Agriculture committee  All right--and I'll pass it over to Colleen.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Colleen. Colleen mapped out our mandate, criteria, and reason for being an organization. This mandate is essential and fundamental to the goals, action, and analysis undertaken by the organization. Mandates and terms of reference are critical components of the funct

Agriculture committee  Thank you for that question. Farmers are feeling particularly under pressure, and have been for some time. Monsieur Roy--or perhaps it was Alex--raised the issue of transparency. We're being confronted with transparency, accountability, competition, and deregulation constantly.

Agriculture committee  First, in regard to the consultation, I would say I did have the opportunity to meet with Mr. Winn and Mr. Halpenny. I also attended the public forum that was held in Saskatoon. Our president, Stuart Wells, attended a public forum in Regina. We had other NFU members attend other

Agriculture committee  To answer the tail end of that, we've been on the public record for some time asking that the Government of Canada backfill the deficits the Canadian Grain Commission experiences in operating and fulfilling their mandate. So we would agree that this would be necessary. The issue

Agriculture committee  My reaction would be that if you use other agencies and use will gravitate to those that can provide excellent service, you end up with concentration in the end, and you end up with probably one service provider. Then the idea of competition and quality disappears. We've experien

Agriculture committee  Yes, thank you. My name is Terry Boehm, and I'm currently serving as the president of the NFU. The NFU is the largest voluntary, direct-membership farm organization in Canada, incorporated by an act of Parliament in 1969, so this makes this our fortieth anniversary. What I'd li

Agriculture committee  Unfortunately, my French is very poor. Therefore, I will answer in English. Unfortunately, the action launched was initiated by the Saskatchewan Organic Directorate. It was an attempt to establish issues of liability in regard to the introduction of GM crops and the consequence

Agriculture committee  On the regulatory regime, one of the big problems—flax is particularly illustrative of this and I'll just briefly address it—is that we had the variety deregistered, making it illegal to sell for seed. But the problem was that it was still legal under the other regulatory aspects

Agriculture committee  Okay. Very good. At any rate, the issue is much more complex than the particular technologies as to how we're going to feed the world. In the meantime, there is a reliance on the technological solution, and I would say our technical ability far exceeds our predictive ability and

Agriculture committee  Thank you. I'm the president of the National Farmers Union. For those who aren't familiar with it, it's a voluntary, national, direct membership organization composed of farmers from across Canada. We're the largest voluntary national farm organization. Farmers actually have to

Agriculture committee  Okay, I'll just wrap up by saying that all of these policies we're seeing are really turning back the clock without looking at the entire public good, the economic cost-benefit analysis taking place. We see it where we're paying excess contributions in the railway freight rates o

Agriculture committee  That's one input that farmers are fundamentally able to supply themselves. From time to time, they'll buy new varieties and multiply them on the farm. Unfortunately, it's also massively profitable on the input supply side, if you can generate control and force farmers into buying

Agriculture committee  The difference on the ground would be that farmers could very well lose a big chunk of their ability to save and reuse seed, which would drastically increase costs. The deans of agriculture at 10 universities suggested that 10% of farmers' gross income should be spent on seed an

Agriculture committee  A little bit from time to time may come from other NGOs that will assist us in a particular research project or something in that regard. It's very—