44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 29, 2023 02:00PM
- Nov/29/23 3:05:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, these are the questions that producers and families right across the country are asking. They are facing an uncertain future with increased climate change and with increased challenges from global supply chains, including those related to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, which the Conservatives seem to be on the wrong side of.
We are going to continue to work with farmers and with agricultural producers across the country to invest and innovate while being able to continue to feed Canadians for decades to come, despite a changing climate.
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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 5:28:02 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, during the worldwide pandemic, the Government of Canada literally supported small businesses in virtually every sector to ensure their survival during a very difficult time. How we ensure that we can minimize the amount of hurt to small businesses is an ongoing issue.
To pick up on what the member first spoke about in regard to how important the diversification of our agricultural community is, it is really important to the government. That is one of the reasons why we invest so much in our regional development agencies, knowing full well that they are in a great position to identify where we can expand and make sure diversification takes place. More processing is really important. I like to think of the pea processing facility just north of Portage Avenue as a good example of the diversification taking place. I think there are so many other examples that one could give, but the bottom line is that the government, virtually from day one, in 2015, until the present day with the fall economic statement, is there to support our farmers and our agricultural communities.
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Madam Speaker, absolutely. In fact, that is one of the recommendations that I did not have time to talk about. The report recommended that in the agri‑food sector, the cap for foreign workers increase from 10% to 20%. I even proposed 30%, but the majority wanted 20%, so we put 20%. Then the government did it. That is one of the things in the 18 recommendations that was done. I say bravo, but it is likely not enough because we have to be smart and provide access to labour.
My colleague is also absolutely right about international trade. A big part of our agricultural production is geared toward international trade. We need to support and develop this aspect. On the other hand, let us not forget that we have other farms that are not export-oriented. I am talking about supply-managed farms. Bill C‑282, which is currently in the Senate, received strong majority support in the House. It should be passed quickly.
When I talk about having respect for our farmers and the way they work, it is because these people are essential and are the bedrock of our rural regions. This bill needs to be passed as soon as possible.
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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 6:00:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to pick up on something intriguing my colleague said. He said that Ottawa, which collects half of our taxes, could reinvest a portion of that money in stimulating regional agricultural development. For example, it could invest in abattoirs, which are few and far between right now. The rules say that abattoirs cannot get more that 50% in public money because they are not money-makers in the regions, supposedly.
At the same time, if I understand my colleague from Berthier-Maskinongé's brilliant reasoning correctly, he is saying that, if this infrastructure were to be built, it would be much like an investment in an aqueduct or other public spending of that nature in that it would stimulate an entire regional ecosystem. It would stimulate the vitality of our towns and the livelihood of our corner stores because people would live in the area. The federal government could invest money—our money—in our abattoirs, in our regions, instead of spending money to transport our livestock 800 kilometres away to be slaughtered. That impacts the quality of the meat, the environment and animal health. We could do it close to home instead.
I would really like to hear my colleague's thoughts 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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