Agriculture committee  I would be happy to respond. I know that when the committee did a study at the beginning of the pandemic on AgriStability, we were quite enthusiastic about the possibility of removing the reference margin and making the program much more valuable to farmers. We've seen over th

Agriculture committee  I think there needs to be a program of support to open new small abattoirs across the country. I think one way to ensure that those maintain competitiveness going forward is to look at something like what we have for grain transportation, whereby we have maximum revenue entitleme

Agriculture committee  Absolutely we need to see systemic change, more holistic management of the supply chain as a whole. We have in the past proposed a Canadian farm resilience agency that would be able to provide assistance to farmers in terms of education and cover cropping. We're currently facing

Agriculture committee  I am happy to provide the link in our submission to the committee. It's from Statistics Canada as of January, which was just published.

Agriculture committee  That one-third that's remaining includes program payments.

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I'm pleased to provide insights and recommendations from the National Farmers Union regarding agriculture and agri-food's supply chain issues. We represent farmers who operate all scales and types of

Agriculture committee  Our greater concern is to ensure that we're keeping up with the purpose, which was to eliminate making a profit off these programs. For the vast majority of farms to cover their expenses, even for many of the larger operations out on the Prairies, that should be sufficient to cov

Agriculture committee  A lot of the challenge for a small, diversified farm is that they tend to be very labour-intensive. When you're dealing with weather, unruly livestock or what have you, there are only so many hours in the day that you have to give to paperwork. The more we can simplify things and

Agriculture committee  Yes, as my colleague from CFA mentioned earlier, there's a real challenge with some of the livestock and horticulture commodities in terms of access, and they don't receive as adequate coverage. We really would like to see equitability across sectors. There definitely needs to be

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. One thing that is made mention of quite often is that there has been a really large increase in farm assets that goes along with this accumulation of farm debt. The problem with that is that when you have a couple of bad years, such as we've had especially this past y

Agriculture committee  I think there definitely needs to be a streamlining of the paperwork and a better alignment with tax preparation, especially for young and new entrants. Any extra paperwork can be really challenging when you're starting out and, again, don't necessarily have all of the assets to

Agriculture committee  We have done surveys of our young members. There is definitely a lack of easy-to-understand information out there, so better communication would certainly help.

Agriculture committee  It was around 50%.

Agriculture committee  The Government of British Columbia recently made an effort to top up their AgriStability contribution in recognition of the challenges that farmers are facing right now. Not every province is in a fiscal position to be able to unilaterally make that change. I think that farmers a

Agriculture committee  The announcement was made at the beginning of February.