44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 29, 2023 02:00PM
- Nov/29/23 3:04:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, farmers across the country, including those in the member opposite's riding, know how important it is to fight climate change as well as protect their investments and future generations of farmers in this country. That is why we are stepping up with significant investments to support innovation in farming and agriculture and support direct investments to change the way we are doing things. It is so we can do them cleaner and greener, in ways that continue to support Canadians and build a stronger future for everyone.
We know that farmers care deeply about the land and its future. We are working with them, not denying the reality they are facing.
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Madam Speaker, I move that the first report of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, presented to the House on Wednesday, February 2, 2022, be concurred in.
I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Lambton—Kent—Middlesex.
I want to concur in the report from the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food on food security that looked at processing capacity in Canada with a particular focus on food security. I believe there is some very pertinent information in the report, which I would encourage all members of the House to take the opportunity to read if they have not done so.
There are a couple of things in this report that I found interesting on how things change quickly. For example, in the government response to our report, there is a line that says, “The Government recognizes that the Report focuses on ensuring that a secure supply of food will be available to Canadians”. Budget 2019 states that “one in eight Canadian households currently experience food insecurity, meaning that they are without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food.”
Now, that was in 2019, here we are in 2023, and that number is no longer one in eight, that number is now one in five. One in five Canadians are skipping meals because they cannot afford to put nutritious and healthy Canadian-produced food on their table. I think that is a statistic for all of us in the House that shows the devastating impact that Liberal government policies have had on everyday Canadians who are just trying to feed their families and make ends meet, pay their bills and carry on with their lives.
The focus of this report, and why I want to highlight it today, is about food security or, more specifically, food insecurity. I cannot help but go back to the debate we had yesterday on Bill C-234, which was a common-sense Conservative legislation that would enhance food security for Canadians. It would be making farming more affordable for Canadians, which was a critical element of this study.
However, what was not included in the study, and I want to highlight that as well, is that, at the time, we did not have definitive data on the impact the carbon tax was having on Canadian agriculture. For example, the Parliamentary Budget Officer reported that Bill C-234 would save Canadian farmers close to $1 billion by 2030. We have a report here talking about food security. These elements would have been a very welcome part of the analysis and recommendations, as well as the impact that the carbon tax policy is having on Canadian farms and harming their ability to ensure that Canadians have nutritious and affordable food on their tables.
The report highlighted the importance of innovation and technology to ensure that modern Canadian agriculture could meet demand and meet its responsibilities. Again, with Bill C-234, we are highlighting the fact that there are no commercially available and viable alternatives for Canadian farmers across the country who are heating and cooling their barns and drying their grain, other than natural gas and propane. When I talk about the Parliamentary Budget Officer report and the fact that Bill C-234 would save Canadian farmers close to $1 billion on a carbon tax exemption, that is only on natural gas and propane.
Ironically, gas and diesel already have an exemption and so really, with Bill C-234, what we are trying to highlight is correcting an oversight, which I believe the Liberal government inadvertently made on its initial price on pollution climate change policy when it made an exemption on gas and diesel but did not include an exemption on natural gas and propane. I believe that when the Liberals developed their price on pollution legislation, or carbon tax, they did not include natural gas and propane because I think they just did not have a clear understanding of what agriculture is and the energy sources that the agriculture sector relies on every single day.
This report highlighted the importance of technology and innovation. Farmers are doing that every single day by ensuring that their farm buildings and barns are as energy efficient and state of the art as possible. In fact, one of the farm families who were here last week, who met with members of Parliament and actually participated in a bit of a rally on the Hill and at the Senate, just built a new state-of-the-art chicken barn in southern Alberta, at a cost of more than $3 million, but it is powered by natural gas because there is no other alternative in rural Alberta. Despite using a very clean-burning fuel, they paid $180,000 this past year just to heat and cool that barn. When the Prime Minister quadruples his carbon tax, they will be paying $480,000 a year just to heat and cool that barn.
I have that study here in my hand where the government provided its responses on the importance of food security. I guess I would ask if perhaps we should be updating this study because I am not sure how we can even talk about food security when farmers cannot remain in business.
This particular farmer, who built a new poultry barn, told me that he could not afford these higher taxes. He really only has two choices. One choice is to somehow pass on those additional costs to the consumer. Again, the question arises about food security when Canadians are already facing record-high food inflation. That is only going to get higher as the carbon tax increases. His other choice is to shut down, to close up his farm and his agriculture operation, which again would impact food prices because that means less product on the store shelves and higher prices.
Another interesting fact about this study is that it talked about a concern of Dr. Charlebois, a professor of food and supply chains at Dalhousie University. He mentioned that we are seeing a number of Canadian agriculture and agri-food businesses stop their investments in Canada and Canadian operations. He said, “They're now leaving the country because they can't capitalize any projects as a result of...increasing fees. The competitive environment here in Canada is not...attractive.”
As a result of the carbon taxes, red tape and bureaucracy highlighted in this study, we are seeing Canadian farms declare bankruptcy or shut down, but also that agri-food businesses are picking up and leaving to more friendly entrepreneurial and business jurisdictions. The result of that, again, as we were talking about in Bill C-234, is that they are carbon taxing Canadian farms out of business, but then they are forcing Canadian consumers to purchase food imported from foreign jurisdictions. That causes two problems. One, it has a significant carbon footprint through moving, for example, tomatoes or mushrooms all the way from Mexico into southern Ontario, or fruit and vegetables from California into Quebec, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Two, it is a problem when we use foreign-grown products that do not have the same environmental standards we have here in Canada. There is a real significant problem when those food products are cheaper to import from Mexico, Brazil or Venezuela, when we should be able to produce them right here in Canada.
I wanted to share some of those facts that are highlighted in this report and just how much it is apropos to what is going on with our discussion yesterday about Bill C-234. When this study was published, one in eight Canadians were facing food insecurity. Four years later, it is now one in five.
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Madam Speaker, I enjoy working with my very respected colleague on the agriculture committee. There is no question that Canadian farmers understand the changes in climate more than just about any Canadian, as they are certainly at the front lines of that. However, my argument today, in highlighting some of the issues in this report, and yesterday with Bill C-234, is that I do not believe that a carbon tax on Canadian agriculture and Canadian farmers is going to resolve issues when we are talking about the environment and climate change.
I have talked to many farmers. Paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in carbon tax does not allow them to invest in the new innovation and technology that will help reduce their carbon footprint and emissions.
I think we should be incentivizing farmers to do those things, not punishing them with a carbon tax.
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- Nov/29/23 4:46:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, actually, it is about time that the House of Commons finally looks at an agriculture report. We do not get the amount of airtime that many other committees do. This is a really important industry in Canada.
I have been a proud member of the Standing Committee on Agriculture for almost six years now. We do some fantastic work. Most of it by far is by consensus. In this particular report, if members look at recommendations 2, 3 and 4, they specifically deal with the main thrust of this report, which is processing capacity.
If my colleague will remember, my main theme of questioning was around how we build resiliency in our local communities, especially when we have the unexpected, such as COVID-19 and whatever disasters might hit us in the future.
Could my hon. colleague share how we build that, because what we saw during the pandemic was that the supply chains are extremely vulnerable to systemic shocks?
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- Nov/29/23 4:47:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is great to have the agriculture band here and everyone here in the House today participating in this. I appreciate that.
I will just highlight one thing that I think will answer my colleague's question. During COVID, the federal government worked with the provinces to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers and allow harmonization of regulations, which allowed provincially certified processing plants to have the same standing as federally certified processing plants. It works very smoothly.
I think we can easily do that again, which would encourage those local processing plants to expand and grow and reduce our dependency on just three plants.
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Madam Speaker, I am here today to debate concurrence in the report on strengthening food capacity in Canada for food security and exports.
I am a proud member of the agriculture committee. Members on the committee work very well together, and this was a study we did during COVID. We heard from a lot of people across the country about challenges that we face in our agriculture sector. I was able to travel across this country during COVID to experience what our processors were facing first-hand. I had the opportunity to visit a couple of meat processing factories, and it struck me how resilient our agriculture processing sector is. However, processors also need a helping hand sometimes. We lack capacity in this country for food processing.
I am proud to come from a region that grows an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables, and a lot of vegetables are grown for processing. As a matter of fact, there is a food processor in my riding, in Kent County, that processes field tomatoes. Until recently, there was also a pickling processing plant; unfortunately, due to circumstances, that pickling processing factory closed. It is really sad, because it was a thriving business that employed a lot of people in Wallaceburg. The owners tried to keep it open, but, unfortunately, they did not succeed. Why is this? Policies of the government impeded their ability to continue their business in Canada.
Sugar beets are another example of food produced in my riding, in southwestern Ontario, Kent County and Lambton County. However, 100% of them are shipped to Michigan to be processed. What happens then? They come back to Canada refined as sugar, and we pay a premium for that sugar, including tariffs, even though the sugar beets were grown in Ontario and are a product of Canada. I bring this up because we are seeing more and more that we are losing processing capacity in Canada, whether it is in the fresh food sector, sugar beets or oilseeds. I hear day in and day out that one of the big impediments to being able to compete in Canada is the carbon tax. The carbon tax makes it more expensive for any of the processors to do business in Canada.
Another example of food processing that we lose to the U.S. is pork. There is an abundance of pork producers in my riding. Most of the pork gets processed at Conestoga in Kitchener and, up until recently, at Olymel in Quebec. However, again, we do not process the value-added products in Canada. The pork bellies get shipped down to the States; they are made into bacon and then imported back to Canada, where we pay a premium on that product.
There is a plastics ban that has been proposed to eliminate plastics for all produce. Produce needs to be wrapped in plastic when it is shipped to maintain its quality. We rely on other countries to provide two-thirds of our fresh produce in this country. If it is not kept wrapped in plastic when it is shipped, we are going to see an exorbitant amount of food waste. Not only that, but we are also going to lose the ability to import food in this country, putting our food security at risk. That is talked about in this report.
Food security is of the utmost importance, and if we ban plastics in our produce sector in Canada, how are we going to get the imported food to feed Canadians that comes from all over the world? It is a global supply chain. We do not get to dictate the packaging on fruits and vegetables. Other countries do the packaging, and we need to make sure that ours is uniform, especially with our biggest trading partner, the United States. If this plastics ban goes forward, it will have serious consequences for our produce industry. It is going to cost our produce farmers upwards of $6 billion to make that happen.
Can members imagine what we are going to face in food security if we already have Canadians who cannot feed themselves? We have two million Canadians using a food bank. There are 800,000 who use a food bank in Ontario. The prices of groceries are high right now. I cannot imagine what the price is going to be when, all of a sudden, we have to pay up to 30% more for our fresh produce at the grocery stores. Families cannot afford to eat right now. They are choosing between heating and eating. If the prices continue to go up on food, we are going to have more people lined up at food banks. That is not acceptable in this country.
The carbon tax makes everything more expensive. I am a farmer, and I hear all the time in the House from the members opposite on the government side talking about how farmers do not pay a carbon tax. That is simply not true. Yes, there are things farmers do where they do not pay taxes on their fuel that I could name off, such as driving a tractor in their field, putting fuel into their generator to be able to pump water to an irrigation system or using vehicles that do not use a roadway. These are exempt from the carbon tax and from taxes on diesel fuel. However, in reality, as I am driving through the countryside on my way to Ottawa every week, the farmers are out in their fields combining their corn. This past weekend, on Sunday, was no different; this is very late right now, because it is so wet.
A lot of farmers do not use tractors and wagons anymore to transport their grains from the field back to the farm to the elevator. They are using transport trucks, which are required to pay the carbon tax for the fuel they use. When the trucks are paying more for fuel, of course the trucking companies are going to pass that cost on to the farmer. Most farmers are price-takers, so they do not get to necessarily pass those costs on to the consumer. What does that mean? Farmers are having to eat up those costs on their farm, taking it out of money they would generate as revenue and reinvest in their farm to purchase more innovative state-of-the-art equipment to keep their business in business. Instead, they have to pay more money in order to transport their grains from the field to the elevator.
In my region, it has been a very wet fall. Our farmers have had extremely wet conditions when trying to get the crops off. Not only that, but the corn is coming off the fields with a very high moisture content. Farmers have to dry the grain in order to keep it in the bins, because it goes for animal feed and to the ethanol plant. In order to deliver that corn to the ethanol plant, it has to be at a certain percentage. Whether for corn, beans or wheat, there are no commercially viable options in Canada other than propane and natural gas. If there were, I am sure farmers would use it. What I have heard from farmers is that we do not have an electrical grid system that could ever handle an electric grain dryer. Therefore, right now, they are forced to use propane and natural gas. That is why Bill C-234 is so important. We need to pass the bill, because farmers desperately need this relief from the carbon tax. It will have an immediate effect on food prices in the grocery stores.
As potato farmers, we use transport trucks to transport our potatoes from the field back to the wash plant. A lot of farmers do that now. Transport trucks transport most of the crops from the field back to the farm for processing, and they have to pay the carbon tax. There is no way around it. Therefore, farmers should be exempt from paying the carbon tax on drying their grain and heating their barns. I have 23% of Ontario's chicken in my riding; I have been in those chicken barns. In order to keep the animals alive, the barn has to be kept warm in the winter. How do they heat it? They do so with natural gas or propane. There is no other commercially viable option.
I implore the Senate to pass Bill C-234 and give our farmers that much-needed tax relief. This is about food security; that is what the report is about. We need to ensure that our farmers, now and in the next generation, can stay in business, so we can produce the food Canadians need to eat. Eating is a necessity, and we need to continue to be able to feed Canadians and the world with our nutritious Canadian food.
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- Nov/29/23 4:59:03 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague is another member of the agriculture committee. It is nice to see us bringing an agriculture report to the House for deliberation.
In my time working with my colleague, she has been very outspoken on the grocery code of conduct. We have it here in the report as part of recommendation 16, and we did hear recently that Loblaw in particular has some problems with the code.
I am wondering if she could give her thoughts to the House on why such a code is important and why it should be mandatory, considering the power imbalance that exists between grocery chains and the hard-working producers and processors, who have been dinged with all of these hidden fees. Could she explain to other members of the House, who may not be familiar with this issue, why it is important and why it is so central to really strengthening Canada's processing capacity?
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- Nov/29/23 5:01:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am also a member of the agriculture and agri-food committee, and I am very proud of Canadian farmers, having come from a farming family myself.
I want to ask the member opposite what she feels the impact of the increase in commodity prices has been, of oil and gas as well as grain, on food prices over the last several years. Do you feel that helping farmers to get off fossil fuels and adapt some of these new clean technologies, such as the hybrid heat pump drying system and the biomass-based heat pump systems, things being developed right to a commercial scale, would help farmers deal with these fluctuating oil and gas prices in the future?
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- Nov/29/23 5:04:37 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-9
Madam Speaker, I have a lot of opinions and thoughts on farms. Members might not be necessarily surprised. After all, I come from the Prairies, and I was born and raised in the Prairies. I have lived on Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. While in Alberta, I was a member of the Canadian Forces. I have grown a great appreciation for farms. How could one live on the Prairies for 60 years and not appreciate the value of our farms? I am going to get into some details on that, relatively shortly.
I really want to focus on why this is. I put it in the form of a question to the member who brought forward the motion.
Liberals in general are open to talking about the farming community. We understand the appreciation of agriculture and the importance it has not only to Canada but also to the world. Canada, in many ways, does help to feed the entire world. The types of products we produce on the Prairies and throughout Canada are second to none. No other country in the world has the diversity of product, not to mention the quality of product. Therefore, I understand and appreciate, as my colleagues do, the importance of our agricultural communities, our rural communities and the farmer.
I say that because I wanted to focus some attention on the behaviour of the Conservative Party today and the disturbing pattern we are witnessing day after day. I suspect that most members who came into the chamber today did not want or expect the Conservatives to move yet another motion for concurrence in a committee report. That is what this is: a motion for concurrence. The motion is that we, in essence, talk about farmers, agriculture, and the industry as a whole that feeds off of it.
Let us not forget that there was another very important issue we were supposed to be debating today. It was, in fact, Bill S-9. Bill S-9 is all about weapons of mass destruction. Canada plays a very important leadership role around the world, and one of the areas in which we play that role is the area of weapons of mass destruction.
I remember the day Lloyd Axworthy brought the land mine issue to Ottawa. We had a worldwide ban and a convention came out of it. Bill S-9 deals with the chemical weapons convention, the listing of chemicals, and it would reinforce that particular aspect of Canada's role. Fortunately, it was brought in through the Senate because of the legislative agenda we are trying to get through.
Even in some of the comments I heard from across the way in the previous two speeches, the members talked about the importance of affordability. Tomorrow and the following day, we will be talking about the fall economic statement because we understand the issues that are so critically important to Canadians.
I want to tell my friends across the way that using motions for concurrence in committee reports takes away from the government's ability to get its legislation through. It is interesting. When I posed the question to the mover of the motion, his response was that it is up to the government to get things through. The government is trying to get things through. We were planning on bringing forward Bill S-9 today in the hope that we would be able to get that legislation passed because I do not think anyone will be opposing it.
Now, we are losing a day to pass that legislation, so if we want to deal with Bill S-9, we will have to call it to the chamber again. Opposition members will say, “Who cares? It's not our problem. It's the government's problem.” If we cannot bring in items such time allocation, how can the government possibly pass legislation when we have an opposition party that is preventing the government from doing just that?
We are talking about food for the world. I have heard members on the other side talk about trade many times. Members can think about Ukraine, the trade agreement Canada has with Ukraine, and the impact that has on food supply, processing foods and so forth.
The Conservative Party, all its members, voted against that important piece of legislation, the trade agreement between Canada and Ukraine. The people of Canada understand and value the legislation, and they are not the only ones who want to see it pass. There is the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, the ambassador from Ukraine to Canada, the politicians in Ukraine and members from every other political party, except the Conservative Party.
The president of Ukraine came to Canada at a time of war and signed an agreement. The legislation was brought forward, and the Conservatives filibustered. They used the same tactic they are using right now with a concurrence report. Bringing in concurrence report after concurrence report, is limiting the number of debate days the government will have. Is this an attempt by the Conservative Party to prevent the Canada-Ukraine free trade debate from taking place at third reading?
Does the Conservative Party not understand that there is legislation, such as the fall economic statement, that needs to be debated in the chamber? If they continue to bring in concurrence reports, they will continue to take time away from debating the legislative agenda. Many, including myself, want to see a number of pieces of legislation debated.
This is not to take away from the issues the member is raising today concerning farmers and our agricultural community. As I said at the beginning, I am a very strong advocate for those two communities. I have given many speeches in the House, as I know my colleagues appreciate. Every week, when we are in session and in caucus, the rural agenda is there and being talked about. We understand and appreciate the needs of our rural communities, our farmers and our smaller municipalities, as well as how vital they are to Canadian society.
Why did the Conservative Party do this? We will have another opposition day next week. We have maybe 12 more sitting days before the break. How many of those days will we be dealing with the fall economic statement? We have an opposition day next week. The number of days is shrinking, and if the intent of the Conservative Party is to prevent the Canada-Ukraine deal from getting to third reading and passing, I say shame on them.
That is not the only legislation, but there is a lot of focus on it. The Conservatives wonder why we bring it up time and time again, and it is because we do not trust the Conservative Party. It has gone so far to the right. We see that attitude in the leader of the official opposition taking his party to a place where it votes in ways that are very hard to understand for one reason.
We already heard two members stand up to speak to this issue, and they strictly talked about the carbon tax, as they referred to it, or the price on pollution. The Conservatives are using that as an excuse for everything they are doing in the chamber. It is reckless. That is what we are witnessing. We have a leader of the official opposition who is not in tune with what Canadians are asking legislators to do here in Ottawa.
It is only a question of time before Canadians actually realize the destructive behaviour of the Conservative Party today. That is why I think it is important, as a Liberal member of Parliament, to amplify it and to ensure that Canadians know and understand what is in fact taking place, and that there are important things that need to be passed here.
The report talks about infrastructure. Recommendation 1 is to associate infrastructure with trade. It highlights infrastructure and trade. No government has spent more and committed more on infrastructure in the last 50 or 60 years than the current Liberal government has, because we understand and appreciate the importance of having a healthy infrastructure so we can get our product to market, whether a local market or an international market. It is one thing to talk about it, but it is another thing to see the action. With the Liberal government, we have seen action supporting investment in Canada's infrastructure from coast to coast to coast.
The Conservatives say “access” and “making sure”. Over the summer, a number of months ago, the former minister of transport was in CentrePort in Winnipeg, just outside my riding. It is a huge park, thousands of acres, strategically located near rail lines and a first-class long-haul trucking industry, the biggest in the province, possibly the biggest in the Prairies. There is an airport literally a couple of miles away. There is a great deal of focus on infrastructure and how we can get products to market. We see the agricultural community coming into CentrePort in a very real and tangible way.
It is not that we do not want to have those types of discussions. That is why we have standing committees. The New Democratic member stood up and said that it was nice we were having a debate on agriculture in the chamber today. I would like to think that we have debates and discussions on agriculture on an ongoing basis, whether they are budget debates, throne speech debates or the numerous private members' bill debates that take place.
One of the reasons we have standing committees is so we can actually look at and take a deeper dive into an issue. That enables, I believe, reports like the one we have today. With those reports, Canadians can get a better understanding of where the House of Commons or the collective parliamentarians would like to see the government of the day take some form of direction. That is what I like about the system.
What I do not like is when reports are consistently used as a mechanism, through concurrence, to prevent debates from taking place on government legislation. That is very problematic. The Conservatives will say that it is the government's responsibility to bring forward the legislation. We are bringing forward the legislation; it is the opposition that is preventing the legislation from being debated. It is the opposition that is choosing the tools it has in order to filibuster legislation.
Some members across the way are laughing. Our Ukrainian heritage community is not laughing; it is upset because it sees the games the Conservative Party of Canada is playing. That needs to change. I cited just one piece of legislation, but there are numerous ones. Even during the pandemic, with regard to financial supports to Canadians, we saw the Conservatives using concurrence as a way to prevent government legislation from moving forward. They used an excessive number of concurrence reports. They have the standard line: “This is an important issue; why would we not want to be able to debate the issue?" They make it sound as if the government were not being sensitive to the issue.
I ask my Conservative friends across the way, if the issues were as important, from a Conservative perspective, as they try to imply to Canadians, why are they not using them as opposition day motions? They have plenty of opposition days when they get the entire day to be able to debate the issues they want to debate, just like yesterday, when they chose to debate the Senate and the behaviour of the Senate.
It is rooted in the price on pollution, I must say, because the Conservative Party of today is very much infiltrated by individuals who are truly climate deniers. Maybe not all members of the Conservative caucus are; I suspect not. However, I do believe there is a preoccupation within the leader of the Conservative's party, which is, in fact, climate denial. The Conservatives are so fixated on the issue of getting rid of the price on pollution. Think about it in terms of this particular report. In the report, members are saying that the price on pollution is scaring farmers away and that they are going to shut down and go elsewhere with their produce.
During the last break week, I had the opportunity to go just north of Portage la Prairie to Roquette, a world-class pea processing facility. Did members know that the largest pea processing plant in the world is in the province of Manitoba? I can say that I am quite proud of that particular fact. The facility creates all sorts of opportunities for the farmers in the area. I am told it even has to bring in some yellow peas from other jurisdictions because it cannot keep up with the demand. The demand is going to continue to grow. The facility is actually diversifying, which is great news. It reinforces that the world is looking at Canada as a place to be able to invest in, and that includes our agricultural community. The role of the farmer is just as real today as it was in any day in the past. The innovators in our environment are often farmers. We do not give our farmers enough credit. Quite frankly, what I do not like is when they are used as a political tool. I was in opposition when the Conservatives got rid of the Canadian Wheat Board.
Suffice to say, I really and truly believe that the Conservative Party needs to get its ship in order, whether with the Canada-Ukraine trade agreement or stopping the filibustering and the preventing of legislation from being able to pass. There is a minority government; that means there is an expectation that opposition members would also behave. There is nothing wrong with criticizing. I was in opposition for 20-plus years, so I understand that role. There is also a role in terms of being a little bit more creative in one's opposition.
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- Nov/29/23 5:27:00 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I understand my colleague's complaints about the fact that the House is not following the order of business each day. Then again, we are always happy to talk about farmers, so I would like to take this opportunity to ask him a very specific question.
Recommendation 17 in the report we are discussing today highlights the importance of providing capital to our SMEs, our small businesses in general. We are talking about food processing at the moment, but we could extend this to businesses in general. Right now, the entire Canadian business community is asking the Liberal government for a one-year reprieve on the repayment of the Canada emergency business account. This is particularly necessary and urgent in the restaurant industry, as well as in agriculture.
If my colleague has so much respect for the farming community, is he prepared to lobby within his party to give our small businesses the breathing room they need to survive and keep their doors open?
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- Nov/29/23 5:32:03 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, Canadian farmers and agri-food exporters have made Canada the fifth-largest exporter of agricultural produce and agri-food products. The member mentioned the largest pea processing facility in this province. I appreciate that the manufacturing sector, including the agriculture-processing sector, has been in decline for the last 20 years. We need more manufacturing and processing, not only to be self-reliant but to export value-added products.
I would like to know whether the member accepts that we need more processing for value-added exports.
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- Nov/29/23 5:58:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I enjoy serving on the agriculture committee with my colleague.
I want to touch on recommendation 14 regarding skills development and the encouragement for training and re-skilling programs. During testimony we heard from UFCW, which represents many workers in our food and processing sectors. In particular, it recommended that the government bring together industry players, representatives of workers and the government, a tripartite representation. I do not think there is enough awareness out there of how technically skilled agricultural jobs have become. A lot of students have a stereotypical and very old-fashioned idea of agriculture, when in fact it is a very technologically specific area.
What does my colleague think about the government having to do more to promote awareness of not only the skills required but also the very well- and high-paying jobs that are available and the opportunities that exist in this sector so that we do not always have to rely on importing workers to fill the huge labour gap that exists?
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- Nov/29/23 5:59:38 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his intelligent question, like the ones he often asks at the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food.
That is what I was talking about earlier when I spoke about having a vision for the future. When we take action, we need to consider what things will be like in 10 or 20 years. We need to start informing, training and providing information to our young people right away.
My colleague mentioned something fundamental at the beginning of his speech. He talked about sitting people down together. The federal government has a hard time doing that. It usually prefers to act as if it has a monopoly on the truth and to launch a nice program that comes with a nice, absolute truth that may not necessarily work.
We need to have people in the industry sit down with people in government for a real, serious and solid consultation to see what measures can be taken. Obviously, this will have to be done in a way that respects jurisdictions. That was clearly spelled out in our report. We need to do that and improve training and information programs, because many young people looking for a career are unfamiliar with the field. We have to work on that.
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Madam Speaker, there is a private member's bill currently in the Senate, Bill C-282, from a Bloc Québécois member. The Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance, which represents 90% of agriculture food exporters, says that if Bill C-282 becomes law, it would be dangerous for future Canadian agri-food exports. The bill would prevent the government from talking about supply management in any future trade negotiations. If it became a problem, would it not affect the agricultural sector, one of the star performers in the Canadian economy, in terms of exports?
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- Nov/29/23 6:05:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a very real pleasure for me, as the NDP agriculture critic and a proud member of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food for almost six years, to be able to rise on this debate.
Let us face it: The House of Commons does not get to review many agriculture committee reports. I am pleased to have this opportunity to participate in a concurrence debate on a report that is quite relevant and important. I am glad we are having this debate today.
The agriculture committee is a unique institution within the House of Commons. I have sat on a number of committees as a substitute before. One thing I have always appreciated about the agriculture committee is that we tend to operate very much on a consensus basis. I think it comes from an understanding that no matter what political party a member sitting around that table is from, we realize that we all represent farmers; that is across the political spectrum.
We come to the table with different viewpoints, and we certainly stick by our principles. However, the realization that we all represent farmers and want our agricultural industry to do well lends itself to a very respectful tone at the committee. It is rare to see reports coming out of our committee with a dissenting opinion or even a supplementary opinion attached. That is one thing I truly do appreciate.
I am very proud to represent a rural riding on Vancouver Island, which has its own long and storied history with agriculture. We have a number of families in the Cowichan Valley that have been farming for five generations. It runs in our blood there. It is certainly not to the scale that we see in the Prairie provinces, but we are very proud of our agricultural history. We are proud of the fact that we are Canada's only Mediterranean coastal climatic zone, which allows us to grow some unique fruits and vegetables that cannot be found anywhere else in Canada.
I am proud to come from that region and to speak up for the farmers in my area. When it comes to this particular report, let us get to the heart of the matter. When we are talking about processing capacity, we are essentially talking about a value-added industry in agriculture in Canada. We are all aware that, whether it is raising animals, getting eggs from chickens or growing vegetables or fruits, that is the primary production end of it. Farmers do quite well selling those. We all love going and picking our fresh produce and so on.
However, there is a whole other industry that is extremely strong in Canada and carries a lot of economic might, and that is our processing industry. We take those primary products of Canadian agriculture and add value to them. Canadians can go to their local supermarket and look at just the sheer abundance of processed food that we have; I am not talking about the food in the centre aisles, I am talking about anything that has had value added to it.
It is important for members to understand that, when we did this report, when we were doing the study into the subject matter, we were right in the middle of COVID-19. The worst had passed, but there was a huge trail of wreckage from that pandemic, on Canada's food industry. We were very much dealing with a lot of people who were still suffering from that crisis and from the trauma that it inflicted on so many who work in this industry.
We tabled that report in the spring of 2021. Unfortunately, in the summer, the Prime Minister decided to call what many thought was an unnecessary federal election. As a result, we never got to have a government response to that report. When we reconvened for this 44th Parliament, one of the first orders of business was to retable that report by unanimous consent so that we could actually get the government response to it. That is why it was report number one of this 44th Parliament.
COVID-19 was brutal. It changed Canadians' eating habits. We were no longer going out to restaurants, because they were closed by public health orders. We were essentially getting our food from supermarkets. The way the industry had to respond to that sudden and dramatic shift was a bit like an earthquake through the industry.
We also know that many of the workers working on farms and working in the food processing factories, the processing plants, were struck down by COVID-19. They tragically succumbed to the disease or became sick and had to be off work for several weeks. Some developed long COVID symptoms and were unable to return to work. That was a huge shock to the system. For an industry that was already suffering from labour shortages to suddenly have its very limited workforce decimated even further was very brutal, and it allowed our committee to take a hard look at the weak links in our supply chains and our ability to feed our local population.
I can remember the word I was using as a theme to guide my questioning as a part of that study was “resiliency”. We did not have a lot of resiliency built into the system. One of the things COVID helped us understand is where the weak points in the supply chains are, and we discovered there were a lot. It is my sincere hope that we can learn our lessons from this report and the many others that other parliamentary committees have done, because we know other shocks are going to come in the future. They may be climate-related or may be from another pandemic. We do not know, but it is a very unstable place we are a living in right now. If we do not learn lessons from our past, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
When it comes to the main theme of processing capacity, I am very proud that in our report we focused recommendations 2, 3 and 4 on the theme of processing capacity. One of the main themes was how to encourage local processing capacity to develop. I will focus my comments on the beef industry, as this area was extremely exposed and suffered terribly from COVID-19.
As many who are familiar with agriculture know, two corporate entities run 85% of the beef processing capacity in Canada. They are JBS and Cargill. They have three main processing plants. In those plants, during the pandemic, workforces were decimated by COVID-19. In some cases, they were completely shut down. In other cases they had one shift out of three working. This caused a massive rolling backlog throughout the entire supply chain.
In the beef industry, there are cow-calf operators, who raise calves out in the fields. There is the National Cattle Feeders Association, which takes them and overwinters them to grow them to a certain weight. Then, of course, there is the processing capacity. However, when our processing plants were knocked out of commission or severely curtailed in their ability to handle a typical workload, suddenly all of our feedlots were jam-packed full because they had nowhere to send all of these cattle. Then if we go back even further, we had a lot of ranchers who could not even get the cows off their lands. Because they were so constrained in where they could get their cattle processed, it exposed some of the very real weak links. That is why we see three recommendations in this report specifically looking at ways the federal government can step up to the plate and develop local processing capacity.
We had all of our eggs in just a few baskets, and when those baskets did not operate anymore, we had no other places to put the eggs, to use a complicated agricultural metaphor. The way to address this in the future is to make sure we have processing capacity built up in our regions. Not only is it good for local economies, because they provide much-needed jobs, but it also, whenever there is going to be a future shock, allows our country to better withstand that.
That is why we see recommendations on how we develop “local processing businesses and regional small-scale abattoirs”, how we can “identify strategic funding opportunities to address regional processing capacity” and also how we can increase funding to funding envelopes like the local food infrastructure fund, which could provide these services for small communities like mine, Duncan, in the Cowichan Valley. These are solid recommendations, and I am glad our committee spent a remarkable amount of time on them.
Another area that I want to highlight in this report is the harmony that is needed between provincial jurisdiction and federal jurisdiction, especially in the context of processing capacity. If a person goes through a provincially mandated processing centre, they can sell within their province, but they cannot sell internationally or across provincial borders. To do that, they would need a federally inspected facility; essentially one that is inspected by the CFIA. However, I think that for an animal processed in British Columbia or Alberta, if British Columbians or Albertans are eating that and it is perfecting safe, it should be good for Canadians across every province. We were encouraging the government to work with the provinces to find ways where we could harmonize the requirements between provincially and federally regulated facilities.
I also want to talk about labour, particularly about skills development. As I said in one of my earlier interventions, there is an incredible disconnect: many people in Canada do not know where our food comes from, how it is grown and how it actually arrives on our dinner plate. First, we need to educate more young people in our urban centres about the hard-working men and women who are out in agriculture doing this hard work in getting the food on our plates, and the incredibly complex system of how it gets there. I also think that for people who are coming out of high school and looking at potential career paths, a lot of them might overlook agriculture, because they have an old-fashioned, stereotypical view that usually involves a red barn and a cute tractor from the 1950s when agriculture is so much more.
Twenty-first century agriculture is an incredible user of technology. We are talking about cutting-edge science in robotics, in communication with the Internet and so on. It is incredible how much innovation is going on in our agricultural sector. With that innovation and technological need, we have to fill those jobs. We need very technically specialized people to come in to operate and fix those machines and be real economic drivers for the industry.
I was glad to see representatives from UFCW come before our committee. It is one of the largest unions in Canada. It represents a lot of the workers in food-processing centres, and it really does want to see the government step up to the plate to work with employers and union organizations so that there is more awareness in Canada's public school system about some of the exciting career paths that exist in agriculture. If we could start that kind of investment now, because the need for labour is so great, I think that is one of the ways we can start heading things off at the pass later on.
The final thing I want to concentrate on when we are talking about food processing in Canada, and this may come as a surprise to some people, is recommendation 16, which is the recommendation that we have a grocery code of conduct, and I will explain to members why that is important.
Much has been made in the news this year about the incredible corporate profiteering that has been going on in certain sectors. If we look at any sector, whether it is telecom, oil and gas, the grocery sector or banking, corporate profits over the last three years have reached unprecedented levels. In my opinion, they are the key driver of inflation that we are seeing today.
This recommendation on establishing a grocery code of conduct is extremely important, because when it comes the relationship between larger grocery chains and the producers and processors who supply them, there has always been a power imbalance. We have five large grocers that control 80% of the market. When they wield that kind of market dominance, they are able to set a lot of the terms and conditions about what products get sold on their shelves. So, for a processor or producer who wants to make money, chances are they have to sell their stuff at Metro or Loblaws, and that is simply the only way they can turn a profit.
There is a power imbalance there. A lot of the time, people who were supplying the foods that people find in the grocery stores found that those processors were getting dinged with hidden fees. There were fees if they supplied too much, if they supplied too little, if they were a day late, etc. There was no rhyme or reason to the fee structure, but they were powerless to fight that. That is why we see this major call for a grocery code of conduct from producers and processors.
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