Agriculture Committee on April 26th, 2023

[Jean-François Doyon]

You are entirely right when you say the square centimetres have to be put to good use. That is obvious. However, it seems that 95 per cent of pesticides used in agriculture are not necessary. The problem is that the agronomists who sign the permits for spreading pesticides sign those permits because they have been hired in the past by the companies that produce pesticides. So it is profitable for the companies. However, it is not always necessary to have pesticides. It would help a lot to have incentives for this.

I would like to add that Canada is a honey exporting country. For some years, honey shipments have been denied entry to Japan, precisely because there started to be pesticides in the honey. We have to start asking questions about this.

[Tim Louis, Liberal, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Mr. Chair, I only have 15 seconds, so I want to thank all the witnesses for being here.

[The Acting Chair, NDP, Alistair MacGregor]

Thank you very much, Mr. Louis.

I'm going to now turn to the Bloc Québécois. I would like to also recognize Monsieur Trudel. Welcome to our committee.

You may start now with your six minutes.

Please go ahead.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses for being here.

Mr. Doyon and Ms. Lamothe Boudreau, you can't know how happy I am to hear French being spoken. It is rare to hear French being spoken in the committees here.

Your testimony is very interesting. You talked about losses and so on.

Ms. Lamothe Boudreau, my first question is for you.

You talked about over-wintering queen bees in banks and self-sufficiency. Can we produce queen bees in Quebec? If so, how is it done?

You addressed that issue earlier, but what challenges would there be for producing queen bees in Quebec at this time?

[Maggie Lamothe Boudreau]

Queen bee production businesses are continuing to grow year by year. New beekeepers are also trying to start producing queen bees. Producing them is as simple as it can be complicated. You start with an egg, you graft it, and you get the royal cell. The queen mates in flight, hence the challenge with importing foreign genetics. You can't necessarily choose the male with which she will mate, so you have to put the queen bee in an isolated area. Once the queen has mated, you harvest it and give it to another beekeeper, or you use it yourself to start a new hive, a nucleus, and save a mother hive that had lost its queen.

At present, our challenge in Canada is in the spring. We are really not able to produce queens before early June. As well, when we come out of winter, there are often hives that no longer have a queen. At present, we unfortunately have to rely on imports. However, the project for over-wintering queen bees in banks, which is being developed in Quebec, allows 40 queens to be kept in the same hive. That means that there is a survival rate that can easily rise as high as 85 to 86 per cent, one queen can be kept, and the other 29 can be sold.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Right. That is interesting.

Do you think that better training for beekeepers and allotting additional resources to beekeepers would be a good thing for the industry in general?

[Maggie Lamothe Boudreau]

Training is actually accessible. We even have schools that offer training in beekeeping, such as the Collège d'Alma.

However, smaller beekeepers, for example, may want to have a hive on their lawn, behind their house, but have no idea how difficult it can be to manage a hive. They have to use veterinarians. They have to give the bees medicines. They have to give them treatments, a bit like dogs when they have to be treated for fleas. Varroa is a bee flea. There are also viruses to be managed. People are not aware of everything that the care they have to provide for a hive can involve.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Right. Thank you, Ms. Lamothe Boudreau.

Mr. Doyon, earlier, you addressed the issue of losses, and you said there are a lot. The federal government has a range of risk management programs. Ms. Lamothe Boudreau also talked about this.

Do you think the programs could be better aligned, between Canada and Quebec and the other provinces, so they would be better tailored to your situation? How could that be done?

[Jean-François Doyon]

Certainly there are already programs in Quebec for winter losses or crop insurance, but the federal government's share is really not huge, and I fundamentally believe that the federal government has to provide support for crop insurance and winter losses, because those losses are huge. A $1.5 million loss is tough and it creates a difficult situation.

Ms. Lamothe Boudreau asked me a little while ago whether we had would still have started our business back up if we had not had insurance. We would have been bankrupt with $1.5 million in losses, on top of lost income. Obviously we really needed support.

I would like to come back a bit to the question of importing packages of bees. We are not opposed to that, but we need to pay attention to the genetics we are developing, so as not to have Africanized cross-fertilizing with our queens. That is why Ms. Lamothe Boudreau said we had to have a closed area to be able to fertilize our queens.

We are not opposed to importing packages of bees, but we really have to pay attention to what we are importing. For example, this year, we are not able to get queens from Pope Canyon Queens in California because an Africanized gene was found.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Doyon.

Ms. Gue, a number of articles and studies have reported the increase in varroa resulting from rising temperatures. In fact, everyone is talking about it. This phenomenon is associated with climate change.

Do you think that as the climate crisis worsens, we might see varroa become more widespread?

[Lisa Gue]

We do know that various factors are interrelated. I have seen studies that show a relationship between climate change and these diseases among bees. Studies also show that exposure to neonicotinoids makes bees more vulnerable to the effects of varroa.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Has there been an increase in neonicotinoids in the last few years, and is their use declining in Quebec and Canada?

[Lisa Gue]

In Quebec, the use of neonicotinoids has declined because of the provincial regulations. Elsewhere in Canada, we have not seen the same trend. It is very difficult to assess the situation because data is scarce. We have to rely on reports of pesticide sales. We are not seeing a decline elsewhere in Canada, despite the fact that they have declined significantly in Quebec. We can therefore conclude that they have risen elsewhere.

[The Acting Chair, NDP, Alistair MacGregor]

Thank you, Ms. Gue. We'll have to wrap it up there. That's the end of your six minutes.

Colleagues, I will be doing my line of questioning here from the chair.

Ms. Lamothe Boudreau, I'd like to start with you.

I really appreciate the testimony you have offered our committee from your expertise in breeding queens. One thing has struck me through these hearings. I think that we all know that, in farming as in nature, there is an evolutionary arms race that is going on. When pests overwhelm their hosts, some hosts will develop a trait, or farmers will seek to breed in a beneficial trait that allows it to survive certain climatic conditions or various pests.

I've just been curious, because I know we have one main species of honeybee, and there are a lot of subvariants. Given your expertise, when it comes to things like the varroa mite and the viruses that mite contains and other diseases that affect hives, is there any promise on the horizon from increased research and funding for bee breeding programs that it might be possible to select traits that allow bees to better withstand that?

I've been quite concerned from the testimony that we've heard about the development of certain species of varroa that are now resistant to conventional treatments. Again, this is part of the evolutionary arms race. They are going to develop traits that allow them to survive what we are using to treat them.

Could you offer some of your experience and expertise about the kinds of recommendations you'd like to see in this report? What promise is there in the future for bee breeding and selecting traits that may help us deal with some of these issues?

[Maggie Lamothe Boudreau]

Yes, there has been a lot of work on selection in Quebec. They have done some research also on bees that would actually be resistant or tolerant of varroa. We are not there yet—that's for sure. That's why I was talking a little bit earlier about other ways to treat them, because the industry has been keeping some of the homologations of some products up on their arms to save them.

But to get back to selection, yes, there is a lot of promise. We've been making a lot of headway in Quebec with the research chair, Pierre Giovenazzo. If we manage to get that financing from Genome Canada, we'll be able to get those snips off the bee genome, and we'll be able to go even faster. This is a three-year project that we're doing.

As queen breeders in Quebec, we've formed an association of queen breeders. As I told you a little bit earlier, we're already 10 years in advance on our selection program, because we're all keeping the family lines to end up with bees. And we have data. We have data that proves we are getting better and better each year at producing honey.

We have bees that are more hygienic, so if we start importing from.... I'm going to give you an example. In 2018, we received some bees from Australia. They were very weak against couvain platré, an illness from the bees. It was brought in by the Australian bees. The problem is that they came with the drones. As I was telling your earlier, the queens mate while they're flying. They'll mate with those drones that are weak against that illness, and the daughters will be weak against that illness, too. We end up diluting our genetics and all of our hard work so far. Before we started importing into Quebec, we had a local genetic that didn't show this illness. We've brought it back in from those importations.

Yes, there is selection, and it is possible. We're on the brink of incredible progress. We just need research, funding, a research centre, and it's going to work.

[The Acting Chair, NDP, Alistair MacGregor]

Thank you for that.

In the final minute and a half I have, Ms. Gue, I'd like to turn to you. My question is along the same lines of what Mr. Louis had asked Mr. Doyon.

We've heard of the financial struggles farmers are experiencing, which are forcing them to really farm every available square inch of land they have just to, in some cases, break even. We've had some witnesses talk about some of the incentives that the federal government maybe could play a role in—providing a more varied type of habitat, more floral options.

Is there anything you would like to add or expand upon that you'd like to see this committee really focus on in its report and recommendations? I'll just give you a 50-second warning.

[Lisa Gue]

Sure.

Thanks for the question. I appreciate that line of thinking.

I would encourage the committee to look to what's happening in the EU under the biodiversity strategy there, which does include a commitment to reduce pesticide use and risk by 50%. I think we need to pursue these goals, which Canada has also committed to under the new global diversity framework, understanding that this is the long-term thinking for a resilient and sustainable food supply in Canada as well.

I would encourage the committee to look at the financial incentives the European Union is including as part of that package. I do agree that such will be an important element of success.

It's an overlooked chapter in the just transition strategy, perhaps.

[The Acting Chair, NDP, Alistair MacGregor]

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

We'll go to the second round, and back to my Conservative colleagues.

Welcome back to the committee, Mr. Shields.

You now have your turn for five minutes, please.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today. I appreciate it.

I'm going to ask you a slightly different question, in the sense that we now have digital logging for trucks. I brought this up at a previous meeting, and now do in the context of your moving very delicate loads. I don't know what your distance is, but when I bought it up in a different part of Canada.... At 12 hours those vehicles turn off. Are you experiencing any challenges with digital logs and moving loads of bees?

Ms. Lamothe Boudreau or Mr. Doyon, do you have any issues with the transportation of bees in the 12-hour digital...?

[Maggie Lamothe Boudreau]

I'm going to try to answer you, although pollination is not my specialty.

In the case of blueberries, which are probably the most remote right now, the trip can be done in 12 hours. However, if I am not mistaken, the breaks that truck drivers have to take present a problem. Taking breaks during long trips is not possible for beekeepers: if we stop and the sun starts to rise, the bees will take flight and we will lose them. The hives will die or suffer from overheating. They are piled on top of one another, and each of them produces 15 kilowatts of heat. It is therefore very important to keep moving and get where you are going quickly.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Go ahead, Mr. Doyon.

[Jean-François Doyon]

For us in Quebec, pollination is not really a problem, particularly for blueberry fields. The log allows 14 hours: 12 hours' driving and two hours for meal breaks. Apart from a few exceptions, there is no problem in Quebec when it comes to the distances to be travelled for transporting bees. We can do a return trip between Beauce and Lac-Saint-Jean, but most beekeepers rent a motel room in mid-trip. There is a team to handle the loading and unloading and a new driver takes over, delivers the load, and comes back to sleep at the motel.

In terms of transportation, pollination is not a problem.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Here's what we're competing with, though. The Americans have an ag exemption for three hours longer, so you're competing against the American ag industry. Their exemption is about 300 kilometres. That's something that has been brought up. I've heard from others in the bee industry that it's a challenge for them to make that.

[Maggie Lamothe Boudreau]

I would like to add that it can become a problem. One of the recommendations I make, to encourage Canadian self-sufficiency, is to simplify trade in queen bees and nucleus colonies between provinces. However, when you are transporting bees from one province to another, it takes longer than 12 hours and you are facing exactly the problem you describe.

It is important that we offer support in this situation. We have to get from point A to point B to unload the hives. We can't do it in the parking lot of a motel.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Thank you. I appreciate that. I think we're identifying something that's existed now.... The U.S. has done it with those three hours to try to help the exemption in the ag industry.

Thank you.

You mentioned getting bees from Australia. Do you get them from New Zealand as well?