Good morning, everyone.
Distinguished committee members and fellow presenters, my name is Jeffrey Walsh. I am a third generation apple farmer from Rockland, Nova Scotia. I'm here representing the Nova Scotia Fruit Growers' Association as the recently elected vice-president.
Our association represents tree fruit growers of Nova Scotia, which means primarily apples, but we also grow pears, peaches and other stone fruit.
The NSFGA was created in 1863 and has a long history of promoting education and advocacy among farmers. Over the last 30 years, Nova Scotia apple growers have invested in high-density orchards of valuable new varieties, making us a leader in Canada's production of apples.
Today I'm going to speak on three issues facing our industry.
The first issue is pest management and crop protection products required for growing apples.
As a farmer, I see the challenges that arise when certain products are either deregistered or limited to the extent that it's impractical to use them at all. The PMRA, or Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency, is responsible for rules and decides which products are allowed or not. The pest management centre, or PMC, is a different body that helps generate new data for guiding rules around pesticide use.
While the PMRA has been undergoing work to become more transparent and accountable, the PMC does not seem to be receiving the same support. The PMC collects data through research and studies that provide information on important decisions that have enormous impacts on our industry. As an example, many apple farmers in Canada are facing a serious disease in orchards called “fireblight”, which causes trees to die. There are limited products to fight this disease, and the ones we do have are essential to protecting our orchards. If we lose them, our entire industry is in jeopardy.
We need to invest in solid data and evidence to prove the safety and efficacy of these products and also to seek good alternatives if there are reasons to, so that we can continue to grow food. This leads me to my final point on this topic, which is that our association supports private member's Bill C-359. We should take advantage of work in other trusted jurisdictions to allow quicker access to safe and tested crop protection products for our Canadian farms.
The second issue is labour. Most horticulture farmers take advantage of seasonal agricultural worker and temporary foreign worker programs. These programs are essential to our businesses, and we could not farm successfully without them.
Some of these programs require the provision of on-farm housing, meaning that farmers are either buying or building accommodation, which is a huge cost. Due to the current housing market, many are choosing to build new; however, as I recently discovered after investing in accommodations of my own, none of the HST on the new build was eligible for an input tax credit, due to a policy of the Department of Finance. This came as a shock, as most other commercial necessities on farms are eligible for a rebate.
Along with the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, we are requesting that this be changed, and we encourage you to support us in this work. It would help farms with cash flow and encourage more investment in worker housing. It's really important that farmers provide high-quality homes for employees to live in, as we want them to feel safe, valued and comfortable in their housing and hopefully return to us year after year.
As a final note on labour, I want to recognize the Government of Canada for implementing the recognized employer pilot, which has made it easier for farmers to apply and has reduced red tape while also ensuring that those who do not follow the rules are restricted in accessing these programs. It's imperative that we work together to make sure the employees and the farmers are benefiting and the rules are being followed.
The final issue I want to briefly to speak on today is cost. It's becoming more expensive to grow food, and despite high prices in grocery stores, farmers are seeing declining returns. For costs like labour, trellises, trees, orchard maintenance equipment, fuel and even the bins to put apples in, everything is going up. We are competing with exports from other countries and with states like Washington that put downward pressure on our prices. Oftentimes, those countries see less pressure in their costs of production than we face in Canada, and many of them are well supported by their government in the work they do.
I encourage all of you to keep fighting on behalf of farmers so that we can continue to compete. I appreciate the work all of you do on this committee to support growers and farmers in our sector. I appreciate your time today and I thank you very much for the invitation to speak.