Finance Committee on May 17th, 2023

[John Corey]

I would say that it is reasonable in a free market, but the railways have a franchise where, as you said, there are incredible barriers to entry. In fact, you could not make a railway today as you did. Most of the rail that is used today was put down in the 1920s, so there hasn't been a massive increase in the amount of track. Maintenance, obviously, is extremely high.

You look at railways, and they have operating ratios pushing 0.6. That means they have a lot of excess cash that's not going into—

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, MP Blaikie.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

It is part of the problem.

[John Corey]

Exactly. They get a freebie up front.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Mr. Corey and MP Blaikie, that's great. We got a lot of information there.

We are going to our final questioner, MP Chatel, and that will close it off for us.

Go ahead, MP Chatel.

[Sophie Chatel, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

One of the things that all committee members from all parties agree on is agriculture.

Mr. Northey, I would like to talk to you about a resolution that was debated at the Liberal national convention.

The resolution was about food security and agriculture support. They really were concerned about food security, as I explained a little bit earlier, and the climate crisis, the water shortage and land degradation around the world. They see an opportunity, but we also need to step up.

They welcome the sustainable Canadian agriculture partnership and its new resilient agriculture landscape program. They thought it was a really good move towards a positive policy for agriculture to support farmers and sustainable agriculture.

It was debated and adopted at the Liberal convention, and they made two recommendations. The first one was to increase direct payments to farmers, including fisheries—Mr. Perkins would be happy with that—that provide ecological goods and services as an ecosystem service or carbon sequestration in agriculture to incentivize them to adopt less resource-intensive practices.

The second recommendation was to orient such direct payments towards initiatives that will boost agriculture investment and innovation and enable the transfer of knowledge, technology and skills.

May I have your feedback on this resolution?

[Greg Northey]

We are very familiar with the Canadian agriculture policy that's being developed right now.

One of our main focuses with a program like that.... Canadian agriculture is some of the most sustainable agriculture in the world. It's very important for us, when we talk about Canadian agriculture, to continually focus on the concept of needing to increase our productivity because the world needs Canadian products. We need to frame Canadian agriculture in that lens of productivity and innovation.

I'm not super familiar with the resolution, but it's important to have that frame. We can't look at agriculture and farmers as essentially farming to try to produce carbon reductions or require them to meet certain goals, because their job is to produce food as efficiently and productively as possible. Certainly you can look at incentives and any kind of market-based approach where you're providing a fair market value for a farmer who is, in the course of their production, protecting an area of biodiversity or wetlands, or reducing carbon emissions from the way they're producing that food. It's certainly something we'd like to see. Any kind of market-based incentive is good.

We always need to maintain the frame that their job is to produce food. It's to produce what they're producing. It's not to necessarily provide the sort of general goods and services that people would like to see from that landscape. That landscape is for food.

[Sophie Chatel, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

It says, “orient...direct payment towards initiatives that will boost agricultural investment and innovation and enable the transfer of knowledge, technology, and skills.”

In your industry, what would these payments look like?

[Greg Northey]

It's tough, as I'm not sure whether that means direct payment to a producer.

Ultimately, a lot of our members are not interested in just getting a cheque in the mail for the production. They want to see investments into innovation, into crop varieties and into the things that can deliver those results, as opposed to getting a cheque in the mail to do that kind of thing. Innovation, for sure, is really key. For investment in that, we need new crop varieties to deal with disease resistance to get more pulses in more acres.

Generally, it feels like it's going in the right direction. We're not looking to have a subsidized agriculture sector in Canada. We want to receive income from the market.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

We're out of time. We can't thank our witnesses enough for their expertise, the knowledge they've brought to us and their time.

We're here late on a Wednesday evening. We thank you for coming before our committee and for answering so many questions from the members in helping inform our study.

Thank you to our witnesses.

Members, we are adjourned.