Agriculture committee  Certainly, I think one of my colleagues who testified, Mr. Fraser, did touch on the key points around the code of conduct and the competitiveness that is at the national level within retail. There are so few players that drive a price-driven market, which pushes down on the growe

Agriculture committee  I would love to, thank you. This is coming directly from some of our fresh members who are not part of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association. When you look at the annual negotiated price and volume model in place in Ontario for those items, out of the 350 processe

Agriculture committee  Thank you for your question. The key we're looking at here again comes back to a series of strategies that I noted. One is ensuring that we have access to the appropriate labour pool that we can effectively produce and process the products domestically. The challenge relative to

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. On behalf of the Canadian Produce Marketing Association, representing over 800 companies growing, packing, shipping and selling fresh fruit and vegetables in Canada and supporting roughly 249,000 jobs across the country, I want to thank the chair and member

Finance committee  The quick answer is that we have one more piece of a three-legged stool to put together, and that is the implementation of a financial protection tool that would protect produce sellers and farmers in the event of a bankruptcy. That would be the statutory deemed trust. With rega

Finance committee  Most definitely we could. It doesn't require any presidential intervention in the U.S. to reinstate our access. It's a letter from the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act team—basically, from their administration—saying that they recognize the equivalency and that Canadian fa

Finance committee  You're correct. It's been in the ballpark of 30 years of talking about getting there. We got very close with creating the DRC, the dispute resolution corporation, and the program within that model. Without the bankruptcy, they finally said that they needed that last leg of the

Finance committee  Definitely, I can. Imagine the way produce is sold. While there are larger farms, the majority of the product is grown by small farm operations and then consolidated. It is then sold through maybe a dealer, which is another farmer, to wholesale, or even through jobbers. The jobbe

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee. On behalf of the Canadian fresh fruit and vegetable supply chain, I welcome the opportunity to share our recommendations for budget 2020-21. Since the start of the pandemic, the fresh fruit and vegetable supply cha

Finance committee  It most definitely would because it does a few things. It creates stability for farmers and other fruit and veg sellers in Canada to invest more. They know they are in a COVID environment, and there are farmers right now who have reduced their acreage and how much they are produ

Finance committee  I think that would be something we could consider. We'd have to go through the logistics of how that would work, but it's definitely something we can look at.

Finance committee  It's a great question. To give you an idea, I will tell you that out of all the temporary foreign workers coming to Canada, in horticulture they represent about 72% of all that labour force. That's very significant. You're looking at over 32,000 to 33,000 workers. That is below t

Finance committee  That's one portion of the supply chain, on the farm, and it's a hard sell. It really is. It's manual, physical labour that we are having a hard time convincing Canadians to do. But there are other parts. There are repackers. There's wholesale. There are other components within th

Finance committee  Sorry, I had it on English, so I wasn't able to hear the French version. The translation cut off at the end.

Finance committee  I have you on English, so I'm hearing only the one version. Go ahead.