Agriculture committee  I could certainly share it with you.

Agriculture committee  It was paid for by the taxpayers of Canada.

Agriculture committee  Right. The perception of Canada from places like the U.K. and Washington is that Canada is going to boom under a warming climate because we're a cold country. If you look in more detail.... In fact, we've collaborated with agricultural researchers at the University of Saskatche

Agriculture committee  I think the major challenge is that you've lost a lot of technical capacity because a lot of people were laid off. They were surplused or retired. It would be difficult to assemble such a large, competent team of soil scientists, engineers, and hydrologists and get them out of re

Agriculture committee  I would suggest you should, because there's an issue in the Prairies of the draining of wetlands, especially the eastern part of the Prairies. A large amount of land that stored water has been drained.

Agriculture committee  This was a major national conference on adaptation to climate change, and I was asked to speak and present the results of our study. There were people from the director level from Ag Canada in the room. I invited them to respond, but they felt that they couldn't in public. Afterw

Agriculture committee  As you can expect, I would say no, we're not sufficiently prepared. We still have some work to do, especially in the context of the loss of institutional capacity within the Government of Canada for assisting at least farmers in the west. In my experience, much of the focus in

Agriculture committee  You mentioned leadership, and an important element of leadership is to take a broader view of things—over a large country, but especially over time. Working with our colleagues in the west, we've clearly documented these wet and dry cycles that reoccur. I mentioned that we have

Agriculture committee  I can speak at least to the situation in Saskatchewan. It is the province that had the vast majority of the PFRA community pasture. Also, the infrastructure that was owned by the Government of Canada was primarily, as far as I know, in Saskatchewan. The government has divested

Agriculture committee  Certainly. The PFRA is a famous institution, at least in western Canada. That includes parts of British Columbia, such as the Peace country and the Okanagan, which the PFRA was responsible for. The PFRA was probably the most respected government agency that you could imagine, inc

Agriculture committee  I hope I more than implied that, because I've studied climate change for 30 years and I like to think it's real. Otherwise, I may have just wasted 30 years of my life. I'm sorry. Was the second part of your question about how it relates to soil and water conservation?

Agriculture committee  I certainly can. In fact, there is a strong correlation between what are called sustainable agricultural practices and adaptation to climate change. If you read any literature, even the general literature on sustainable agriculture and adaptation to climate change, you see that t

Agriculture committee  I was referring to the practice of not maximizing the productive capacity of the fields. In fact, Professor Rood also referred to that in his third point, regarding optimization versus maximization. It's entirely possible that this is occurring. There's an industrial scale of agr

Agriculture committee  Yes. As I said, we had a fairly major five-year study completed recently. We were fortunate to have been given millions of dollars by the federal government. We concluded that the major problem was them. I presented the results at a conference in Ottawa last spring. There were re

Agriculture committee  I have one paragraph left, sir. This program was shut down in 2013. I have no expectation that PFRA and these programs will be restored, but I expect they will. The next time the agricultural sector suffers from a prolonged drought or the impacts of heavy rain, you can expect th