International Trade Committee on March 20th, 2023

[Keith Currie]

No, I wouldn't. Canadian products are sought worldwide. They always have been. They always will be. Our farmers are some of the best in the world. We produce high-quality, high-demand products, so I do not think that any country would necessarily say, “No, we're not going to deal with Canadian products because we can't have access to supply management.”

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Are you saying, then, that the government negotiated a bad deal in the renegotiation of CUSMA by including supply-managed sectors in that deal?

[Keith Currie]

I think they could have made a better deal.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

Okay. That's interesting.

My next question is for Mr. Carroll.

You're strongly supporting Bill C-282, and I understand that. However, you wrote an article in Policy Options in which you stated:

And giving a small amount of dairy market share under the Comprehensive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership...and the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement...did not undermine our supply management. We have always shared some of our market with other countries, so now we will have to share a bit more. It's nothing to fear. Canada believes in trade and we're world class players.

That seems to be at odds with what you've come to the committee to say today, which is that we should absolutely never negotiate away any further access to supply-managed industries. Why have you changed your view from when you wrote that?

[Tim Carroll]

First off, on the idea that we're protecting our supply management, Canada is not weak. Canada is able to compete in the world market. The point I was making was that because of part of the agreement, more access was given to our trading partners. That doesn't mean they automatically get it; it means they have to get it away from us. They have access to it, but we can still compete for it.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

That's exactly it, right?

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

You have 20 seconds.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

That is exactly it. It just gives them the opportunity to compete.

[Tim Carroll]

It does, yes.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Dufferin—Caledon, ON]

It doesn't mean they automatically have—

[Tim Carroll]

You can't undermine the entire supply management system. We've always, from the formation of the Egg Marketing Agency and the Chicken Marketing Agency, had quotas drawn up for each province, but also, quotas were drawn up on the same basis for products that were being imported into Canada on a five-year average. I believe that's what we did at the time—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I'm sorry to interrupt, Mr. Carroll—

[Tim Carroll]

People entering the market were simply given their share of the market as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you, Mr. Carroll.

We'll go on to Mr. Virani for six minutes, please.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank all of the witnesses for their contributions in feeding Canadians and indeed the world, and for their contributions today.

By way of commentary, it's probably painfully obvious to most members of the committee that the United Kingdom's desire to conclude trade agreements with the rest of the world post-Brexit is quite strong given their interest in CPTPP and their interest in the Canada-U.K. deal, but I'll just leave that where it is.

Mr. Currie, I want to start with you. If you could, give me your response in about 90 seconds or so.

Usually when we talk about supply management and its 50-year legacy after it was created by Pierre Trudeau's government, we talk about what it's done domestically. Mr. Currie, you talked about the idea of food security around the planet. I think that's come into sharp focus for all of us as parliamentarians, given the unjust and illegal war in Ukraine and Russia's invasion.

Can you elaborate a little bit on how domestic supply management rules of the kind we're trying to do with this bill actually help shore up not just food security for Canadians, but also how Canadian farmers get food to the rest of the planet?

[Keith Currie]

It's probably a better fit to ask that very question to my supply management colleagues who are here today, but certainly, from a CFA perspective, people are extremely aware of food security, not so much in terms of availability as in terms of affordability of food products.

The one thing supply management does is stabilize both the cost of the product for consumers and the return for the producers who are producing those products. That results in greater investment on new technologies on the farm. It results in different job creation across the country. It stabilizes small rural communities. It enhances small rural communities right across this country.

Something that gets lost a lot, particularly in the halls of government, is the impact that this has, but it also ups the gain for other countries around the world to look at our other products that are out there, saying that they're also producing at a high-quality level, an affordable level, and we're doing this with very little government support. I think that's very important to know.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Thank you.

I'm going to turn to Mr. Pelissero now.

I want to comment on something you mentioned, but also link it to something that was mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

You talked about small farms and protecting small farms, sort of the mom-and-pop operations as opposed to the large industrial farms. I'll tell you quite candidly that I represent a riding in Toronto. We don't have a lot of farming in Parkdale—High Park in downtown Toronto, but we do have a lot of people who believe in reducing and maintaining family farms and smaller farms. They also look at it through the lens of environmental impact. This came up last week, actually, this idea of thinking globally and shopping locally and obtaining your produce and your goods from something that's maybe a 20-minute drive away as opposed to a four-minute drive away or a plane ride away.

Can you comment on how supply management actually helps with that broader piece about farming and farming stability and its environmental impact?

[Roger Pelissero]

Yes, exactly. You're in the GTA. I'm down in Niagara, so my eggs are probably reaching the grocery store and you might be buying the eggs from my farm.

In the domestic supply that we have in Canada, the average-size family farm is about 30,000 laying hens. In the U.S., you're talking four and a half million birds. There are 50 companies in the U.S. that control over 95% of the production in the U.S. Their average production is about 330 million layers a year. We have 30 million layers in Canada, obviously because of the difference in population.

When you take a look at the environmental impact, the carbon footprint, we have a much smaller carbon footprint. We have a much smaller environmental impact. We follow the same animal care program from coast to coast in this country. That's every farmer. We're not competitors against each other. We work together as a family to supply the market, because we have a cost-of-production formula that we can use.

During this recent bird flu outbreak, egg prices in the U.S. reached six dollars a dozen. In Canada, they never got there. I have family members in the south who said, “How come egg prices are so expensive?” I said it was because of bird flu. They had 18% of their production affected by bird flu. We had 4.6% of our production affected, and the difference is due to smaller farms and in being able to control our biosecurity better than those large farms. When a large farm goes down and you have three and a half million birds you need to repopulate, imagine the size of the hole you're digging in the ground to bury all those birds. When you talk about environmental footprint, have a little picture of that.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

This dovetails with Mr. Currie raised in his submissions, which was about preventing disease. Would it be fair to say that supply management both helps to green Canadian agriculture and also helps to improve the safety, quality and health standards of Canadian agriculture?

[Roger Pelissero]

Yes, I would agree, for sure.

We put out our first sustainability report a couple of years ago at Egg Farmers of Canada, and it talked about how we've reduced our water usage and land usage but have increased our capacity to produce eggs by more than 50% over that time.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Currie, do you want to dovetail on this point about preventing disease? I think you mentioned it in your opening submissions.

[Keith Currie]

Certainly. Biosecurity is the reason, as Mr. Pelissero pointed out, that we're able to control much better here in Canada, and that's true through most of our commodity organizations. They have tremendous biosecurity protocols in place that allow us to do that.

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you.

Monsieur Savard-Tremblay, you have six minutes, please.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I thank the witnesses for being here, and for their statements today.

Mr. Loyer, you mentioned earlier that the government made a clear commitment to keeping the system whole and untouched. Yet you are calling for passage of the bill.

Why are you doing this?