Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear today to provide testimony on Bill C-206. My name is Aaron Coristine, and I'm the science, regulatory affairs and government relations manager at Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers.
Today, I'm here to represent the broader fruit and vegetable sector as chair of the Canadian Horticultural Council's energy, environment and climate change working group.
By way of introduction, the CHC is an Ottawa-based national association representing over 14,000 fruit and vegetable growers across Canada involved in the production of over 120 different crops with $5.4 billion in farm cash receipts in 2019.
Canada's fruit and vegetable growers are committed to being a part of the climate solution while also playing a major role in food security and Canada's economic recovery.
CHC and our members have consistently and actively engaged with the federal government to ensure carbon pricing policies connect the dots between the cost of carbon pollution and desired behaviours and outcomes versus unintended impacts and overall lowered emissions. Our consistent request has been for federal leadership to ensure that carbon pricing exemptions and relief are extended to the full range of farmers, including greenhouse growers, across all main fuel types, including natural gas and propane, used in common agricultural machinery.
In short, carbon pricing policies need to better reflect the modern agricultural practices across Canada, support increased security of food production and sovereignty, and minimize competitiveness impacts across provincial boundaries and with our major international trading partners.
CHC is interested in more information on the delivery of the government's commitment in budget 2021 to return a portion of the proceeds generated from carbon pricing directly to farmers in backstop jurisdictions. With regard to concerns with other GGPPA definitions, CHC supports Bill C-206 and its expanded definition of “qualifying farming fuels” to include natural gas and propane.
Although it falls beyond the specific scope of this bill, we also believe it is critical to amend other definitions in the GGPPA to ensure Bill C-206 achieves its intended outcomes. More specifically, in the legislation “eligible farming machinery” is defined to explicitly exclude property that is used to heat or cool buildings. As a result, certain farm machinery, when used to heat and cool buildings would, regardless of the fuel type, necessitate regulatory inclusion as a “prescribed property” to attain carbon pricing relief.