Agriculture committee  No.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Someone at our farm income symposium said as long as we say we should think outside the box, we're still using the old box as a reference; we should just forget about it.

Agriculture committee  On the Canadian farm bill, let me say again that if there's competition between the different departments, help us get rid of it. There's no reason why all the departments in charge of agriculture in Ottawa couldn't be working together as a team. There is no reason why the differ

Agriculture committee  He's mentioned a few other things that are very important—

Agriculture committee  Don't worry. If we want all the farmers to speak as one voice, we try to work with other organizations as much as possible. But you know, we developed amazing consensus in the national safety net advisory committee, from every organization. Every organization across Canada was

Agriculture committee  I think that's very good news, the story you told us about your nephew, because that's exactly what we're hoping for, that retail loyalty. The other thing I want to mention is that the success of the on-farm food safety programs and environmental programs is contingent on indust

Agriculture committee  It's certainly supported by all our membership. You probably know it's the ten general provincial farm organizations as well as national commodity organizations, and we've worked with some other organizations on it as well to ask for ideas and get them to submit ideas. I'll get J

Agriculture committee  Well, we encourage, in our strategic growth pillar, that there should be a lot of focus on value added. There needs to be top-down investment as well. We need to make sure that we create value-added opportunities. Niche markets, certainly, are an opportunity as well. We also ne

Agriculture committee  There is one thing we think we need for the success of the bio-economy as well as for any of the other pillars we have in our Canadian farm bill--and Mr. Easter alluded to it earlier. How can we, with our joint jurisdiction in Canada, develop a farm bill that's going to work if,

Agriculture committee  We have some really good information on that already, just in the initial stages of this research. We'd absolutely be willing to provide it to you.

Agriculture committee  Thank you. If we're going into something that other countries have already been in, and where they are probably ahead of us in the game, I think we have to make sure we develop competitive policy. The biofuel industry is a classic example. What can we develop here that's going

Agriculture committee  We do have information that Canadian consumers are prepared to pay a premium if they know the money is going to farmers, but unless we make our on-farm food safety programs mandatory, again, we can't control it at the border. The only thing we could do is adopt a precautionary ap

Agriculture committee  The one thing we are discouraging, and I had this discussion at an IFAD meeting a couple of weeks ago, is any suggestion that you should try to compete based on saying “My food is safer than your food”, because we think that any food on a shelf should be safe. By virtue of the fa

Agriculture committee  I'll ask Justin to answer that. He's been doing the work on this project.

Agriculture committee  That issue is still under discussion with CFA.