Thanks very much for the opportunity to appear before you today.
I urge the committee to examine how to improve our policy execution. We have an implementation problem in the Canadian food and agriculture system as it relates to environmental improvement. It's a decades-old problem. It cuts across all levels of government, all governing parties, elected and unelected officials, and their systems. Nobody seems to want to address it and I'm hoping you will. Given what's in play and the potential of Canadian agriculture to contribute to environmental sustainability, this seems to be a moment for change.
We do have many good aspirations and policy statements, and in some cases we have very good targets, but the instruments that we're using will not permit us to meet the sustainability goals we've set out for the food and agriculture sector. All the main programs for environmental sustainability and agriculture suffer from the same kinds of deficiencies. This includes the Canadian agricultural partnership, the on-farm climate change fund and climate change solutions. These problems are essentially that they're largely voluntary, focus on grants or contribution agreements and are not targeted. They focus on best management practices and not systems change. They focus on the supply side without demand-side elements, and they have limited transition planning associated with them.
These instruments are not adequate for the scale of our challenges. We have to improve our instrument choices, our designs, application and integration. I elaborate on more suitable designs on my research website. The clerk has the link to that site.
Thanks for inviting me, again, and I look forward to the discussion.