Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I want to thank you very much for having me come here tonight.
First of all, I want to acknowledge today that I hail from the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, located in the traditional land and the unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people, who have stewarded this land for centuries.
I'm here to speak in favour of allowing packaged honeybees to be imported into Canada from northern California.
I am a generational beekeeper from Saskatchewan. I was born and raised there. My parents were life members of the Saskatchewan Beekeepers Association. My grandfather helped start the Saskatchewan Beekeepers Association. I was a director before I moved to Nova Scotia.
Prior to moving to Nova Scotia in 1992, I had my own commercial bee operation in Saskatchewan. When the provincial meetings were held to discuss the closing of the border, I voted back then, in 1986, to close the border to prevent the invasion of various foreign pests into our hives. I believe it is time to re-evaluate the risk assessment, since the results of the 2014 assessment on border closure are no longer accurate.
In the spring of 1992, we moved to Nova Scotia to work for the Bragg Food Group, which is the largest producer in the world of wild blueberries. The company has become one of the largest beekeepers in Canada, with commercial operations in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario. All of this has been driven by the closure of the Canada-U.S. border and the lack of a reliable source of hives for pollination.
I was allowed to speak before the Senate on this very same topic back in 2015, I believe. While we were unsuccessful then, I believe that by my presence here today I am proof of our beliefs and our resolve.
We spoke to the Senate about the development of an additional 13,000 acres of wild blueberry land that our company had started to develop in northern New Brunswick and about the future needs of pollination of this land. The development is almost complete now, and the need for bees has increased. We expect to need four hives to the acre to pollinate that land. Where are all the honeybees going to come from?
During the past eight years, our company has been growing our hive numbers, along with investing in infrastructure. This year, our company has purchased 3,000 packages of honeybees from Australia to pollinate our wild blueberries and those of our customers. This is on top of our existing operations of close to 20,000 hives.
At this point, I would like to comment on the report by the industry-government honeybee sustainability working group. I believe it deserves to be mentioned that as the largest beekeeper/blueberry grower in Canada. and 100% Canadian-owned, we can't understand why we weren't invited to at least make a presentation to this group. There was no communication whatsoever.
Personally, I read the report and felt that they did not address the lack of pollinators for wild blueberry pollination or the high winter loss of hives.
I would also like to comment on the report by Dr. Albert Robertson, who has extensive experience working in northern California with honeybee queen producers. He feels that we now already have any issues that they have. I feel that the monsters of the past have been put to bed—