Agriculture Committee on Oct. 24th, 2024

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Tothova, in your presentation, you said that 25% of greenhouse gas emissions came from the agricultural sector and that those emissions had to be reduced. I agree. However, I also think we need to consider the beneficial impacts of agriculture, as you've mentioned in your comments. I'm talking, for example, about maintaining a grassland or carbon capture in the soil when zero tillage is applied.

Ms. Bedard‑Haughn, you talked a lot about the importance of recognizing the value of our own practices, measuring that in a sustainable way and rewarding our early adopters. I've been advocating for this for a very long time. How can we measure the positive effects of agricultural practices and decently reward people who, for 20 or 25 years, struggled, barely making ends meet because they were protecting the environment? Now that we want everyone to protect the environment, we're going to reward the person who polluted the environment for 20 years because they changed their practices, but we're not going to take early adopters into account. We have to find a better way.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.

[Dr. Angela Bedard-Haughn]

That's certainly an important topic for me, Monsieur Perron. Here in Saskatchewan, we have so many early adopters of practices like conservation tillage. I spend a lot of my own research time trying to get an effective quantification of the historic benefits we've accrued to date from those early adopters. I also think one of the opportunities we have before us now is to look at how we can incentivize those individuals to continue doing those important practices in the face of other types of pressures.

My greatest concern is that we implement some sort of policy or framework that unintentionally disincentivizes those early adopters—for example, by only rewarding the late adopters— because at that point, the early adopters are being told the only way they can get this particular carbon credit is to stop doing conservation tillage, blow off all the carbon they've already sequestered and then start over again by reintroducing these practices. I do think it's important for us to think about how to credit the avoidance of emissions that would be so easy to end up in that situation with the wrong policy instrument.

[Monika Tothova]

I would add, if I may, that it was 28% of the entire agri-food system, but of course we recognize that agriculture also has positive benefits in terms of lowering greenhouse gas emissions. It's a matter of the agricultural policies within specific countries on how they balance this demand. There is no universal prescription, right? A lot depends on how the agricultural policy is set up in the country.

If you reward people who have been doing something for a long time—conservation tillage, for example—while at the same time you encourage, maybe with a slightly different policy instrument, the people who have not been doing that..and in fact they should, let's say, convert to this practice.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, John Barlow]

Thank you very much.

Finally, we have Ms. McPherson for two and a half minutes, please.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Again, thank you to the witnesses.

I'll start with you, Dr. Bedard-Haughn. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, in 2021 recommended investing in emission abatement technologies to prevent emission leaking, which many witnesses have also echoed at this study. Do you believe this is a favourable alternative to BCAs? Do you think both approaches could work together? Could they complement each other?

I'd love your thoughts on that, please.

[Dr. Angela Bedard-Haughn]

Very briefly, yes, I do think it's important for both of these to work together if we do go to the BCA. I think with the border carbon adjustments, those are further into the future due to all the various complexities we're looking at. Some of the emission abatement approaches that we're looking at, depending on the specific one you were talking about, will be more innovation-driven and will be relatively easy to adopt in the shorter term.

I think it's a “both-and” as opposed to an either-or.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Do you have any comments on that?

[Monika Tothova]

I absolutely agree that we need to try everything that is going to work in terms of abatement or different policies so that we achieve an improvement.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you.

Dr. Bedard-Haughn, I have one last question for you. There were consultations regarding Canadian BCAs in 2021. Did you or the University of Saskatchewan know about these consultations? Did you participate in them?

[Dr. Angela Bedard-Haughn]

I did not.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Did you know about them?

[Dr. Angela Bedard-Haughn]

I did not. I was relatively new to my dean role at the time, so it may not have come to my attention. I can't say for sure whether any of my colleagues may have been engaged in those conversations, though.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

So, from that, can I assume that, from your perspective, the consultations were insufficient?

[Dr. Angela Bedard-Haughn]

I don't know whether they were insufficient or not. I can say that when I reached out to my colleagues in agriculture and resource economics on this issue in advance of being here today, the only one I heard back from who was actively engaged in this space was Richard Gray. However, there have been a couple of retirements in the last couple of years, so it's possible that institutional memory has been lost.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you very much.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, John Barlow]

Thank you very much, Ms. McPherson.

Thank you, witnesses.

I'm just going to ask Dr. Bedard-Haughn one question.

In the previous questioning, you mentioned your concerns about implementing a system that may not recognize the achievements of those producers who have adopted minimal till, crop rotation, precision agriculture and things like that. Have your colleagues done any work on coming up with a preferred system, let's say, that would give recognition to producers for their carbon sequestration in terms of a carbon credit market or something along that line? Has there been any consensus on what would be a preferred model?

[Dr. Angela Bedard-Haughn]

I don't think we're fully at consensus yet, beyond saying that, yes, we need to have something in place. We are actively working on two or three different possibilities in that space, including, as I mentioned, credit for avoidance in addition to or complementary to a different tool than sequestration. I think that's one piece. There have been other conversations about ways to incentivize this, thinking about the soil benefits and the ecosystem benefits that go with some of these practices as well.

So, are there other opportunities for crediting these folks by looking at their risk reduction? When we think about agricultural risk, these same practices tend to reduce the risk of soil erosion, soil loss, disease and so on. So, are there crop insurance benefits, for example, that could be accrued to some of these folks who go beyond, in addition to any type of a carbon market?

With regard to the carbon market, we're just really stuck right now with the international requirement for the additionality piece. However, I do think that we need to acknowledge that each year that they're continuing to do this practice, these folks are avoiding a whole lot of carbon loss that would otherwise be occurring. Likewise, with precision agriculture, they are avoiding a lot of emissions that might otherwise be occurring.

So, we are actively working on ways to quantify that.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, John Barlow]

I'll give Ms. Tothova an opportunity....

Has there maybe internationally been some work on an international standard, let's say, in terms of best practices? Are there other countries that have implemented a system that seems to be working?

[Monika Tothova]

There have been efforts. I'm not sure whether I would call them at this point a success, right?

There is still quite a bit of room for improving the methodologies, harmonizing the methodologies, and it goes back to what I said at the start of my testimony: that a truly global issue like this does require a global response.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, John Barlow]

Thank you very much. I appreciate your time.

Thank you, witnesses, for being here today. Your testimony is much appreciated.

Colleagues, we're going to suspend for a couple of minutes to allow our witnesses to move on with their day. Then we'll come back to get some committee work done. We're just going to suspend for a couple of minutes.

[Voices]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, John Barlow]

[Proceedings continue in camera]