Evidence of meeting #10 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was need.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Research Director, Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, As an Individual
I'm not sure there's a simple answer to that.
There are some small farms that are unsuccessful because they're not of a threshold size to be able to make use of reasonable amounts of capacity or provide a reasonable income. There's a whole range of things in here.
I don't think I'd want to speculate on that specific point.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Okay.
In your view, would small-scale farms, if we had more regional food systems, contribute to a greater resilience within our food system?
Research Director, Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, As an Individual
They certainly could.
Whether you're talking about processing plants or farms, to some extent, there are advantages with small, because small can be nimble. The difficulty is trying to get efficiencies in the system at a small scale, where you tend to have economies of size.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Do small-scale farms have a greater cost of compliance when it comes to a regulatory burden?
Research Director, Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, As an Individual
It probably depends a bit, but in general I would expect so.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Wonderful. I don't know how I got all of this in.
We heard from Mr. Campbell that local processing was an issue.
Would you say that this is an issue for a lot of our small-scale farmers?
Research Director, Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, As an Individual
Regionally, it could be an issue, but it depends on the context. It could be, yes.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Kody Blois
I'm sorry, Mr. Turnbull. We're at 25 seconds.
Go ahead, Monsieur Perron.
Bloc
Yves Perron Bloc Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
Dr. Mussell, I'll continue with the very interesting topic of regional processing and small farms.
You said that it was difficult to achieve profitability.
Would it be a good idea for the government to support small processing plants in the regions to overcome this profitability issue?
Research Director, Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, As an Individual
The context is very important here.
We have to remember back to the lessons that Canada learned following the BSE instance in the early 2000s. We publicly funded the erection of meat-packing plants, beef plants specifically. One of them is back in business now, but in the years following recovery from the BSE incident, every single one of them for a period of time—I believe there were seven of them—went bankrupt.
For the established plants, it made things very difficult on the competitive front. We have to be very cautious about getting into those kinds of arrangements.
Bloc
Yves Perron Bloc Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
Is there a way to support this sector permanently? We could be more innovative, for example, by offering tax exemptions or things like that?
What do you think?
Research Director, Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, As an Individual
I'll talk about meat plants again. There are all kinds of processing plants, but when you get into the meat plants, it's a hyper-competitive situation. They operate on very thin margins. It's very difficult through public policy to give an advantage to some of the plants and not the other plants.
What smaller plants can do is specialize in particular niches. There are ways we can look at setting up plants differently that do a better job of attracting talent and people. Alternatively, if resilience is going to be an ongoing problem, whether through climate or because we have to worry about warfare now—any range of things—there is greater resilience in having a larger number of smaller plants than having a small number of very large plants. However, the large plants have a unit cost advantage, so you're giving up efficiency in order to do that.
That's a trade-off we may have to understand better, but the marketplace hasn't necessarily done that for us.
Bloc
Yves Perron Bloc Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
As I understand it, this would increase resilience.
Thank you, Dr. Mussell.
Ms. Tranberg, you talked about the need for very fluid lines of communication.
Would moving processing facilities closer to producers in some cases help them?
President and Chief Executive Officer, National Cattle Feeders' Association
We're hearing that labour is the number one issue. We already have a significant shortage. How do we expand if we don't have the people to work in the plants? While bringing additional processing, I think that if we could add some processing capacity closer to where the cattle are, for example, perhaps we could see an expansion. We need to address some of the barriers to that before we go to that, and certainly, labour is one of those major barriers that we need to address.
Bloc
Yves Perron Bloc Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
Thank you.
Mr. Hemmes, you raised the problem related to containers, lack of data and congestion. Another witness suggested that we lift the exemption from the Competition Act for companies operating in this area.
What do you think?
President, Quorum Corporation
I don't know whether there's an exemption for anyone.
Bloc
Yves Perron Bloc Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
In fact, we've already heard from a witness that many companies aren't subject to the Competition Act in the container sector, because it's international shipping. He suggested that we remove that exemption.
What do you think? Would that be a big improvement? Would you recommend that?
President, Quorum Corporation
I think it would improve it greatly, yes. Now I understand. You're talking about the—
Bloc
Yves Perron Bloc Berthier—Maskinongé, QC
Dr. Mussell, do you have one or two specific recommendations to make?
Research Director, Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, As an Individual
Maybe I'll speak to the current situation that has to do with Ukraine, and the worries about a global food crisis.
One of the things we have to realize is that with Russia now having lost its most favoured nation status with many countries, access to fertilizer, specifically nitrogen fertilizer and potash, is now a strategic matter. Potash is an issue for other countries but not for Canada, because Canada is the largest producer of potash.
Canada is a country that's rich in natural gas. We need to be able to do something that helps to wean us off the need to import urea and other nitrogen fertilizers from Russia. That's very important, particularly for eastern Canada.
Canada needs to be part of a multinational effort to serve the customers, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, that can no longer be served by Ukraine.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Kody Blois
Dr. Mussell and Mr. Perron, your time is up, even though I gave you an extra 30 seconds because of the delay in the interpretation.
Colleagues, the bells are going to start ringing in four and a half minutes. I need unanimous consent for us to continue beyond the bells.
Is it agreed?
Mr. MacGregor, you have the floor.