suggestions or questions from the floor.

Mr. Drouin.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Mr. Chair, are the analysts going to send us a list of the proposed witnesses and potentially a schedule we can all look at and comment on if we need to?

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

I understand everybody received a list of witnesses proposed by each party. Am I right? As soon as the analysts have determined the people who will appear....

Everybody was asked to indicate their priority preferences. Your first witness would be your number one choice. With that, the analysts can start scheduling the upcoming meetings.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Okay.

Mr. Chair, obviously we know some other stakeholders were given the opportunity to appear before other committees. I would hope this committee would choose and prioritize those who haven't yet had the opportunity to appear before any committee.

I would suggest the analysts look at what other committees certain witnesses have appeared. It's not to say we don't want to have other witnesses appear at this committee, but I think we should give a voice to those who haven't yet been able to express their concerns or thoughts with the agriculture committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you for your comments.

Are there any other comments on that?

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

I have a comment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Go ahead, Mr. Perron.

Mr. Barlow, you'll have the floor next.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

I have something to say about Mr. Drouin's comment.

When you asked us to submit a list, it was clear that we would prepare that list based on the order of priority. The members who prepared a list of witnesses know whether the witnesses appeared elsewhere. If the members believe that these people will provide significant information, the fact that they appeared elsewhere shouldn't necessarily be taken into account. Instead, we should refer to the lists prepared by members of Parliament.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Mr. Perron, the parties are responsible for suggesting witnesses and the order of priority. I think that Mr. Drouin said this. You can choose to suggest the witnesses you want.

Go ahead, John.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm kind of echoing what Monsieur Perron said. We've already submitted our witness list, so it's tough to prioritize ones who have been....

To Francis' comment, I think it's pretty tough for us not to have CFA, horticulture, the cattlemen, the pork council or the meat council at the agriculture committee, as they may be bringing up issues that are more focused on agriculture programs or issues, where, if they were at the finance or industry committees, they may have taken a different approach. Many of us on the ag committee were not on those committees, and we have not had the opportunity to ask questions that we may feel are more ag specific or in more of an ag direction.

I agree to a little point. There may be some who don't have a specific ag focus who we don't have to prioritize, but I think our main stakeholder groups would be.... It would be incorrect for us not to have them as big priorities as part of this committee.

My second point, Mr. Chair, is that I'm wondering if there's any will among our members to put some sort of timeline on this. The only reason I say this is that, unlike a lot of other industries, time is of the essence when it comes to agriculture as we're going through the spring seeding right now, and producers are trying to get yearlings into the auction marts. The set-aside does not work for the hog industry, as was raised today, as Mr. Forbes said. We want the set-aside for the pork industry, but it doesn't work for pork.

I think there are some time issues that we need to be focused on, so it's not clear to me, Mr. Chair, and maybe you can clarify how this is going to work. Are we meeting indefinitely and just talking about COVID issues in agriculture, which obviously is what we're here for, or are we saying that, maybe in two or three weeks, we develop some sort of list of recommendations that we would pass on to the minister?

I do think time is working against the agriculture industry right now in terms of some of the things they are facing.

Maybe, Mr. Chair, you could provide some direction on the timelines here or what's really expected of us. Would that be okay?