Finance committee  Thank you. Chair, members of this committee, farmers need help right now. They are the front line of our food supply. We have a $2.6-million oversupply of mushrooms due to the closure of the restaurant market. We need $3.8 million for emergency COVID measures to protect our wor

Finance committee  I'll just speak very quickly then hand off to Ryan. First of all, on a point of clarification for the other member of Parliament, currently I would say the majority of mushroom farmers in Canada do not qualify for any of the emergency COVID measures, and the other agriculture pr

Finance committee  Thank you, Pierre. Basically the COVID measures do not work for the farmers, and I would say this would be for all farmers in Canada. That is because we do not qualify as small businesses. Farms have a lot of capital investments and machinery. We're not small businesses that way

Agriculture committee  Thanks, Ryan. We're here to report to you today that our supplies of the N95 face masks on many of our farms will be gone in two weeks. The N95 face masks are now selling for up to $10 per mask. These masks used to sell for well under $1. Committee members, that is 1,000% inflat

Agriculture committee  So—

Agriculture committee  I will speak about the PPE, which I've done a lot of the research on. Very early, the farms started to move quickly to invest in Plexiglass, extra housing and extra busing. That's why we're getting these costs. What we're seeing with the way the programs are being set up, unfortu

Agriculture committee  Yes and no. There are some provincial programs. In fact, we were just on a call, before this, with the provincial ag minister, Minister Hardeman, and now we're on a call with the provincial ag minister from B.C. There's a new procurement program in B.C., but we're not sure. There

Agriculture committee  We are very appreciative of the Ontario program. If there was more support for that, for mushrooms, some farms would be able to consider it as an option, because “skip the grocery store” is very popular. I totally agree that it's the new way of doing business, the boxes that co

Agriculture committee  Is that for mushrooms again?

Agriculture committee  For mushrooms, our workers are actually year-round and they're in Canada already. We have about 50 workers who were outside Canada on vacation when the travel restrictions began. About 10 of them have been able to return, and they'll be using the Ag Canada $1,500-per-worker, $50-

Agriculture committee  We get no expenses. We are not allowed to use that program. We're completely on board, but please loosen up the criteria so that some of our mushroom expenses can be covered. We're totally on board with that.

Agriculture committee  I would add that we had the accountant for one of the farms use the new Ag Canada AgriStability calculator. It's a case study that we have in our report that we're going to make available to the committee later this week. Basically, it's unsustainable. The farm goes broke by the

Agriculture committee  Yes, thank you. We're actually very excited about the agri-food immigration pilot, and we've worked very closely with the immigration department for four years. We had workshops with the farm workers until the economy was shut down in March. We felt that we would have maybe 100

Agriculture committee  We provide feedback unofficially and we spoke with the minister's office about two weeks ago, but we're hoping they will take some official feedback and make some additional changes very quickly, which could include this simple administrative thing, a little change of wording so

Agriculture committee  Yes. Actually, our sector is 70% Canadian workers, and we have about 900 temporary foreign worker program agricultural stream workers across Canada. They were in Canada. The 50 workers were the ones who were just on vacation. However, as Ryan said, we have a 20% job vacancy rat