Agriculture Committee on Dec. 8th, 2020

[Ian Affleck]

Absolutely. I think almost all the innovations to plant breeding, whether they're conventional breeding, gene editing or genetic modification, provide environmental benefits and sustainability benefits, even something that doesn't sound like it, like a high-oil canola. You need less canola to get the same oil, so your carbon intensity per acre is going down when you have those new products. If it's 5% higher yielding, once again, you need less land and fewer inputs to get the same amount of food. That's where innovation will help to continue to lead us to a more sustainable agricultural system. The GM canola varieties we've had over the years have allowed us to really invest in no-till agriculture so you're not turning over the soil and you're sequestering carbon into that soil.

These innovations will help agriculture sequester more carbon moving forward, so innovation will lead us forward.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Affleck.

Thank you, Mr. Perron.

Now we have Mr. MacGregor for six and a half minutes—no, for six minutes.

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

Thanks for the extra time, Chair. No, I'm just kidding.

Mr. Prouse, it's good to see you again. You and I have talked many times over the last two and a half years since I became an agriculture critic.

Certainly the topic of regulatory reform has always been a hot one. I'm glad to see that there's going to be that round table and consultations in January. I'm curious as to what some of the responses are that you are getting from the executive branch of government on why we're still sort of having these conversations even though you and I started talking about them way back in 2018.

[Dennis Prouse]

I was going to say this conversation with government actually dates back to late 2014, I believe.

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

Sure, but from my timeline, it's been less.

[Dennis Prouse]

Yes. Ian is very fresh off some thoughts and some discussions.

Ian, I'll let you take it from there.

[Ian Affleck]

From a government standpoint, this has been demonstrated as a priority. It's in the road maps, it's in the strategy tables and we have the protein industries supercluster all there. We have working groups, etc.

The challenge is being as innovative with our regulatory policy as we are with our innovations. Instead of being bound to old interpretations of regulation, it's looking at the new science and where the globe is going and then integrating that into our policy interpretations. There are ways to do that, but we have to be bold and we have to want this to be successful. I think that's a threshold we have to cross, and we're continuing to have this discussion in an effort to do that, but we've seen in the last five years countries pass us. The Argentinian regulators have published a peer-reviewed paper on the innovation and economic advantages they've already seen from their changes. We're not just behind. We're behind enough that others are publishing on it.

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

Mr. Affleck, when we had the Canola Council appear before the committee, they were talking about the great promise that exists in our biofuels sector and how they really want to be a part of it.

I know canola is a desirable source, especially for biodiesel because it has that low saturated fat content, which allows it to be processed into biodiesel. Are there varieties of canola developed that would be specifically used as a possible biofuel source, versus traditional canola that might be going towards making cooking oil and so on?

[Ian Affleck]

I'm not aware of a specific one. If you have the right innovation environment, people will definitely pick that ball up and run with it.

I think we see those examples. Right now I can list 15 new varieties that are under development in the United States and almost none in Canada. They have a clearer pathway and they're more in line with global trends. We're trying to get there and there's an opportunity to do that.

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

Okay.

[Dennis Prouse]

I would just expand on that, Mr. MacGregor. I think it's about creating a regulatory environment that's able to respond quickly. These technologies now allow for new traits to be developed in much shorter times than before. That's why we risk falling behind unless we make those changes.

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

Thank you.

I'd like to turn to Mr. Curran and the Government of Alberta.

Mr. Curran, we're talking about processing capacity. Of course, Alberta, has the High River Cargill plant. On Cargill's website it says that between Guelph and High River, that's basically 55% of Canada's beef processing capacity right there.

High River, of course, was hit quit hard with COVID-19, and it's an integral part of our processing capacity in Canada. Could you maybe talk about a few of the hard lessons that the Government of Alberta has learned from that experience? What steps are you taking into the future to help protect that? What kind of assistance do you want to see from the federal government?

Are you looking at diversifying operations, or is it maybe putting in more safety protocols to prevent anything like that from happening in the future?

[Jamie Curran]

That's a great question.

In terms of lessons learned, I would say the ongoing relationship and preparation with their processing sector as a whole is important because we monitor supply chain. The preparation is a key part of it.

As we adapted to the changing conditions of COVID-19, we learned a lot in terms of how we can work together in a collective manner and work very closely with processing sectors. Now we have regular touch points with our federal counterparts and our processing sector. We have biweekly calls to just touch base in terms of how we continue to maintain continuity to support the needs of the processing sector and to keep the industry whole.

The ongoing work in responsiveness with the fed cattle set-aside program was a critical success as part of this, leveraging AgriRecovery and responding quickly and nimbly to meet the oversupply needs of the cattle industry as we adapted to new processing capacity. The critical learnings for me were that preparation, the partnership and our ability to leverage the current programming, such as AgriRecovery, to respond to the pandemic.

In terms of ongoing support from the federal government, we continue to focus on labour and our challenges with labour as a whole. The labour programming continues to be a priority. It was discussed recently at the FPT table of ministers. We continue to advance and evolve the work around labour.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Curran, and thank you, Mr. MacGregor.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

We'll go to our five-minute round with Mr. Warren Steinley and Mr. Epp.

For the members' information, it's fine if you want to split your time, but I won't intervene so you have to keep tabs on how much time you have.

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

I'm starting right now, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much.

My first question would be for Mr. Curran. It's along the same lines as my colleague, Mr. MacGregor, on the processing capacity of livestock in Alberta. With just two major plants and the safety concerns around what happened during COVID-19.... These plants shut down, which backlogged a lot of livestock producers and made everything take longer, from feed livestock to basically having to wait a little bit for a fall calf run.

Is there a look, in Alberta and across western Canada, towards bringing in medium-sized processing facilities and trying to encourage some diversification? In your opinion, what would be some of the impediments—which this study is supposed to undertake—to encouraging some of the medium-sized processing facilities to be set up?

[Jamie Curran]

I'll talk about opportunities. We think there are both livestock and crop opportunities. The market conditions will drive that. We work with all the stakeholders that are prepared to invest.

At the end of the day, the policy environment needs to be competitive, and that's a critical piece. As a province we've created that macroeconomic environment to be a competitive jurisdiction by reducing red tape and, of course, advancing a very low tax environment to incent overall processing as a whole. We also have the programs to help enable that from a value-added perspective. We know there are great growth opportunities for things like hemp. There are impediments, such as varietal development. We know that's an impediment to deriving some varieties for hemp in other sectors.

Specifically, with respect to cattle processing, it comes down to market demand, logistics, cost of capital and infrastructure. All of those things will help create a competitive environment for cattle processing.

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Both witnesses talked about the regulatory competition and that we need to ensure our agriculture producers stay competitive.

What would be the two biggest issues facing agriculture producers now in Alberta and western Canada, Mr. Curran? Why are we not as competitive as producers in other countries around the world?

[Jamie Curran]

I don't know the two biggest issues. In my opening remarks, I mentioned that access to capital is always a challenge for processing. The ongoing labour at some of our facilities for processing is always a challenge. Those are two things that come to mind.

With respect to how we address some of those challenges, we have the lending tools through the Alberta Agriculture Financial Services, our private institutions and our federal counterparts with the former FCC. We know those capital opportunities exist, so we have the environment now that will help overcome many of those impediments for investment, export and growth.

Investment and trade are interrelated, even on the export side. We need strong trade agreements, working through those areas and working with governments where there are non-tariff barriers. It's highly interrelated, and our goal is to drive exports and investment for the province of Alberta and to focus on those two areas to support growth.

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Are there some non-tariff internal trade barriers that you see as impediments where we could help to make sure there is easier cross-provincial ability to access markets? Are there some non-tariff internal trade barriers we could tear down?

[Jamie Curran]

I want to be careful around how specific I am here. There are certain countries that have specific provisions in place with respect to COVID that sometimes impact on trade.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you. I'm sorry; we are out of time.

You have five minutes, Mr. Drouin.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank Mr. Affleck, Mr. Prouse and Mr. Curran, who took the time out of their busy schedules to spend some time with us today.

Mr. Affleck, on the regulatory framework you guys are working on with gene editing—and Mr. Blois touched on that—the international partners are used to another regulatory framework, and in Canada, we're essentially based on outcome: whether or not it's safe.

With your dealings with U.S. companies and others, is that, within itself, creating a barrier, or is that helping?

[Ian Affleck]

It's about to create a bigger barrier. I would say that the product-based approach is right. We've preached it for 25 years. We've convinced a large proportion of the world that we're right, and they're moving to product-based approaches that are better than ours.

Now, if that's what sets in, we are also importers of food ingredients for processing. If we have created a more opaque system that applies more rules than the rest of our trading partners, this is going to make it harder to import those food ingredients as well because if we're overlaying rules that others don't have, now every time you're importing something, you have to sift through to see if there's something unique in Canada that no one else has to worry about.

We're running into those now, and if we don't align, that's going to get worse. It's not just not growing it here. We're going to start having trouble figuring out...or it will be discouraging to try to import things to Canada because it will be more complex to bring things into this country.