Thank you for your question. It's very much to the point.
I should say that my wife and I have farmed for 15 years. We raised our children on the farm. We raised sheep and lambs for the market. Very early on--we started with no experience--I got the local agriculture representative to come out and I asked him what we should do. He said we should grow corn. Well, we happened to be farming on glacial till of Nova Scotia, and the last thing you want to do is stir up those rocks. But that was a uniform program for the province. Corn was what was on the menu that year. So it really didn't matter where you were.
That was a pretty good lesson for us, a good introduction.
But we've seen, over the years, the movement back from agriculture of the federal government. Now if I were to ask an agriculture rep for some advice, I would get some consultant who might work for Cargill or one of the other agribusiness industries, who, obviously, would have a product to sell. I think that sums up where we've gone in 30 years.
So the government, in a sense, has privatized any public responsibility it had for agriculture. It's now engaged in plant breeding, or across the board trying to.... If you want to do research, you have to have a corporate partner. This means that it's the corporate agenda that is followed in every instance.
What we're calling for is actually a federal agricultural policy, an agriculture and food policy that has as its basis the health and welfare of the Canadian people and the economy, based on local production for local consumption, and reducing....
My first book, actually, talks about the characteristic of our industrial system as maximizing the distance between where your food came from and your mouth. And what we're seeing now is a move across the country with local food to reduce that distance, to shrink it back.
The federal government has a tremendous responsibility that it needs to take up on behalf of the Canadian people to redesign.... I shouldn't say redesign, because I think we do have to start all over again and rethink what agriculture is all about. Their current policy is about export and balance of trade, not public health. I think that's fundamental. That basic mandate needs to be reorganized.
It would mean shifting, for example, in plant breeding and animal science, and so on, to much stronger public support for public programs and public science, for the benefit of everybody. It would mean a different kind of education--and again, this should be directed in concert with the provinces right across the country--not to have a uniform program, rather to have programs that would meet certain criteria, standards in a sense, but that would have to be tuned, as with any farm, to the local ecology. What do you actually do on the prairies? What do you do in the Maritimes, or in the coastal fisheries in B.C., or the inland fisheries in Manitoba?
I would suggest that this would need to be done in conjunction with Health Canada. Our understanding of health has to begin with healthy food. It's interesting. Almost invariably, the people we talked to who have been through cancer treatments have switched to organic diets.