Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for the invitation to appear today on behalf of the Agriculture Carbon Alliance or ACA.
My name is Dave Carey. I serve as co-chair along with my colleague, Scott Ross, who I will be splitting my time with.
ACA is a first-of-its-kind coalition of 14 national farm organizations that unites every major commodity and collectively represents more than 190,000 farm businesses and $76 billion in farm market receipts in 2021. The ACA was established to ensure that Canadian farmers' sustainable practices are recognized through a policy environment that supports their livelihoods and leverages their role as climate solutions providers.
It is imperative that environmental policies are developed in collaboration with producers to ensure that the government understands their realities and that policies and programs can actually be implemented by producers to benefit the environment and ensure their businesses remain competitive.
We founded the ACA in 2021 because farm groups weren’t viewed by ECCC as relevant stakeholders, despite agri-environmental policy development being a significant focus of the department and the government as a whole.
We would request that a formal working group be struck between AAFC and ECCC, with representatives from primary agriculture, to work on pragmatic and practical policy development.
We share the government’s goal of a more sustainable agriculture sector, but are seeing a deterioration in stakeholder engagement. Resulting draft policies developed by regulators are not practical, reasonable or implementable by farmers and ranchers as they look to continue to produce low-cost, high-quality food for Canada and the world.
I will now pass it over to Scott Ross for the remaining time.