44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 3, 2023 10:00AM
- Oct/3/23 3:58:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to remind my hon. colleague that the poultry association of Canada, the grain growers and the canola growers have all committed to be net zero by 2050. Interestingly enough, every time the member, who I respect, stands in the House to talk about the impacts of climate change, he never talks about the impacts on farmers, and the billions of dollars that droughts, flooding and pests are costing our farmers all across the country from coast to coast. We never hear about that. The Conservatives have no solution to help our farmers fight climate change and help them with affordability.
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- Oct/3/23 3:59:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, here is the impact on farmers: A third-generation farmer from B.C. called me saying in three months, they are going to lose their farm. Four of her neighbours have already done so and another one is selling their cows and their quota. Why? It is because after eight years of the Liberal-NDP government, they cannot afford farm-killing carbon taxes and higher interest rates. Farmers cannot afford when diesel goes up 70¢ a litre. Farmers cannot afford to pay more for feed, fuel and higher interest rates. Canadians certainly cannot afford to pay more for food.
If the Liberals really want to defend the family farm and lower prices for Canadians, why will they not cancel their inflationary carbon tax?
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Madam Speaker, the Liberals have had a carbon tax in place for many years, and yet I do not see grocery store prices going down. I do not see life becoming more affordable for farmers.
When I talk to farmers, their number one issue is not climate change. Their number one issue is Liberal government bureaucracy, red tape and carbon tax. It is the biggest stress in their lives.
Farmers in Canada do everything they possibly can to reduce their emissions. That is the thing the Liberals miss. They continue to punish Canadian farmers instead of rewarding them for what they already do. Instead of comparing them to Europe and asking Canadian farmers to get to where Europe is, they are thinking about this backward. What they should do is say they will help get Europe to where we are, with precision agriculture, zero till and 4R nutrient stewardship. Those are the things Canadian farmers are doing, and Liberals had better start recognizing that.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my friend and colleague for his tremendous leadership on this bill. It is important in my riding as well. I have lots of fruit and vegetable growers in Milton, and I want to give them a shout-out because I go to the farmers' market every Saturday in Milton. I love fresh produce, and we want to do everything we can to support them.
One of the biggest threats to growing fresh produce in Canada and certainly throughout North America and getting it fresh in our grocery stores or at our farmers' markets is climate change. Therefore, it is important that farmers continue to be a solution for fighting climate change, as the ones in my riding continually talk about. Can the member opposite talk about some of the climate events in his riding that affect some of the growers we can support, so we can help mitigate them?
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Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for that, and I thank the NDP for supporting this bill. I would love to see my Liberal colleagues on the other side here unanimously consent it right to the Senate tonight.
This bill is so important to fresh produce farmers. We have been talking about this since 2014. We were all elected here to get things done for our constituents. We have an opportunity tonight, and I turn it over to my Liberal colleagues now.
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Madam Speaker, I always love it when the people I am talking to appear to be listening, at least.
What I was saying is that it is essential. I challenge anyone here to accept the same working conditions as those people. Rain in the summer brings us down because we cannot go for motorcycle rides or head to the beach. What do they do when it rains? They do building maintenance. They go place orders. They do their paperwork because they do not have time for that when it is nice out. They have to be in the field 14 hours a day because they have no workers. Why do they have no workers? Because the government is so slow at processing foreign worker applications and because governments failed to see the current labour shortage coming.
I would like to say a thing or two about the labour shortage. I was a high school teacher. I was not an internationally renowned scientist. I was a high school geography teacher and, in the early 1990s, I taught my students that we would have a labour shortage now. Nobody did anything to avert that, and now people are stuck in this situation. They have no workers. Locals do not want to get their hands dirty, so people have to find other workers.
These folks are facing a labour shortage. They have to mechanize a lot of the production, and that means thousands if not millions in investments that generate debt. These people are heavily in debt. They called for help in spring and early summer, when torrential rains just about wiped out their harvest. Why did they call for help? They called for help because the crop insurance programs we have, the ones currently in place, the ones that the good old ministers refer us to whenever we ask them a question, do not work. Growers are not being adequately insured because the programs were designed 30 years ago in a more stable climate.
Yes, global warming exists. At the very least, I can tell the House that there is so much climate disruption that the last three years have been a disaster for produce growers. First, there was a drought. Then there were aphids. Why aphids? Because the hot season lasts much longer. The aphids moved further north. As they ran out of soybeans to eat, they moved on to fruits and vegetables. That happened last year. This year, there has been non-stop rain. We broke all-time records, particularly in the Eastern Townships, but just about everywhere in Quebec. It is all over the board. During the same period, there was a drought in Abitibi—Témiscamingue and northern Quebec as we tried to navigate our way through the smoke from the forest fires.
All these things are real. As a society, we are going to have to sit down with these people and discuss how to share the risk factor. We cannot just keep asking growers to put $2 million, $3 million or $4 million into their fields in the spring and get nothing back but us thanking them for feeding us and telling them that if they run into issues, they will need to figure it out on their own. We cannot do that.
I am digressing a bit from the subject of the bill to illustrate the fragility of this sector. I am a bit tired of hearing politicians talk about food sovereignty and how important it is to buy local. For 10 years now, we have been talking about this kind of simple, free measure that will not cost the government a thing, and yet it still has not been done.
I wish there could have been unanimous consent to send the bill to the Senate this evening. I am angry and upset because people who are celebrating and congratulating the member for York—Simcoe on his outstanding leadership, who say they are so happy to be voting this way for farmers, did not give unanimous consent. That means we will have to spend who knows how much more time on this in the House before sending it to the Senate. We also have to hope that place will deal with this efficiently so it can come back here and be made law.
Bills like this can be hard to implement. There are jurisdictional challenges that mean negotiations with other levels of government. That is important. We have to move quickly. Our fresh fruit and vegetable farmers are looking to us. They feed us now, but for how much longer? I think they are going to get sick of it and go find something else to do. Maybe grow field crops. Maybe sell their land. That is what we are up against. Let us pass this bill pronto.
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Madam Speaker, I am extremely proud to be standing in the House on behalf of the fruit and vegetable farmers in my region of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford. My region and the Cowichan region have a long and storied history in agriculture. I would like to remind all members that the Cowichan Valley is in fact Canada's only Mediterranean climatic zone. The Halkomelem language is the language of the Quw'utsun; the Cowichan name is the anglicized version of that, and it roughly translates into the “warm lands”.
We are an agricultural powerhouse in the Cowichan region. I have been proud to call that area my home for over 30 years, and I am proud to be standing in this House in support of Bill C-280. This is a measure that has long been talked about in this very chamber, and we now have an opportunity to actually change the law. As many colleagues have pointed out, this is going to be of no cost but of huge benefit to the people it directly concerns.
I want to thank the people who have spoken before me: the sponsor, the member for York—Simcoe; the member for Kings—Hants; and the member for Berthier—Maskinongé. I have the pleasure of serving with two of those colleagues on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. I have been the proud agricultural critic for the NDP since January 2018, so I know this subject very well. This is my third Parliament on the agriculture committee, and this subject has come up time and time again.
I do not want to delve too much into the details. We know that this issue matters because of the nature of the product we are talking about. Fruits and vegetables only have a tiny bit of shelf life before they have no more value. This is a unique product, and that is why we need to have this kind of a deemed trust.
It is not as though farmers, who are taking all the risk, can recoup losses by taking the product back; it is perishable in nature. We know that farmers deal with high costs. They have high input costs. It is expensive to buy machinery and erect greenhouses. In fact, almost all farmers' money is tied up in infrastructure, whether that is machinery or land. They are, in other words, land rich but cash poor.
This is a business model that is based on the tightest of margins, and anything the Parliament can do to ease up and make the payment process more guaranteed is something we should look at seriously. I am happy to say Bill C-280 would do that.
I would argue that, instead of this being just a Conservative bill, this bill is expressly non-partisan. I know the NDP has been fighting for this, as part of our electoral promise to Canadians, since 2015. Moreover, it is non-partisan by virtue of the fact that the second reading of this bill was unanimous. It sailed through committee. We had three meetings; we heard from a variety of witnesses. However, we decided as a committee to report this bill back to the House without amendments. It has the committee's stamp of approval, and I hope members in this chamber take note of that and seek to give it rapid passage.
This bill has been the subject of many committee studies. I have almost lost count of how many times, at different committees and different parliaments, we have seen a recommendation for this type of measure to be enacted by the House of Commons.
The time is now. I would like to see this bill pass through third reading, get to the Senate and start getting the traction it needs. The Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada, the Canadian Produce Marketing Association and the thousands of people they represent are watching us. They are waiting for action.
I will conclude my remarks by proudly saying that I will be supporting this bill, along with the NDP caucus. We look forward to its speedy passage to the other place; hopefully, it will eventually find its way to the Governor General's desk and receive the royal assent it deserves.
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