Thank you and good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to present today. It's a welcome break from the lambing barn.
My name is Katie Ward and, in addition to being a sheep and hog farmer in the national capital region, I'm in my third term as president of the National Farmers Union. The NFU is Canada's only national direct membership general farm organization, representing thousands of farmers from coast to coast, engaged in all commodities across a wide range of scales—everything from market gardens to large-scale export grain operations—and utilizing a variety of practical approaches from organic and biodynamic through to regenerative and conventional.
No farm organization has thought longer and deeper about climate change and reducing agricultural emissions. The NFU has been advocating for climate change mitigation and adaptation policies for over two decades. Climate change and emissions reduction was the theme of our 2003 national convention, but our policy and educational work on the connections between agriculture and the climate crisis goes back as far as 1997.
In 2019, the NFU published a discussion paper entitled “Tackling the Farm Crisis and the Climate Crisis”, which laid out a road map for a 30% reduction in agricultural emissions alongside policies to increase net farm incomes. The NFU has called for a transformation of Canadian agriculture: a future with lower emissions, more farmers, higher net incomes, lower debt, more use of renewable energy, more young farmers and production systems based on agroecology, food sovereignty and protecting and regenerating soils, water and biodiversity.
The NFU is the only farm organization that intervened in support of the federal government in the Supreme Court challenge on the carbon levy. I bring this up to clarify that, while we do not advocate having a carbon levy on farmers and the fuels we use on our farms and ranches, we do strongly support the constitutional right of the federal government to implement strong and effective national measures to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2018, we became one of the founding members of a coalition called Farmers for Climate Solutions, which advocates for agricultural practices and policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture as the most effective way for farmers to avoid paying a price for emissions. In 2019, delegates at our 50th annual convention passed a policy resolution supporting a rebate on fuels such as propane and natural gas for dryers and other agricultural uses such as barn heat, because we believe that farmers face enough of a challenge to our bottom line already and that the erratic weather patterns caused by climate change, which disrupt our harvest catastrophically as happened in 2019, should not mean that farmers face financial penalty on top of the weather risks that impact our very livelihood.
I would like to thank the government for the rebate announced in last Monday's budget for the backstop provinces where the federal pricing is in effect. A simple rebate mechanism would be for farmers to document eligible or non-household use of natural gas and propane and attendant carbon levies paid and to request a refund, perhaps as part of a tax or GST filing.
In light of the budget announcement, it may be that Bill C-206 is no longer needed, especially since we understand that the budget rebate mechanism may cover barn-heating fuel usage in addition to grain-drying fuel usage and would, therefore, be more expansive than the bill under consideration here today.
I want to note, however, that we are here today to talk about removing a measure, admittedly flawed, that could reduce on-farm emissions. While it is necessary to ensure that farmers are not financially penalized while low-emissions technology catches up to the extreme weather challenges we're already facing as we grow food here in Canada, it is more necessary to introduce a suite of measures to partner with farmers, support farmers and incentivize farmers to reduce emissions so that agriculture is not increasingly seen as a high-emissions sector, while other parts of our economy are reducing their emissions on the way to our Paris targets.
Last Monday's budget introduced a number of very positive programs and spending measures that the NFU and Farmers for Climate Solutions have called for, and we're grateful to see financial support for farmers and ranches to actually implement practices that will reduce farm-related GHG emissions. Assistance to transition to low-emission technology and practices on our farms means that we don't have to face the financial risk of such a transition on our own and helps to level the playing field when we're in competition internationally with farmers receiving far more agri-environmental support, such as in the EU and the U.S.
Given market demand and potential border pricing measures under discussion internationally, everyone knows that we must go further, so we need additional programs to support farmers.
I'd like to highlight for you what we are suggesting could be called a Canadian farm resilience agency, or CFRA, modelled on the prairie farm rehabilitation administration, which the federal government administered across the prairie provinces for 70 years—
