Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. Good morning. My name is Jim Laws and I’m the executive director of the Canadian Meat Council, which is based here in Ottawa. Thank you for inviting me here today as part of your review of your first report, from March 2014, on the Canada-European Union com

Agriculture committee  Mr. Chair, to add to that, I think it's very important to note that for Canadian farmers the deal is that it has to be Canadian animals used in the meat sent over. We can't sneak in U.S. meat and send it off. No, it will benefit Canadian farmers.

Agriculture committee  That's a good question. Certainly the beef side is different from the pork side in Canada. Almost all of the pork processing facilities in Canada are owned by Canadian processors but, having said that, JBS Canada certainly expressed a great interest in being ready and taking adva

Agriculture committee  JBS Canada. Their headquarters is in Brazil. But nevertheless they certainly are devoted to growing the business in Canada. They have Canadian management in that facility. We're glad that they came to Canada to do that. That's really good news.

Agriculture committee  Well, in that particular case as well, they did purchase Establishment 38, which we all know had a problem with an E. coli recall in that facility. It was really good news that they did come and bring their international expertise to that facility to make sure that the product co

Agriculture committee  Well, the pork producers had a very rough time in terms of pricing. The cost of feed ingredients went way up. It makes it very difficult. They have very high capital costs in their barns, etc. They can't just stop producing the animals, so that's very difficult for them. As John

Agriculture committee  We don't know the answer to that question. I mentioned it because it concerns compensation that the government could give to the dairy industry. Should there be complications or a negative impact for those three companies with trademarks that would be lost, they would also hope t

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. We have some pork facilities in Quebec that were exporting to Europe already, but with the increased price of the Canadian dollar it just wasn't worth their while. When we see this deal kick in and the tariffs eliminated, they're saying that absolutely they'll be back

Agriculture committee  Again, it does give us an opportunity to get ahead of the Americans in this particular situation, even with the current challenges we have for the market into Russia. We are still supplying the Russian market—it's difficult at times—but the Americans are not. Again, with them hav

Agriculture committee  Well, it's certainly going to be reciprocal, though, a tariff reduction on both sides. It'll be a trade, and maybe it will be a good thing when we see Canadian pork getting to Europe, because we can look at this and say that it may be Canadian pork coming back to Canada in a proc

Agriculture committee  I would add that the pork producers of Quebec are very important. There are a lot of them: ATRAHAN Transformation, Aliments Lucyporc, Agromex and Aliments Asta. Quebec is home to a lot of production and a lot of diverse factories, which is very important because ham is much more

Agriculture committee  I'll start it. It's tricky to estimate. One of the concerns we hear in our sector is that the meat processors are having trouble finding enough labour.

Agriculture committee  If they could find more labour, they could do more value-added activity. That's something of a challenge. But we are hopeful. We haven't seen the details of the agreement, but there's probably a labour mobility section that we're going to be looking at very closely, because a lot

Agriculture committee  No, not by any means. It would be quite a bit less than that, for sure.

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. So nothing would change in that regard.