Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon. I represent the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, an independent, non-partisan forum. Our task is to create a dialogue on pertinent issues and present alternative solutions, so that Canada's agri-food sector can reach its full potenti

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the question. The consumer is vital. At the end of the day, if a consumer is not buying a product, that's not good for the profitability of any player in the supply chain. I think the question for us is not to try to discover what individual consumers want. I'll l

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much for the question. I think government is trying to do quite a bit to try to facilitate change, innovation, and competitiveness. I think, though, there's always room to ask the question, are we optimizing? For example, there was an effort made to enhance or ele

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much for the questions. I'll start with the latter. We acknowledge that targets can be difficult things to set and to enforce. We're all supposed to be eating five to ten fruits and vegetables a day. Sometimes that doesn't happen, so targets can be inspirational

Agriculture committee  May I elaborate on that? The link between health and agrifood is highly complex. There's no question. In part, it's about how we produce our food. Sodium and trans fat might be in foods or other things. In part, it's about how eat, which is clearly diet. It's in part about how we

Agriculture committee  We didn't specify what is or isn't or should be Canadian content. That's a complex piece, and I understand that from some of your previous testimony and from what we've heard. From our standpoint, our focus is to understand the attributes of demand within foreign markets, or fr

Agriculture committee  Merci. Thank you for the question. What is happening is that governments across the country are trying to facilitate how supply chains can work. I'll comment on the federal government for a moment. What we are seeing, federally and provincially, are funds going into the Universi

Agriculture committee  Thank you. I use the tourism example to demonstrate the point that food touches so many different government departments, provincially, federally, and municipally, frankly. The interest in how we support local food is an increasing trend, and we're seeing across the country a r

Agriculture committee  I wonder if I can defer to Bob to start, given that the paper was authored by the George Morris Centre.

Agriculture committee  Yes, thank you. Thank you, Bob. I think it should be organic; that is, it should naturally evolve where there are business opportunities to be had. Government absolutely plays a key role. They are regulators, they are funders, and they are trade promoters, so in their own right

Agriculture committee  Bob, do you want to?

Agriculture committee  I don't want to put you on the spot. Mr. Chairman, maybe you better preside on who....

Agriculture committee  Okay, then, Bob, you can think of a good answer. Quickly, back to the hospital point, this is a really interesting area. It speaks to the idea that we tried to present here, which is whether we should be thinking about the health sector and the agrifood sector, and are there mut

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the question. Federal-provincial issues are very much front and centre for the agrifood sector. There are many activities being undertaken right now federally, provincially, and territorially to try to streamline issues and harmonize regulations, including in the

Agriculture committee  Well, of course, there is the Growing Forward 2 process, which is designed to have a consolidated approach across the country in order to plan, manage and prioritize, and then fund, federally and provincially. That's a robust process that's under way, and it's been under way for