Hon. Pat Duncan: Honourable senators, I am grateful to join you today from — and to live and work on — the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council.

[Translation]

Esteemed colleagues, I rise today to speak to Bill S-227, An Act to establish Food Day in Canada.

[English]

This bill seeks to establish the Saturday of the August long weekend as food day in Canada. As with other speakers, I am eager to celebrate and share the discussion of Canadian locally grown, harvested, prepared and shared food.

A Canadian meal may include seafood, such as lobster from New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, cod from the recreational fisher in Newfoundland and Labrador, shrimp and mussels from Nunavut and salmon from the East and West Coasts.

If seafood with omega vitamins is not your thing, there is nothing quite like Alberta beef or caribou harvested by the Gwitch’in in the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

The main course should include P.E.I. potatoes and other vegetables such as asparagus, Brussels sprouts and peas from Manitoba; a fresh salad with tomatoes and greens from Ontario; cucumbers from Alberta; and carrots from the Yukon. Every meal should have bread made with Canadian wheat from Saskatchewan and a slice of cheese from Quebec — perhaps with butter from a dairy farm in B.C. or Ontario.

The sweet dessert will have started with sugar from beets once grown and processed in Manitoba, now perhaps from Alberta, flour milled in the Yukon and eggs from the Yukon. The sweet dessert might be berry-focused, with cranberries from the Fraser Valley in B.C., Saskatoon berries from Saskatchewan, blueberries from Nova Scotia and haskap berries from the Yukon. Perhaps an apple is more to your liking, a Honeycrisp from Nova Scotia or a McIntosh from Ontario, candied with maple syrup from Quebec.

As many would agree, fine foods are best consumed with an appropriate beverage, such as a glass of Canadian wine from Niagara or B.C., or perhaps a locally brewed beer. According to the Yukon News’s local guide to spring in the Yukon, with five breweries in Whitehorse, we are the Canadian jurisdiction with the most breweries per capita. Or if an after-dinner single-malt whisky is more to your liking, Yukon Brewing has won the best Canadian single malt of the year at the World Whiskies Awards.

That’s just a wee sample, and not exhaustive, of a truly Canadian menu. Yes, you can eat your way from coast to coast to coast.

To celebrate Canadian food that is traditionally harvested on the land in the traditional way, or grown and harvested in the agricultural community, with this bill we are turning our attention to celebrating Canadian food and agriculture, and celebrating those who grow and bring to market those exceptional items that grace our tables.

I would like to thank Senator Black for his tireless efforts to celebrate Canadian farmers and all that agriculture means to our country. We are not allowed props in the chamber to emphasize our point or to express thanks, but I will share that I have a small gift for Senator Black in my office in Ottawa.

Honourable senators will have noted, as I described the meal, that I mentioned Yukon-grown carrots and haskap berries, eggs from the Yukon and flour milled in the Yukon. There is a bag of flour in my office from the Hinterland Flour Mill in the Yukon for you, Senator Black. I thank you for your tireless representation of Canadian agriculture.

And thank you, Senator Quinn, for your recent gift of dulse.

Allow me to grow your knowledge of agriculture in the Yukon. Almost three years ago, the Sunnyside Farm in the Ibex Valley near Whitehorse changed their focus to become a year-round commercial dairy farm. Setting up a dairy farm in the Yukon was recently described by Yukon’s Minister of Agriculture as an epic adventure, with the owners sourcing Jersey cows from Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia, and their farm equipment from Ontario, Romania, the Netherlands and Ukraine. Sunnyside Farm has now received a licence to sell commercially and locally produced whole milk that can be purchased at the grocery store near my home in Whitehorse.

The dairy farm is new; agriculture in the Yukon is not.

Honourable senators, in 1997, thanks in part to the efforts of the Yukon Anti-Poverty Coalition and the Downtown Urban Gardeners Society, a non-profit society known as DUGS, was formed. Last year, the Whitehorse community garden donated almost 1,000 pounds of locally grown vegetables to the Golden Age Society, an organization dedicated to seniors.

The Downtown Urban Gardeners Society and the dairy farm are innovations within my children’s lifetimes. I grew up in the Yukon, when most of our food arrived by truck from Edmonton. Despite the stories of Sunnyside Farms, Little Red Hen eggs, Ibex Valley farm eggs and DUGS today, if there is a problem on the Alaska Highway, there will still be a run on milk in the grocery store. Supply-chain issues are not a new story in the North.

There are pictures and stories of vegetables grown in Dawson City with the long summer daylight from the early days of government in the territory.

In an online article, “Agriculture Research Stations” from The Canadian Encyclopedia, author Stephen Morgan Jones reports:

Two experimental stations were opened in YT at Mile 1019, Alaska Highway (1945) and in NWT at Fort Simpson (1947) . . .

Those are experimental farms.

Honourable senators, I will share with you the story of one of the farmers who operated a Yukon experimental farm. In January 1965, a sense of adventure brought James Roderick Myles Tait, better known as Rod, and his family to the Yukon where he became the foreman at the Pine Creek Experimental Farm, five kilometres west of Haines Junction.

Returning to Stephen Morgan Jones’s article I referenced earlier, he wrote about the Yukon and Northwest Territories stations:

. . . both stations subsequently closed due [to] the lack of agricultural potential in the regions that they served.

It was not the first time that Ottawa made a decision that didn’t quite sit well with Yukoners.

As was noted during the tribute to Rod Tait when he passed in 2007:

Unfortunately, Ottawa’s decision makers did not share Rod’s love of farming and the boundless confidence that it could be done successfully and profitably north of 60. After six years at the farm, funds were slashed, leaving only Rod and one loyal helper out of a once-proud number of 30 employees.

Further funding cuts forced Rod into interim employment with Parks Canada before he found full-time work at the Haines Junction weigh scale, while double-shifting in the midnight sun on his own farm, his true vocation and passion.

With cattle purchased from the defunct experimental farm, a land lease and a six-acre market garden application, Rod successfully pursued his dream of growing the finest beef, oats, hay and vegetables in the region.

He leaves a legacy of more than 200 titled acres of farmland, more cleared land, and the reputation of growing the best and most exotic potatoes in the north. His expertise was formally recognized with the presentation of the Yukon Farmer of the Year award in 2000.

The area where Rod farmed and his family lives is at the base of Kluane National Park in the Yukon.

Whether the Yukon Gold potatoes were Rod’s innovation or not, I will always credit, in part, the success of Yukon agriculture to Rod Tait and farmers like him throughout our country.

May I suggest, colleagues, that we best honour our farmers when we lovingly prepare and honour their products? I am delighted to share with you that “Yukon-grown food products proudly sold here” is displayed in grocery stores in the Yukon. Inside on the shelves, I can purchase potatoes, eggs, cabbage, beets, carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes. There are also locally produced kale chips and mixed spices, celebrated in the recent The Globe and Mail Christmas gift list.

The flight kitchen of Air North, the Yukon’s airline, demonstrated their resilience during the pandemic, offering bison, shepherd’s pie and other dishes ready for your freezer and to go on your plate. Those meals and other homemade-ready meals from Home Sweet Home business, using local ingredients in the Yukon, are also available in the store.

We also celebrate the farmers’ market. I note that the very first Yukon farmers’ market will be held this evening on the shores of the Yukon River in downtown Whitehorse.

Honourable senators, this bill asks us to celebrate all Canadian farmers, and to purchase and consume their products all year, particularly on the Saturday of the August long weekend.

Therein, Senator Black and those who have supported this bill, lies my difficulty. The Yukon does not celebrate the August long weekend the way you do. Our August long weekend is the third Monday in August, the date closest to Discovery Day — the date gold was discovered in the Klondike. While Yukon Gold potatoes might be the gold we eat, changing the Discovery Day holiday would encounter the same sort of difficulty that Prime Minister Chrétien encountered when he wanted to rename Mount Logan in Kluane National Park, Canada’s highest peak. It’s not a winning proposition in the territory.

That said, trying to choose a date appropriate for all of Canada and to get all regions of Canada to agree upon a date is not an easy proposition. Celebrating Canadian farmers and Canadian food is a winning proposition, and I wholeheartedly support the bill’s intent.

Respectfully, Senator Black, perhaps the other place will make an amendment to the bill to celebrate Canada food day as the first Saturday in August, rather than reference a long weekend that only part of the country celebrates.

However and when it occurs, I look forward to the support from and this bill’s return from the other place. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss the Yukon with all of you once again, and thank you for this chance to discuss the importance of agriculture and the availability and quality of sustainable food sources in the Yukon and throughout Canada and, notably, to share the story of agriculture in the Yukon and to express my support and a slight reservation with Bill S-227.

Mahsi’cho, gùnáłchîsh, thank you, colleagues.