Ben Lobb

[Canadian Dairy Commission Act, May 13th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, the situation is absolutely baffling. I have spent so much time on the phone in the last five or six weeks talking to farmers and other people, and they ask me why the government does not do more for them. They are not looking for a brand new pickup truck in their parking lots. They are looking for an actual conclusion. They have lost a market because of this pandemic. They are not asking for what happened in September. They are not asking for what happened in October. They are asking for what happened from March 15 to today. It is baffling.

They can roughly estimate what they need right now, but it is like there is nobody to talk to. It is so frustrating. Hopefully one of these days the government will wake up and get to the table.

[Canadian Dairy Commission Act, May 13th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, the set-aside is good, because, as I said, if farmers are losing $70 a head, the worst thing they can feel is knowing they have to keep paying for something they will lose money on.

Pork and beef farmers do not want to euthanize their animals. They want to see their animals become food. However, the reality of the situation is that if the barn is full and weaner pigs are coming in, there is no space and farmers have to sell their pigs for what they can get for them. That is where we are at. We know the processing capacity in Quebec, for example, where some Ontario hogs are sent, is reduced, and things gets backed up and pigs end up in Manitoba or wherever else.

This is a short-term problem, yes, and set-asides and other things will help, but for the long term, we have our heads in the sand if we are not looking at food sovereignty in this country and our processing capacity in the provinces to process what we have here.

[Canadian Dairy Commission Act, May 13th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be here tonight. I just want to correct the record. The member for Brandon—Souris was incorrect in some of his comments at the beginning about his origins. Wingham is in the riding of Huron—Bruce, smack dab in it. Of course, Huron—Bruce county has some of the best agricultural lands in the country.

I would also mention to him that former NDP member Pat Martin was also not too far down the road from where his relatives grew up. I am pretty sure he is not related to him. Maybe he had it too good in Huron—Bruce and he moved out west. I do not know, but we are happy to have him here tonight.

If we go back in history to the years from 2006 to 2015, those were 10 of the best years that Canadian agriculture has known. It is indisputable and I cannot reiterate that enough.

When the Conservative government came into power in 2006, there was a lot of work to do and we did a number of different trade deals. It really changed the direction and dimension of agriculture. It was not only agriculture, but it certainly benefited from a number of those trade deals. We also did things with red tape and a number of other things that allowed farmers to get out from underneath some red tape and bureaucracy so they actually could focus on their operations. I can think of people not too far down the road from me who upgraded their machinery a few years ago. They put GPS equipment in, and have different rippage and tillage systems for their cash crop. Those were very good years.

It could be a fluke, but it likely is not, but over the last five years there has been a downward trend in the sentiment and reality for agriculture in the country. Farmers have a different outlook on agriculture, unfortunately, than what they did just five years ago, and it is not in just one sector. It is not just in dairy; it is in all of the other supply-managed sectors. It is in the cash crops, beef, pork and in all the other sectors that we would call agriculture. Their outlook is diminished and there is a number of different reasons why.

That is where we need to start this discussion today with Bill C-16. We are not anywhere near where we were just a few short years ago.

Three trade deals need to be discussed as well today: the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, what the government now calls CPTPP; and then the USMCA.

When we were in the 2015 election, we came to a resolution midway through it. There was an agreement with TPP, which included the United States. The supply managed sector said that this was setting up for future generations in agriculture. It was a very positive time. It put everything to a conclusion, a finality, and allowed everybody to think about moving forward and about the investments and growth that would be there.

Subsequent to that, we have had a number of issues. Some of them are in direct compensation. I am speaking particularly around dairy. There have been a lot of complaints about that. There is a lot of uncertainty around TPP. With USMCA, there are some ballpark figures. However, certainly the way in which these dollars will be delivered are still to be seen. That is an issue.

What we are dealing with today is something we will call a positive. It is an action that needs to be taken. As the member for Brandon—Souris said, it is not enough for all of agriculture. I wish we could be talking about further compensation for pork and beef, but we are not having that conversation today.

Also, I would like to talk about processing capacity. It would have been fantastic if we could have had something in the bill. I know there has been some money allocated to processors, but I understand it is pretty well for PPE. I do not understand, for the life of me, why Cargill, one of the largest processors in the world, with deep pockets, needs money for PPE. It seems to me it would have its own money for it. Maybe it could have help getting PPE, but certainly it could afford to purchase its own.

I have talked to trucking companies that truck directly to dairy, and trucking companies that truck to other facilities. They are ineligible for all of these programs. They are the ones that do not usually have front-line people on the cutting edge of what is being used for PPE, so that is a frustration.

If we look at the province of Ontario and what has happened in the last number of years with processing, specifically around beef and pork, it is very frustrating. We have seen Quality Meat Packers close. We have seen Ryding-Regency have its licence pulled in December. Right now, there are about 12,000 head of cattle processed each week in Ontario. Of that, 1,500 could have been from Ryding, but Ryding is out of the picture. This is not to say that Ryding was completely innocent with respect to its infractions, but the frustrating thing in the Ryding situation was the cloud of secrecy after the initial violation occurred.

No member of Parliament in this House, except perhaps the Minister of Health, the Minister of Agriculture, the Prime Minister and maybe cabinet, would know exactly what the issues were at that specific moment back in the fall of 2019. No one knows. I tried to find out exactly what happened, exactly what the final straw was as to why it was pulled, and we do not know. The media does not know. The Canadian Cattlemen's Association does not know. I do not think Beef Farmers of Ontario knows, to this day, what the final straw was. The issue is that once it is pulled, that is it. It has to start back from scratch. That is a problem.

In the future, it needs to be transparent and open, so that if it is the will of the House of Commons to help deliver a financial package or a dollar solution to it, that occurs, because now, for example, kosher beef, almost all of which Ryding provided to Canada, is coming from Mexico. We saw last week in the news that ground beef is coming from Uruguay.

I would challenge the Minister of Health and the ag minister to show anybody on this side of the House of Commons that Uruguay and Mexico are as diligent with their inspectors regarding ear tags and cattle being unloaded at a processing facility with a limp. Currently, if one gets the wrong inspector, the animal is euthanized. It is five feet from being put on the line, and now it is scrapped.

How about traceability? How about the new transportation rules the government has imposed? How about the new rules it imposed at cattle auctions for further processing of horns, etc.? I bet it is not even close to what we put our producers through here, and the fines they get, such as a $1,500 fine if the animal does not have an ear tag so they know what farm it came from. There is a lot we need to do with the CFIA and transparency. There has to be a reality whereby if we are importing beef, those countries have to be held to the same standards we are, or we have to come to an agreement as to what all the standards are.

There also needs to be an investment in greenfield processing capacity, at least in Ontario. I am sure there are other parts around the countryside. Conestoga Meats in Breslau is a great example in the pork sector. It is a kind of public-private partnership. In spite of the pandemic right now, it is doing very well. Farmers have a share of the hooks, and it works out quite well.

The other thing I wanted to talk about, which I did not get a chance to do earlier today, was really to go back to what the member for Brandon—Souris said. To my mind, the minister said that we are going to go with our business risk management programs, and she talked about the calculator. One of her pork farmers received $11 a head. If that is not proof enough to the House that this is not working, every person who has a pig farm in this riding is losing $70 a head because of this pandemic and the processing capacity. They are losing money unless they have a contract, which many do, but some do not.

When farmers are losing $59 a head and the agriculture minister says that AgriStability is going to give $11 a head, what is the point? It is not enough. As I said earlier today, it is not like this is old MacDonald's farm with 10 pigs in the barn. There are thousands of pigs, and the losses are in the millions and hundreds of thousands.

[Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation Act, March 10th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, it is unprecedented, and here are a couple of numbers. In egg production, 1.6 million extra eggs are going to rise to 10 million extra eggs in six years, and it is 1% more on top of that per year for the next 10 years. When we think about that, they also have their WTO allocation. This is 20 million eggs. It is a huge number. It is very concerning in the long term.

Believe me, these farm groups may come to committee and say nice things, but they are being nice. If we talk to them in our offices or over a coffee, they have a whole different vocabulary they use when they describe the current government and the trade deal they have been dealt.

[Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation Act, March 10th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, no offence to my colleague, but he should go back to the 2015 quotes when we agreed to the TPP. He should look at what the Canadian dairy farmers and the supply-managed sector said. They said this was the best deal they could come up with and that it set the sector up for the next generation.

The next chance we will have to try to square this away with the Americans is if they ever try to get into the TPP. That is the only chance we will ever have to get anything back from them. When that opportunity comes, and we know TPP is too good for them to stay out of because they cannot get all those bilateral deals, we have to be tough and we have to fight. We have to say that the entry is going to be pretty high for the Americans to get TPP 2.0.

[Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation Act, March 10th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, the peanuts part was actually peanuts, but on sugar, I think of the food guide. I understand there is trade between Canada and the U.S. on sugar, but as for the food guide, some of the private members' bills in the last Parliament were about sugar and sugary drinks, the issues we have with obesity and type 2 diabetes. I do not think the government should be holding out its big promise on this trade deal and talking about all the sugar it is going to ship to the U.S. I think there is enough sugar down there. We should be focusing on the big things.

On the auto side, I do not think what we did in the deal for the auto industry is that exciting. We need to build more automobiles in Canada for Canadians. How many pickup trucks do we manufacture in Canada right now, compared with how many we buy? We have to do way better and we have to demand GM, Ford, Dodge and other companies build their trucks in Canada and make the investments here. We have the talent and the labour. Let us build them here, not in Mexico.

[Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation Act, March 10th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today to talk about this important trade deal.

I will be sharing my time with the member for Red Deer—Lacombe. He is a good friend and I would not want him to miss out on an opportunity to give the Alberta interpretation of this deal.

I do not want to be critical of the previous member or some of his interpretations of the deal. When I look at a trade deal, whether it is an economic trade deal or a sports deal or whatever, there are only two trades I can think of that are similar to this trade deal. One was when the Boston Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, and the other was a trade in 1992 to my team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, when the Calgary Flames were kind enough to give us Doug Gilmour. That is where we start, if we want to see what kind of a trade deal we have here.

David MacNaughton, the Prime Minister's appointed ambassador to represent us in Washington, said at the outset of the deal in November 2016, “I think any agreement can be improved.” He got that wrong, and he got it wrong big time. Another point he made that day was that Canada would have at least one clear demand, free trade in lumber. If that was the hill to die on, the Liberals were blown right out because they did not get anywhere on that.

In my riding of Huron—Bruce, which I have had the honour to represent for many years, depending on the location, it is an hour to an hour and a half to the Blue Water Bridge, right across from Port Huron, on the Sarnia-Port Huron border. We are right along Lake Huron. We have tremendous agriculture productivity, cash crops, edible beans and livestock of all sorts. We also have a tremendously strong manufacturing sector. We have the world's largest exhaust manifold manufacturer as well. We also have Bruce Power, which is the largest nuclear power plant in the world.

Trade to the United States is very important to us. Fair trade with NAFTA and the USMCA deal is obviously very important to us.

Other things that were not dealt with in this deal, which I think is very unacceptable, are the buy America provisions. We would have expected those to be dealt with. As well, there was no firm commitment from the government, and I will speak specifically to the very loose border in regard to CBSA. Many commodity sectors in Ontario have long-standing complaints against the leaky border, whether it is the dairy sector or the poultry sector with spent hens. There are many other topics that were not dealt with.

We should think about where we were five years ago. We had the then minister of international trade, we had Gerry Ritz, and we had the then prime minister agreeing to a monumental trade deal, the deal of the century, with TPP, which included the United States and Mexico. I can remember when that deal was first agreed to. It was right in the middle of the 2015 election. In spite of that, we had agricultural sectors saying that it had set up their sector for a generation. I know there were exact quotes at that time.

TPP is a perfect example of a trade deal, the one we concluded with the United States, where there is give and take. Agriculture groups could look at it and say that they had given up a little but, to the benefit of the entire sector, there were huge gains and, by the way, there was certainty with some of the biggest markets around the world for a trade deal.

If we look at what happened, some things could not be helped. There was the U.S. election and the United States pulled out of the TPP. I do not think anybody could have predicted that when the deal was first agreed to, but that is what happened. We entered into a deal, and the Prime Minister told Canadians he would get us a better deal, but he did not do that.

Let us look at some of the other deals. One of the best deals we did was between Canada and South Korea. That had so many huge benefits for Canadians, including for Canadian agricultural producers in my riding with edible beans. It was phenomenal, including for beef and pork. The tariffs were coming down. It gave us a tremendous opportunity. The TPP with Japan is going to make a big difference.

I have heard a number of members from the Liberal side talk about chapter 19 and chapter 20, but I go back a number of years when we had a dispute with the United States about country-of-origin labelling. This had a huge impact on our livestock sector in Canada. We did not go through chapter 19 or chapter 20. We went through the WTO. The Canadian Cattlemen's Association made note of that in its committee briefing that we do not even use that. It has not been used for 15 or 20 years.

I will agree that softwood lumber did have a one-time payoff perhaps, but in agriculture, it has been zero. The one thing the Liberals keep saying is a big deal in the agriculture community is peanuts. Peanuts is a great segue into something else I would like to talk about.

The U.S. PR paper talks about what the Americans gained versus what we gained. The U.S. gained access to dairy. The U.S. gained access to poultry. The U.S. gained access to turkey, eggs, and on and on. What did we get in return? Somehow we got a little dairy and I will see that when it happens. Apparently our big gain from the U.S.A. on agriculture is on peanuts and peanut products. I can think of all the peanut farms in my riding. What a thing. I know at the U.S. agriculture committee they were laughing about what a great deal they secured for American farmers. At home we cannot say that.

If we look at the beef sector today in Ontario, it is in crisis. The Liberal government pulled the processing licence for Ryding-Regency in Etobicoke and that has caused ripple effects in the beef sector in Ontario for years now. The Liberals did not have to pull it. They could have extended it past 90 days.

Then we look at what has been done through CFIA on transport rules. The Liberals thought they had a deal and time to do it, but CFIA went in and said here is the deal. Another deal recently done is on processing mainly eastern Ontario and some Quebec cattle in auction facilities like Brussels in my riding, Cookstown and others where they used to have great arrangements for processing cattle with their horns and other components. It was humane, safe and all of a sudden CFIA comes in and says they have to be held for so many days. There is no capacity for that. Now it is on farm.

The government has not been fair to Canadian farmers and farm producers. The agriculture minister was in Teeswater in the summer to make a big $70-million announcement for Gay Lea in my riding that was specifically trying to address schedules 6 and 7 products in the dairy sector. This huge investment to try to add value and create value for dairy farmers and the processing sector, and this deal knocks the legs right out of it, with 50,000 tonnes reducing to 35,000 tonnes. The price is not set by Canadian processors. The price is set by the U.S. If we want more access, guess who we have to go through? Uncle Sam. How could we do a deal like that?

I look back at 2019-20 and ask what the big change is. I used to work in the manufacturing sector. In the auto sector, saying that 40% of the Mexican production by whatever year it is, they will earn $16 an hour when assemblers are earning $7.40 an hour and auto parts employees in Mexico are making $3.40 an hour. What a joke. It should be 100% have to make that. We have hard-working auto parts workers in my riding who go to work every day through the snow, and produce a product that would trade around the world on fair price, fair labour, fair benefits. This deal does not do it.

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 27th, 2020]

With regard to materials prepared for ministerial exempt staff from January 1, 2019, to present: for every briefing document prepared, what is (i) the date on the document, (ii) the title or subject matter of the document, (iii) the department’s internal tracking number, (iv) the author, (v) the recipient?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 27th, 2020]

With regard to costs associated with the Prime Minister’s transition team following the 2019 federal election: (a) what were the total costs associated with the transition team; (b) what is the breakdown of all expenditures by type; (c) what are the details of all contracts entered into by the government for the transition team, including (i) date, (ii) vendor, (iii) amount, (iv) description of goods or services; (d) why did the government rent office space at 222 Queen Street in Ottawa for the transition team as opposed to using existing government office space; and (e) how much did the government pay for the office space at 222 Queen Street and what was the rental or lease start date and end date?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 27th, 2020]

With regard to government expenditures on the rental of aircraft since January 1, 2019, and broken down by department, agency, Crown corporation and other government entity: (a) what is the total amount spent on the rental of aircraft; and (b) what are the details of each expenditure, including (i) amount, (ii) vendor, (iii) dates of rental, (iv) type of aircraft, (v) purpose of trip, (vi) origin and destination of flights, (vii) titles of passengers?