Agriculture committee  I can address the second part of your question. Through our indigenous science liaison officer, we are working with communities that are interested in traditional agriculture, but as I said, for many of these there's the traditional knowledge but the practice might not be in plac

Agriculture committee  I can't speak to the broad national numbers but I can give you a couple of examples locally. We have a large research and development centre in Lethbridge, Alberta. Adjacent to that is the Blood Tribe First Nation. Part of our student recruitment initiative was looking where we

Agriculture committee  Well, our general goal is that we'd like our population of employees to represent the Canadian population from a diversity lens, a cultural lens. We don't want to draw hard targets just for the sake of hard targets, but if the general population is 4% or 4.5% of Canadians who are

Agriculture committee  I can start. I think the way we approach it is important. I mentioned at the outset the importance of working with the community. This means going to a community, finding one that's interested in this sort of thing, sitting down with members at the drawing board and finding out

Agriculture committee  Again, there are a couple of areas on the research and development side. One of the projects that's under way is the lingonberry project. The closest thing a lingonberry is related to is a cranberry, but they're in uplands. They're found throughout the northern boreal forest. Fo

Agriculture committee  I mentioned in my opening remarks our call for proposals for working with indigenous communities. One of the calls was for sustainable northern agricultural production, going into communities and looking at where there were potentially traditional ways of producing local food. Al

Agriculture committee  I was the champion of our indigenous student recruitment program that started three years ago. I didn't know much, but what I did know was that the earth—mother earth—and water are sacred, and that's at the root of most first nations culture. Caring for the earth and having the e

Agriculture committee  You mentioned the land capabilities and capacities. That's one thing. The other is the capacity within the communities for agriculture, so this is an area where we're trying to build bridges. Some communities are already excelling in agricultural production. Others have agricultu

Agriculture committee  Continuing, there are communities that have agricultural lands being farmed, but not by the first nations. They have an interest, but they don't have the highly qualified professionals or access to capital. Then there's a third category that are not practising agriculture, but

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Tom, and thank you, Mr. Chair. Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge Elder Mervin Traverse. He's a member of the Lake St. Martin Ojibway First Nation, and a traditional Saulteaux-language speaker. He is also Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's first departmental elde