Welcome, everyone, to meeting 28 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food.
Pursuant to the order of reference of Wednesday, February 24, 2021, and the motion adopted by the committee on March 9, 2021, the committee is resuming its study of Bill C-206, an act to amend the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, regarding qualifying farming fuel.
Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of January 25, 2021. Therefore, members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.
The proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website. The webcast will always show the person speaking rather than the entirety of the committee.
I'd like to take this opportunity to remind all participants to this meeting that screenshots or taking photos of your screen are not permitted.
To ensure this meeting runs smoothly, I would like to share some rules with you.
Before you speak, please wait for me to recognize you. If you are participating via video conference, click on the microphone to unmute it. The microphones of participants in the room will, as usual, be monitored by the proceedings and verification officer.
I remind you that all comments from members and witnesses should be directed to the chair. When you do not have the floor, please mute your microphone.
Before welcoming our witnesses, I'd like to ask the members to remain in the meeting once the second panel is over. We'll go over the press release for the processing capacity report and approve the budget for the study of Bill C-205. This will only take a couple of minutes.
Now I'd like to welcome our witnesses. We have today, for our first panel, from the Canadian Horticultural Council, Aaron Coristine, chair of the energy, environment and climate change working group; and Linda Delli Santi, chair of the greenhouse vegetable working group. From the National Farmers Union, we have Katie Ward, president and farmer.
With that, we'll start our question panel. With the first panel, we have six minutes each, and we'll start with Ms. Rood for six minutes.
I jumped over the opening statements. I'm sorry about that. Let's go back to the Canadian Horticultural Council and whoever wants to take the opening statement for five minutes.