Agriculture committee  If you take, for instance, the crop that was produced last year, that often enough was pre-sold into forward contracts. It's somewhat not as bad as what they are planting at the moment. At the moment, what's being put in the ground is the crop that's going to be the big questio

Agriculture committee  Well, it depends on where this pandemic is going to lead us. If we have a second wave, that would be a great disaster for the grain and oilseed sector. There is no way this sector can recoup in a short time frame out of the first, initial stage of the pandemic. The shelves are su

Agriculture committee  The stance of the Grain Farmers of Ontario, I have to say, is that we were the ones who got hurt behind the situation. I cannot say that the government should have handled it differently, but we should have be compensated for that loss that we had, because—

Agriculture committee  —this was a direct impact to us. I am not going to say what it should have done, but there should have been action coming back from government to make sure that no industry had to suffer from a decision that was made at that point.

Agriculture committee  We have seen basically from history, back in that time frame, that it's not only the prices that we have to be concerned about; it's also the inputs we buy. Everything has increased in price on the input side, so of course we're going to have to get more from the marketplace to c

Agriculture committee  In certain markets, it has improved; in other markets, it has degraded. That has a lot to do with some of the new trade deals that the government has signed in the past few years to help us out with market access. However, in today's world, things can change overnight. It just t

Agriculture committee  Yes. We're not just getting the carbon tax downloaded to us on the corn-drying side or commodity-drying side; it's also on transport. On inputs that we buy, we have to absorb that within. We're basically saying it's $14 an acre of carbon tax cost that's downloaded to the farmer a

Agriculture committee  It's roughly about 700 to 800 acres in Ontario. If you take me as an example, I farm a bit more than 2,000 acres. I paid five and a half thousand dollars of carbon tax last year only on corn drying.

Agriculture committee  I don't know where she gets her figures from, but it's a very simple calculation where they went wrong. They took the whole amount of tax that was collected through the fall season and divided it by all the farms that produce grains and oilseeds, but it's not all the tons that ge

Agriculture committee  No, there haven't been, because all support programs.... AgriStability was clipped already prior to that. Then AgriInvest was reduced as well from 1.5% to 1.0%. There are fewer support programs that support the grain sector at the moment than before.

Agriculture committee  It has become more competitive on the world stage. Depending on the government or country that's producing, it puts a lot of pressure on the marketplace. If you take, for instance, the U.S. and Brazil, they can shift production significantly to a different manner, and we're compe

Agriculture committee  Yes. That's actually working fairly well. In Ontario, we have a good mechanism in place to make those changes as they come up. Those proposals go forward in an appropriate manner. They get addressed in a timely fashion to get them out to the farmers so they can use those programs

Agriculture committee  Perhaps I'll start with the outlook for the FPT meeting. First of all, it's unfortunate that it had to be delayed from July until, I think, October. The problem I see coming is that we're going to have to get all provinces lined up to agree on the principles of getting a reform

Agriculture committee  It will help, for sure, because there is one thing I have to say. Grains and oilseeds have long, not as deep cycles, where animal production—like pork and beef—has deep drops and short drops. That's when bringing it up to 85% will actually help, because we will be able to trigger

Agriculture committee  Actually, for the grain sector, it doesn't really have great impact to put that in as an insurable peril. The grain sector is actually quite mechanized to handle the production that we do. It doesn't matter if you're in eastern Canadian production sites or western Canadian; it wi