Evidence of meeting #67 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was growers.
A video is available from Parliament.
Executive Director, Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada
Thank you.
I think it's been discussed tangentially a number of times how farmers find it easier to just walk away when they're not able to put a complaint through the process. Perhaps Quinton could go more into that.
Chair, Trade and Marketing Working Group, Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada
Thank you for the question.
As Mr. Webber said in his opening statement, a lot of the time in this industry, the growers don't know who the other creditors are, so it's hard to form a bankruptcy class. What happens is that, a lot of the time, there are businesses that just go bankrupt and walk away. A lot of the statistics are flawed in the fact that they're not capturing that.
In our township alone, in Holland Marsh, we've seen three instances of that in the last 10 years, so a lot—
NDP
Alistair MacGregor NDP Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC
I think Mr. Webber made reference to the valiant efforts. StatsCan has tried to get the correct stats, but when no one reports them, you can't bring them out to the dataset.
Chair, Trade and Marketing Working Group, Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada
When there is no true bankruptcy or insolvency, it's hard to report stats. I know of three situations where people just walked away, closed down their business and started again. Those did not get accounted for statistically as a bankruptcy.
There are a lot more bankruptcies within the sector.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Kody Blois
Thank you, Mr. MacGregor and Mr. Woods.
Colleagues, that brings us to the end of our second panel. On behalf of all of you, I'd like to thank our witnesses for making the time this evening, those who joined us online virtually and those who had the opportunity to be here in the room. Thank you for your respective work in the name of agriculture and our farmers across the country.
Colleagues, on Wednesday, we will be drafting our environmental contribution of agriculture report, version number one. We don't have enough time today, but I would ask.... I know Mr. Barlow's not here, but Mr. Perron, Mr. MacGregor and Mr. Turnbull are here. We need to have a conversation off-line about what next week could look like. There is some uncertainty with the House proceedings and how long we will be here.
My desire would be that, if we are able to get the report done on Wednesday, we can have a conversation about whether you want to do something next week. Otherwise, we will resume our activities when we come back in September when the House returns.
We can talk about that off-line. Thank you everyone, and good night.
The meeting is adjourned.