Finance committee  Thank you, Mary. To the question, I think one message we would convey is that succession, as I think Ms. Bissonnette said earlier, is not a clear-cut and one-size-fits-all process for Canadian farmers. We highlighted the need for dialogue because it is a very complex process that can take a lot of different forms.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not sure what you're speaking to on the last initiative. I know the Migrant Worker Support Network is centralized out of British Columbia. I know some of our members have been involved in that, but I can't speak to that necessarily myself. When it comes to the issue of open work permits, the concerns our members have, very much, are the time, energy and resources it takes to bring a worker into Canada, and the extensive relationship and investment that exist there, with predictability of labour being a big question.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I can take a start, Chris, if you'd like. When it comes to the testing regime under Switch Health in particular, one of the issues we've seen is that often results are either being lost in courier or in translation to the end laboratory. As a result, there are a number of workers left in quarantine simply because they don't have the results of their day 10 test.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  On that front, we do see that the seasonal ag worker program has a transfer mechanism that has incorporated quite a bit of flexibility that allows for workers to more easily move between different farm operations. More than anything—in Quebec, for example—they tend to use the agricultural stream, which does not have that same mechanism in place.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, I can speak to that. One of the challenges under COVID-19 has been that there's quite a bit of variability in the cost, region to region. It's not a simple answer to put a dollar figure on what the increase should be. We are aware of some employers paying up to $3,000 per worker in incremental costs, on top of the normal costs associated with the program.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would add that transportation logistics under COVID-19 in particular have been a real challenge. For charter flights, particularly where a number of workers aren't able to board the flight due to pre-departure testing, the cost of individual tickets can double or triple. This is all borne by the employer without any available support.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's not something we've discussed directly in terms of the length of time that would be appropriate. We do recognize that for those employers who are bringing the same workers back year after year for upwards of decades at a time, there is a significant administrative burden associated with that process that, in many respects, could be avoided through some amendments and flexibilities there.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think that, on the notion of a trusted-employer model, we've seen the program evolve over the last few years, and with that, our understanding of what that model might look like has sort of changed. We've seen LMIA processing for agricultural employers, for example, speed up a fair bit, and it's working quite well.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, I can speak to that as well. When we hear concerns coming from farmers about the application process, one reality is they can't just always discern what's the LMIA process and what's the work permit process. There's not a lot of transparency, necessarily, there, and understanding of what is holding up the process.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. Mr. van den Heuvel will be speaking on behalf of the CFA today.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. I think maybe other witnesses have touched on elements of this, but I think we continue to see a rise in incorporation in farms for a variety of reasons, involving everything from tax planning to succession planning and other elements of that. While there is a small percentage of farms in Canada that are currently not family-owned, we certainly appreciate the fact that family farming brings with it a whole suite of benefits for all of Canada, including the fact that was alluded to earlier wherein the retiring generation tends to extract the value they need for retirement but tries to put the farm in the next generation's hands in the best financial health possible.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for the opportunity to speak to you today. My name is Scott Ross. I'm the assistant executive director of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, Canada's largest general farm organization, representing nearly 200,000 Canadian farm families from coast to coast to coast.

Agriculture committee  When we look at BRM, one of the most noteworthy concerns we have is that, as it currently stands, around 31% of Canadian farmers are in AgriStability. That speaks to the number of farmers who are currently lacking in trust in the sufficiency of that program to respond to the risks they're facing in a normal year, let alone an unprecedented crisis like this.

Agriculture committee  It was $1 billion, yes.

Agriculture committee  I can speak to that. With AgriStability, because it's demand-driven, it's quite difficult to assess exactly what the cost would be, because as the situation evolves that would change. Certainly, those eight measures you referenced were identified about six weeks ago, and a lot has changed since that time.