Agriculture Committee on Nov. 9th, 2023

[Corlena Patterson]

Absolutely. Within that regulatory requirement, we're collecting regulated data on behalf of the government and sharing it with them. We have to bring everybody up to speed, and blockchain means that we don't have to transfer new data; it means that you can tap into the data, with permission, and see it. We'll get everybody to that understanding of blockchain eventually.

In other words, yes, it will be there to support their traceability requirements.

[Heath MacDonald, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Maybe I'll go to the CFA on this one, just to have their input on what's taking place with what Ms. Patterson's group is doing.

Mr. Ross, are you looking at this type of system that could alleviate some of the concerns for other sectors that are using ELDs?

[Scott Ross]

I'll let my colleague Pierre also respond to this.

I would suggest that from a traceability standpoint, we're always in favour of strong traceability systems and we think that they certainly do add value wherever possible.

At the CFA, we tend to not get directly involved in the commodity-specific elements required and involved in developing those systems. While we certainly are in favour of anything that helps streamline the supply chain and provides more clarity, transparency and consistency, there are a lot of sector-specific considerations on how you implement traceability models. I think that's something that we're always very cognizant of.

However, writ large, at the highest level, it's certainly something that's always an added benefit to the supply chain.

Pierre, is there anything you would like to add to that?

[Pierre Lampron, Second Vice-President, Canadian Federation of Agriculture]

Thank you, Mr. Ross.

Traceability is very important for producers and consumers because it helps maintain confidence in our products. We take pride in our productions, but traceability is very important. We are quite diligent about the traceability of the product all the way to the abattoir, but it could be even better. We urge every link in the chain to ensure that traceability with help from the government.

[Heath MacDonald, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you.

In regard to the ELDs—and maybe this goes back to CFIA again—we've seen cyber-attacks, obviously. With the traceability and the program Ms. Patterson introduced, what security is there around our regulators regarding ELDs and cyber-attacks?

[Scott Ross]

I'm not familiar with the protections that are in place.

I know that when it comes to the traceability systems referenced by Ms. Patterson, certainly blockchain technology has some fundamental privacy protections embedded in it. These are intended to protect information and ensure there's confidentiality.

I'm not in a position to speak to the regulatory protections the government may have in place. It's not something I'm familiar with.

[Heath MacDonald, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, John Barlow]

Thanks, Mr. Ross.

Thank you, Mr. MacDonald.

Mr. Perron, you have six minutes.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

I thank the witnesses for being here this morning.

Mrs. Patterson, in your presentation, you talked about the blockchain technology and your AgroLedger traceability system. That is very interesting. I think that this path should be explored further.

You said that we need to think about public reaction and the public image of our producers when there is a stop during transportation.

Could you elaborate on that?

[Corlena Patterson]

Yes.

Livestock haulers don't have specific rest areas where they might pull over. If they've maxed out their hours of service, they use whatever facilities are available. Feed, water and rest are few and far between, and they are ill-equipped to accommodate truck drivers versus the livestock.

The concern is this: Those trucks pull over into truck stops, just like cargo and freight trailers do, and sit there.

Folks were talking about passive ventilation; if it's 30°C outside and all pavement.... I travel the 401 far too frequently, and it's nightmarish at best. Those truck stops are very crowded with trucks and with the general public, and the general public get out to stretch their legs and walk around.

Now you have a trailer full of animals at 30°C with no ventilation, stopped because it has maxed out its hours of service and there's no other place to do it. People look at the animals and become concerned and try to give them water, or they go to the truck driver and say, “What are you doing? There's a problem. You need to do something about it.”

Do we want that truck driver to say, “The government makes me do it?”

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much for that excellent response.

Essentially, the priority has much more to do with animal welfare than public image.

During previous meetings, representatives from organizations that work for animal protection shared their concerns with us. They fear that making the regulations more flexible will only make the transportation distances longer on a regular basis. This would pose a risk to animal health.

From what I understand, the opposite is true.

Do you have any comments to add?

[Corlena Patterson]

My argument is that the challenge with the ELDs' max service means we can't meet those regulatory requirements.

If you're stopped on the side of the road because you've maxed out your hours, the animals are on the trailer. That adds to your total feed, water and rest interval time. Now you can't make it to a rest stop. You have no way to oblige the federal regulation around humane transport.

In fact, our argument and our concern with the ELD policy for livestock transportation is that it won't allow us to keep our obligation to provide feed, water and rest intervals. Most of our sheep will make it from Manitoba to Toronto in a single trip because we have nowhere to feed, water and rest them.

Our industry is already designed to work around and respect those regulations. The risk is that these logs may mean that we can't respect those regulations. We push back on these driving logs because we want to ensure that we're respectful of the welfare of the animals.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much.

You noted the importance of increasing processing capacity in the different regions. There could be government measures to promote the creation of more small to mid-sized processing plants. They would not replace the big plants, but could be complementary to them.

Do you think this could also help significantly reduce the problems around transporting the animals and their well being?

[Corlena Patterson]

Absolutely.

The study we did on the comparative environmental impact assessment of our supply chain was partly to help inform the discussion around how moving to more regionalized, smaller-scale processing means we could move more meat than we do live animals. We can put more meat in a trailer than we can live animals.

Plus, when you move long distances, you have “shrink”. They've consumed resources that disappear in transport because of the stress, and you need to feed them again, so you double that 10% of resources into the animal.

Yes, I absolutely agree: It wouldn't just mitigate the need to transport live animals, but our study suggests that by improving regional processing capacity, we could reduce our carbon footprint strictly from trucks and shrink by 14%.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much. That is a very good response.

I am very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Patterson. We had not spoken yet. I will give you my card.

Mr. Lampron, could you add a few comments on the same topic?

[Pierre Lampron]

Thank you for the question.

There is no doubt that access to regional abattoirs could vastly improve the situation. Another direction was taken with the decision to close many of them. That is why the regulations need to be eased a bit to make it possible to reopen some of the regional abattoirs.

We are certainly in favour of the transportation regulations. What we are asking for is to ease them somewhat to buffer against the unpredictabilities. Livestock transporters have animal welfare at heart. They plan their work for things to go smoothly, in compliance with the law.

However, when something unforeseen happens, the animals should not have to suffer because of the regulations. That is why we are calling for some flexibility in the regulations, which should be aligned with those in the United States. In that country, there is some flexibility with respect to on-duty time for livestock haulers within a 240 km radius of departure and destination sites.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, John Barlow]

Thank you very much, Mr. Perron.

We now go to Ms. Mathyssen for six minutes, please.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you. Thank you for allowing me to visit this lovely committee. I appreciate the time.

I did want to ask something and continue on from where Mr. MacDonald was headed in talking about that AI technology.

You said that you were starting to share that with other groups and were looking to the CFIA to take leadership on that or to share it. I was able to tour with the Ontario dairy farmers, and they were showing us the technology that they use for traceability, for tracking. Is it similar? Are the Sheep Federation and the dairy farmers association working together in that technology and on requests from the CFIA, Ms. Patterson?

[Corlena Patterson]

As livestock sectors, there are not many of us. There are five or six. We all sit in the same room very frequently.

When it comes to traceability, we all work and pull together about regulations and, to a certain extent, around technology. This is identifying animals for the purpose of traceability, because traceability is about identifying the animals, identifying the places and then identifying when the animals go to places and tracking that so that you can move backwards and understand who and what may be involved if there is a disease outbreak.

From a technology perspective, our trace system is blockchain-based, and we built it for ourselves. We'd be the first industry in the livestock sector to bring it in at that scale. There have been lots of pilot projects.

We are certainly open to sharing that experience with anybody who is interested in exploring it, but we don't want to.... I don't want to call it stealing market share and we're not all competing in a traceability database space, but....

We'll do it. The great thing about being a quiet eco-conscious industry—I won't call us small, as that's my least favourite word in the world—is that it's a great testing ground for how successful this might be in a regulated space.

In terms of ID, what I think you were talking about was the RFID technology that identifies the animal, which is a pillar of that. We use RFID technology. It's still slow if you want to have traceability reporting move quickly and efficiently and reduce the administrative burden on stakeholders in doing the reporting.

Our AI tools started with using facial recognition of livestock as the form of ID so that you could capture information about the animal autonomously. We designed ours to work from a cellphone. You can ID them from a cellphone, a networked camera and a high-volume intermediate site that captures the ID, takes date stamps and time stamps and geolocates the event. That's the vast majority of movement reporting.

Although I'm often looked at it like I have three heads and people question the sanity when I say I want facial recognition for sheep, the reality or the goal is to move toward autonomous data collection in that field to alleviate the work that people have to do. The push-back we've always seen around tracing has never been about whether a traceability system is important. Everybody fundamentally agrees with that. All the push-back to the regulations has been on how hard all of that is going to be to do with the technology we have. I just feel that someone should have spent the 10 years looking more at how to fix the technology issue that made it difficult rather than being overly concerned about how difficult it might be.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

That was coming into my next question. It seems that one side—your organization and maybe others—is far more ahead of the game. When the regulatory bodies, the government bodies, are receiving that data, they are not at the same level.

[Corlena Patterson]

Yes. Even the regulation will allow seven days to report any movement. Now, under the future regulation, it's 30 days, depending on which sector you're in and what type of event you're reporting, but even seven days in a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak is a lifetime of disease moved around, if you really look at the demographic patterns of livestock movement.

With integrated systems like pork, it might be easier to predict patterns and understand where those movements are going, but in the beef industry—like the cow-calf operation—and the sheep industry, our livestock movement demographic study suggests there are two million movement events out of fewer than a million animals in a year. If we're waiting long periods of time to do it, it's too long.

Even with the regulation, it's too much. The goal is to get to that autonomous piece so that we take time, people and data entry out of the equation and nobody even knows they reported traceability—it just happened and we were successful.

Our hope is to move that out past our own sector and make it available. Somebody has to start, so we took it on. We're going to accommodate anybody else who is interested in partnering or exploring and looking at the technologies.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

I can open this up to whoever wants to answer.

The last line of questioning referenced the slaughter and production facilities. There is a desire, of course, for an increase in the capabilities in the actual facilities themselves. We certainly saw throughout COVID that it was a huge problem.

What is required or what is industry asking for overall from the federal government that can go into a report that would come out to help with that specifically?

[Corlena Patterson]

In our sector, we've always called that transition from provincial to federal inspection the kiss of death. The seasonality and the size of our sector means that federally inspected facilities, which carry a higher regulatory and cost burden to maintain them, have difficulty surviving.

For us, it wouldn't even necessarily need to be giant investments in the infrastructure—the physical buildings that do the processing—as much as it may be simply alleviating those interprovincial trade barriers around meat moving between provinces. We saw exemptions for this during COVID.

I understand there's work there, but for us, I think that really solves it. Then you just open the door for industries and sectors—well, not sectors; we don't do always do our own processing—and groups that want to get into it to understand that they can maintain a sustainably sized processing facility in their area and serve their community but still move the meat to where the major market is.

Our markets for lamb are Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, but raising sheep around the Ottawa Valley.... I don't know if you've tried to buy a house near Ottawa lately. I live in the region. You can't really afford to put livestock on acreage that is worth $100,000 an acre. You move it elsewhere.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, John Barlow]

Thanks, Ms. Patterson. Thanks, Ms. Mathyssen, for your questions.

We'll now move on to the second round.

We'll start with the Conservatives and Mr. Steinley for five minutes, please.