Madam Speaker, I would like to congratulate you on your new responsibilities, and I wish you the best.
I also thank my colleague for his passion for rural Canada and for his hard work as chair of our committee during the past session.
How we maintain sustainability in rural communities is important for many of us who represent these areas.
With respect to agriculture, I remember a year or so ago our committee had many recommendations on food security. One of them was about championing local initiatives and about maybe having a federal procurement policy to buy locally for federal institutions and prisons. This recommendation was supported by all members of all parties on committee. Yet when we took this suggestion to the government and the department, we were told we had to be careful of trade obligations.
How can we advance the role of local food initiatives and local food supply and support local farmers when we have this cloud of trade obligations? How can we move ahead and ensure that we have access to good quality food?
I met this morning with a representative of the Island Farmers Alliance from Vancouver Island. He pointed out that there were obstacles to all the local food initiatives, one of them being the meat inspection regulations in British Columbia, which prohibit a farmer from selling from his or her farm gate to someone else. Even in my area in the Slocan Valley a lot of farms have been shut down because of that.
How can we on the one hand ensure we have good quality food at the multinational level or the corporate levels and not get any more unfortunate incidents? At the same time, can we have flexibility for our producers at the local level to contain this thriving agricultural industry that supplies good quality food to people in the immediate area?
Could I get some comments from my hon. colleague? Maybe he is aware of some initiatives undertaken in his province. British Columbia is having a really hard time with these new regulations, which are standard. They do not seem to take into account local initiatives and certainly do not support local farmers.