Agriculture committee  Good morning, Mr. Chair and honourable members of this committee. Thank you for inviting me to speak today to share our organization's perspective on Canada's next agricultural framework. My name is Tia Loftsgard. I am the executive director of the Canada Organic Trade Associati

Agriculture committee  Yes. I just attended a Food Secure conference, and there was a presentation by a fellow whose name I forget. He wrote the book The Market Gardener.

Agriculture committee  That's right: Jean-Martin Fortier. He's done an experiment to prove that ecological intensification and growing diversely on a small plot of land can be a successful model. He even publishes his income to motivate other farmers. Since then, a larger farmer has donated his land,

Agriculture committee  It's a model that is being experimented with and that is now employing five people. The point is that you need different forms of tools, not tractors. You need to be able to implement different structures. He's making $140,000 per year, gross, on an acre and a half.

Agriculture committee  Sure. I actually brought a copy of both of the programs with me, so I could leave those with you. Each is a bit different. They go into the cost per production capacity. Fruit and vegetables have a different pre-certification amount that would be subsidized versus that of green

Agriculture committee  Sure. In regard to the organic designation of products, we in Canada have three categories: made with organic ingredients up to 70%, the 95% organic, and then 100% organic certification. In Canada, you can use the logo on the last two. In the United States, they don't have the 70

Agriculture committee  I'll let Marie-Ève take that one, because she's our lead on trade equivalency agreements and international markets.

Agriculture committee  An idea that I've heard thrown around a few times is land trusts and actually creating a program that would allow older farmers to bring in younger farmers on their land and transition the land slowly through a payment plan. I think that's an idea that needs to be explored furthe

Agriculture committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and the honourable members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to speak today on the topic of non-tariff trade barriers. My name is Tia Loftsgard. I'm the executive director of the Canada Organic Trade Association. I'm joined today by my collea

Agriculture committee  I think I'll go back to the equivalency arrangements we have with 90% of our trading partners on the organic marketplace. There has been a positive move. We've formed a technical advisory committee that will consist of industry informing the CFIA with regard to equivalency agreem

Agriculture committee  Sure. We had a presentation at the organic value chain round table by CFIA saying that essentially the Canadian organic office, which used to have about four employees, would now be integrated into two separate structures.

Agriculture committee  It continues to be CFIA, but essentially it is integrated into two separate departments. There's no longer something called the Canadian organic office. The lead auditor is still there, but she's also covering the Safe Food for Canadians Act, etc. She's not dedicated specifically

Agriculture committee  I'm going to let Wally, as a certifier, speak to that in particular. Our comments so far on the safe food for Canadians regulations are that the government, in past regulations, said no to allowing the term “certified organic”, whereas all of our trading partners allow the term

Agriculture committee  We do a lot of correspondence with the market access secretariat as well as trade commissioners around the world, particularly to resolve issues as we see them coming or in advance, particularly when it comes to bilateral meetings. We were just at the Canada-Mexico meeting becaus

Agriculture committee  I think I'm learning how we can work together, so it's hard to come up with some concrete suggestions until we see how other sectors outside of organic have been able to work with the market access secretariat. One of the areas where we certainly see a fall down between our gove