Finance Committee on Nov. 19th, 2012

[Dr. Scott McAlpine]

Absolutely.

[Wayne Marston, NDP, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Do you believe our government should be giving serious consideration to increasing its investment in international education with an eye to doing just that?

[Dr. Scott McAlpine]

Precisely. We have fairly good, robust data that shows that about 50% of the international students wish to stay in Canada. This speaks to some policy around the Canadian experience class. We need to develop ways to meet our targets in the CEC class of immigration.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you, Mr. Marston.

We'll go to Mr. Hoback, please.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's great to see you here. I appreciate your testimony this afternoon. It's very interesting.

Unfortunately, I only get five minutes, so I'm going to go to Mr. Phillips and talk a bit about the grains and oilseeds sector.

Mr. Phillips, you mentioned in previous testimony that you were a seed grower, so you may have seen $10 wheat in your days of growing seed. But I am curious. How many times have you seen $8.50 or $9 off the combine in wheat prices in your growing career?

[Richard Phillips]

Once.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Would that happen to be this year?

[Richard Phillips]

Yes.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

That's very interesting.

You talked about changes to the Canadian Wheat Board. A lot of things have been put in place to support the Canadian Wheat Board, whether it's the grain grading system or the transportation system. But we made some changes in the budget implementation act that went through this committee. I am curious. You talked about further changes. What types of changes do we need to be looking at? Would it be in the grading? What areas?

[Richard Phillips]

We need a couple of things.

Number one, there's a lot of cost in running the Canadian Grain Commission. If we're paying even $2 a tonne more than we need to on a 50,000-tonne vessel, that's $100,000 on every boatload of grain that leaves Canada, and we export millions of tonnes. These are big numbers.

We need to go through the Canadian Grain Commission. Inward inspection is going away, but we need to ask what else they have had their fingers into over the years. What adds value and what doesn't add value to farmers? At the end of the day, when they move to cost recovery, farmers will pay 100% of the cost of the operations. We need some sort of mechanism of governance so we can make sure that what they're doing returns value to us. And then we're happy to pay for it. That's one of the things.

Number two is that we see a huge interest in people wanting to invest in wheat breeding in Canada. Canola is a huge success story. The acres have gone up, the yields have gone up, and the wealth back to farmers has gone up, because they're private and public, and producers have all worked together.

In wheat we never had that. We now have that opportunity. We need to have a system that will ensure that the private sector comes in and we can leverage their money, along with Agriculture Canada, universities.

Producers can come to the table with money too. We have to build that partnership. For that, they need more assurance that if they invest in research, their varieties will get registered for sale. Right now the variety registration system does not provide that confidence at all to any private breeders.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Again, I know the variety registration system on the agriculture committee.... We've seen a lot of issues there in the process. A lot of our winter wheat varieties, for example, are more accepted in the U.S.—and have sold in the U.S.—than they are in Canada, which is disappointing when you look at the economic benefit those varieties would have brought to our farmers.

You also touched on rail service levels and the importance of just-in-time delivery and being able to meet commitments. What types of changes do we need to have in the rail system to create some accountability?

[Richard Phillips]

Two things are top of mind.

We need some sort of reciprocal penalties. Right now if you don't load your railcar in time or if you overload one end of it too much, big penalties are applied to all the shippers. If the cars don't show up even within a week of when they're supposed to, there are no penalties for the railways.

This is how it affects the actual grassroots farmers. If you're trying to bid and sell grain into Turkey on a lentil contract, for example, you're asking what the odds are you'll get your railcars on time to get it to Montreal or to Thunder Bay to get it over there, and what the penalties are going to be. You're going to have to start paying less money to the farmers to allow for the likely penalties you're going to have for late delivery. And that all comes directly out of the farmers' pockets.

We need reciprocal penalties to help ensure better service. We also need a fair arbitration and dispute resolution process so that when there are disputes, we don't have to go through over a million dollars in a level of service complaint, as we have to today with the Canada Transportation Act. Small shippers can't do it, so they just lose out on sales from Canada.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Mr. Phillips, you talked about public research, having research dollars available for plant breeding. I'll use plant breeding as an example. Some farmers in Ontario were looking for a winter wheat breeder to be located here in Ontario.

What do you think the government needs to do as far as plant breeding goes? How do we make that work with the private sector so they're not necessarily competing against each other?

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Could you give a brief response, please?

[Richard Phillips]

Everything we have today is primarily predicated on having the Wheat Board involved. We have to look at how we are using our cluster money or DIAP money. We could review all that. We've had several years of experience.

The Ontario guys have great ideas as well, but the private sector has a lot of money it's willing to put into this. We just need to find a way to leverage it, to make use of it.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you very much, Mr. Hoback.

We'll go to Mrs. McLeod, please.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses. Again, we've had a great diversity of presentations.

Since my colleague pointed out page 3, I have to point out page 2. The Nature Conservancy website is a project I am particularly fond of. Maybe if I have time at the end we could perhaps have an opportunity to talk about how that matches and moves forward. It's a win-win, I think.

I would like to start with some specific questions to Ms. Cohen.

I came from one system where people could access physiotherapists and psychologists through extended health benefits without a doctor's referral. I notice that in the federal system it is very different. Intuitively, I know that we have busy physicians, and I think people are sometimes capable of recognizing the appropriate path to support.

Has there been any research on the appropriateness of access or the cost of one system versus the other? I think we have an opportunity to really say which is a better system. We need people to get help when they need it. Has there been any work done in that area?

[Karen Cohen]

Psychologists have, by legislation, though it differs by province, the authority to diagnose and deliver care. If someone decides to seek the services of a psychologist outside of a publicly funded system, of course, they could go straight there. The issue arises when they want to get reimbursed by their extended health care plans. There is great variability. Some underwriters will require a physician referral and some will not.

One part of the work we are commissioning will be surveys of stakeholders, including the insurance industry.

I can't give you any data on the differences in uptake when the bottleneck is created, but certainly it's happening. It creates an unnecessary delay, because the work that is going to be done is going to be done by the psychologist.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

I'd be really curious to know if anyone would ever take up that particular task of studying one system versus the other, when you think of the cost of a physician visit. It would be a fascinating piece of work, because I think we have a natural opportunity.

To me, it seems fairly sensible that for many people, psychologists or physiotherapists might be their avenue of support.

Next I wanted to ask if you could expand a little further on what you were talking about regarding residency training within the federal system. Can you talk a little about what you envision there?

[Karen Cohen]

One of the great challenges in recruitment and retention, and there are several, is training. We heard recently that the Canadian Forces and Veterans Affairs have a need for psychologists, and Correctional Services has a need for psychologists. What we know, and we heard it from other panellists, is that students tend to stay where they train. Also where the need is has to participate in the development of the skill set they need to work in that particular environment. If a psychologist has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, he or she also needs to know something about the Canadian Forces to work with that population.

By creating those residency programs, you contribute to training, and you also provide a mechanism for recruitment and retention.

There is a rural and northern program in Winnipeg that trains psychologists to work in those communities. My understanding is that over 50% of their graduates actually stay to work in rural and northern venues.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Within the federal public service right now there are no residency programs at all.

[Karen Cohen]

As far as I know, one has recently been developed in Correctional Service Canada. We've been trying to advocate for the development of a residency program that might see clinical psychology students rotate through various departments, with perhaps four months in Veterans Affairs, four months in the Canadian Forces, and time in Correctional Service Canada to help try to meet that resource need.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Are you training enough psychologists right now to meet the needs anyway, or is there a significant shortage?

[Karen Cohen]

That's a really good question. The only benchmark I am aware of is one in the area of school psychology. We know that the greatest return on investment when it comes to mental health is with children.

The benchmark is about one psychologist for every thousand students. The European Federation of Psychologists' Associations guesses that it should be about one to 1,500. In Canada it really is all over the map. Half the psychologists in the country are in Quebec, which is interesting, and in the rest of the jurisdictions it's one to 3,000 or 4,000. In rural and remote areas, it's about one to 28,000.

My answer on whether there are enough psychologists is that I'm not sure we have a clear benchmark in Canada. But we do know that we're the largest group. There are four times as many psychologists as psychiatrists licensed to practice.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you, Ms. McLeod.

We're almost out of time. I don't have time for a full round, but I did want to just ask one question.

Mr. Lounds, your presentation here is very interesting in terms of what you have accomplished as an organization. Do you have a sense as to what impact the setting aside of these lands in particular has had on carbon emissions? People talk about one half of the carbon cycle. We often don't talk about the other in terms of absorption. Do you have any sense as an organization of what sort of an impact you have had?