Thank you. What a great opportunity.
In these brief comments, I'd like to lay out four points for you to ensure that Canada uses advanced agri-food technologies to both expand exports, which was the question I was asked to ponder, and at the same time be a global leader in what we're calling the “digital agriculture revolution”, which is a way of addressing climate change. We're looking for some win-wins here.
First is the obvious: We have to invest in our infrastructure more. Today, as we know, the Prairies are almost a unique resource globally in terms of their ability to produce grains and oilseeds as well as plants and animal-based proteins. That capacity goes through the Rocky Mountains on a very small number of train lines, and every few years that service is disrupted.
Just last week, I was on a panel with the vice-president of operations for the Port of Vancouver, and he discussed how the bottlenecks are spreading even now as we speak. The fragility of our trading system harms our ability to be that breadbasket for the world that Canada aspires to be, and we need to make our transportation infrastructure more of a focus.
The second point is to create financial incentives to reward farmers who adopt greenhouse gas mitigating management practices and then market ourselves to world markets as sustainable agriculture. By embracing what some of us are calling regenerative agriculture, meaning encouraging farmers to use more complicated crop rotations that take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, and by using smart tractors that are very, very efficient with fertilizer, agriculture can become a source of the climate solution as opposed to a source of greenhouse gas emissions. Doing that will allow us to build a global sustainability brand that will be a trade advantage in an increasingly climate-concerned world.
Without giving too much away, on October 25, my institute, the Arrell Food Institute, together with the CEO's office at Royal Bank and the Boston Consulting Group, is releasing the first of a series of reports that tackle that issue. The punchline of these reports is that we need a federal carbon pricing mechanism that captures agriculture, sends the signals to farmers to do the right thing and gives us a basis on which to build a sustainable trade brand.
Third, if we want to produce the food, we have to train the right people, and this requires us to address the labour shortage. This means we have to train people, encourage young people to come into agriculture and rebrand agriculture away from the idea that it involves a straw hat and a red barn and towards the understanding that the farmer of the future is as likely to wear a lab coat as she or he is to drive a tractor. Agriculture is part of the innovation economy, and we need investment in our curriculum of skills that we train people with. If Canada wants to expand our exports in the long term, we need a technologically savvy workforce who are ready to drive innovation.
Fourth, and finally, my last point is that we need to invest in the tools of what some of us call the “digital agriculture revolution”. The same tools that gave us smart phones and are transforming medicine are finding their way into barns and food processing facilities as controlled environment agriculture, vertical farming, and robotic harvesters and milkers, allowing us to boost production while reducing inputs, along with more efficient processing facilities and smart packaging. That's just a tip of the iceberg of what technology can unlock for us.
I think Canada needs to be at the head of this wave of innovation. We should do this by creating ag-tech innovation zones, giving particular areas preferential tax and immigration status, land-use planning permissions and competitive utility rates, thus germinating a Canadian Silicone Valley for food.
There's a lot of good stuff already going on in the world and in our country. A quick example of a public-private partnership that is run by the Weston Family Foundation is a homegrown innovation challenge designed to spark innovative thinking on these technologies in our country.
To close, there are four points: expanding our transportation infrastructure, creating carbon markets and a global sustainability brand, training the next generation to be technologically savvy users of this digital agriculture revolution and creating ag-tech innovation zones.
These four strategies would allow us to grow exports in the long term and also allow us to reach that vision that the advisory council for economic growth, the Barton report, gave us in 2016, which is that Canada should be the world's trusted supplier of safe and sustainable food in the 21st century.
With that, I'd like to thank you and open the floor for questions, or whatever you want, Mr. Chair.