Agriculture committee  I think the easiest one to put together is a national line in terms of technology, staffing and all those kinds of issues. One of the benefits of having a line in each province is that they would know their region best and would be embedded in the issues and concerns of the produ

Agriculture committee  I think it's best to be located in a rural area because you're going to attract the professionals and volunteers needed to run the line when they have lived experience.

Agriculture committee  It would be very possible. Certainly we would entertain the notion. Currently, we are funded by our province, so we have to operate within that mandate. As I mentioned before, a variety of models could be looked at, such as one or two national lines that service English and Fren

Agriculture committee  Yes, we're here.

Agriculture committee  What we can speak to most directly is direct service for mental health for farmers. All the programs that assist producers when it comes to their financial world are very important. That is one of the primary issues that we hear on the line. It often has a financial seed that imp

Agriculture committee  This is a challenging thing to do with crisis counselling, because we may only hear from an individual one time. We have what we call familiar callers, who call us over a period of time, so we get a better sense of how they are doing.

Agriculture committee  I think the federal government can show leadership when it comes to the needs of Canadian farmers and work with the provinces to direct the service and make it happen. Without a needs assessment, we probably don't know the best model. When we first started, there were farm distr

Agriculture committee  The Manitoba Farm, Rural & Northern Support Services supports the recommendations laid out by Dr. Andria Jones-Bitton of the U of Guelph to this committee: namely, support for a Canadian network for farmer mental health, a federal funding stream for farmer mental health resea

Agriculture committee  We would be more than willing to stay afterwards if anybody wants us to.

Agriculture committee  We need more than three days to prepare.

Agriculture committee  Thank you. I actually provided some information from our annual reports that includes a lot more statistics, so I welcome you to pick up packages at the back. Our biggest year in terms of call volume was 2004, at the height of BSE. We had 2,175 calls at that time during that

Agriculture committee  We found in our program that very few people qualified. It didn't apply to enough people in our community.

Agriculture committee  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chairman, and the honourable members of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. It's a real honour to be here this afternoon to speak with you today. My name is Janet Smith, and I'm the program manager of the Manitoba Farm