Agriculture committee  I'm quite comfortable with the national food policy that was put forward by the current government in 2019. I think, again, the issue is not the visions and the principles; it's the implementation. A lot of what's in play and what's being proposed to reach the vision, I don't thi

Agriculture committee  When you look at the studies on why farmers don't make changes, why they don't shift to more sustainable practices, they name about 15 different barriers. We think that they're mostly financial, and obviously some of them are financial, but there are also many what are called “ps

Agriculture committee  I think our regulatory system still suffers from its roots, if you will. A lot of our regulations were designed around fraud prevention. Obviously, fraud prevention is important, but now we're in a situation where, as you say, we're trying to figure out how to support certain kin

Agriculture committee  That's what my website is all about. I have hundreds of proposals for how we need to change all kinds of government instruments at all levels of government. I'd encourage you to look at my proposals there.

Agriculture committee  Yes. Part of our dilemma is that we've focused for too long on export and not enough on regionalization. We also haven't done much in the realm of import substitution. Those are critical areas that need much more attention.

Agriculture committee  One of the problems right now is that, as I mentioned off the top, our program designs are not really based on systems adoption. For example, you have Mr. Cullen's kind of system. We don't really incentivize that kind of transition process, and there are many ways in which we c

Agriculture committee  Yes, I do think it's a good model. Part of the idea with transition payments is that it's not a long-term process. It's usually transition payments within a three-year window, and sometimes those payments can be reduced over time. The idea with transition payments is not to co

Agriculture committee  It's very important that transition payments be associated with certain kinds of recognized sustainability protocols and that those protocols be authenticated. That creates the kind of market confidence that consumers will often need. If you get this integrated approach where t

Agriculture committee  Yes, there's a transition framework that usually has to be applied to any kind of change process. Part of our challenge is that we often don't use transition thinking. The idea here is that we start with relatively straightforward changes that improve the efficiency of the proces

Agriculture committee  I think we need to have transition advisory services all across the country. Obviously the provinces have a big role to play in this, but, because of the Canadian agricultural partnership, there's an opportunity for the federal government, especially at this stage of negotiations

Agriculture committee  Thanks very much for the opportunity to appear before you today. I urge the committee to examine how to improve our policy execution. We have an implementation problem in the Canadian food and agriculture system as it relates to environmental improvement. It's a decades-old prob