Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I do appreciate the committee allowing a few of us the opportunity to speak here. I know that is not traditional, but, as you mentioned, Mr. Chair, this is an issue that impacts just about every province in the country, and we want to ensure that we have almost every province represented here.
I want to touch on only two issues that haven't been addressed thus far. The one thing I really want to stress as part of why we're calling for this emergency meeting with these three ministers is the critical timing around this issue. I think a lot of people don't understand. They may be thinking this is an issue that's going to impact the crops they are going to be seeding in the next month or so. That is absolutely not the case. This isn't something that's going to impact them when they harvest next fall and start shipping next winter. This impacts the canola that was harvested last year, which is in the storage bins now.
We've seen the price of canola drop by more than a dollar a bushel. That means the value of the crop that is in the bins now waiting to get to market has been reduced by more than $1 billion. I really want to emphasize that this is something that is impacting the pocketbooks of the 43,000 canola growers we have across the country. Over the next few months the bank is going to be calling on them to pay their mortgages, their equipment bills, and the loans and things. They are going to have to be getting contracts ready for shipping next year. This is something that impacts their planning right now.
Some people in Canada are going to be asking why they don't plant something else this spring. Our farmers make these strategic decisions years in advance. They are rotating the crops in their fields. They are looking at the futures market. They can't decide now, because we've lost a very critical market, to go back home and say they will not plant that 1,000 acres of canola this year and will move to barley or something else. These decisions are made years in advance, and this is impacting what they've already harvested.
That's why the timing of this is so critical. That's why I think having an emergency meeting with those three ministers is so important when we have an industry that contributes $26.7 billion to the Canadian economy. As the shadow minister for employment, workforce development and labour, I am saying that there are 250,000 Canadian jobs that rely on this industry.
I spent the constituency week speaking to the producers in my riding, who are extremely frustrated because the timing of this could not be worse, as I said, as they plan for their seeding for this spring but also because of the impact it has on the harvest they have just had, which is in the storage bin.
I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to speak on that.
The last thing I want to touch on is that it's important we have the opportunity to speak to those ministers, because when I was on the agriculture committee—and this was touched on briefly—we had commitments from the agriculture minister and the trade minister at that time to ensure that we would maintain the level of CFIA personnel in our consulates and embassies around the world. I want to make sure we still have those people in place in China, on the ground, having discussions with our counterparts in China to ensure that this can be addressed expeditiously to ensure that we can access that market once again.
We've seen a trend in which our trade in peas and pulses to India has dropped by more than $1 billion. We can't keep losing these markets for our processors and certainly our producers. That's what I want to get across, Mr. Chair, just how critical the timing is.
Again, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak here today.
