- Member of Parliament
- Caucus Chair
- NDP
- Cowichan—Malahat—Langford
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $140,733.69
- Government Page
- May/9/24 5:43:24 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my office has received a tremendous amount of correspondence on this particular bill, and I am pleased to be supporting it as we send it off on its journey to the Senate.
I want to ask a question of my hon. colleague. I, too, sit on the agriculture committee and during our deliberations, in testimony from witnesses, briefs that we received and even in general correspondence, there was an allusion to this being the start of a slippery slope.
I hope my colleague could address that concern, because it is my understanding that people can still continue to breed horses in Canada. Horses can still be slaughtered in Canada. This bill is really just focusing on one small niche area. Could he clarify anything in that regard?
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- May/7/24 10:08:48 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as the NDP's agriculture critic, and someone who has enjoyed working with Canada's organic sector, I am pleased to rise today to table e-petition 4909 on behalf of the petitioners.
The petitioners recognize that a transition to a more resilient food system and supply chain is needed to adapt to a changing climate, other foreseen disturbances and geopolitical instability to protect Canada's domestic food supply. They recognize that organic food and farming is a model for success in this transformation with documented benefits for the economy, public health and the environment. They recognize that organic production contributes to biodiversity and soil health, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, resilience to extreme weather events and a fulfillment of key government objectives. They recognize that ambitious policies and investments in organic by other countries have been successful in making organic food more affordable, available, diversified and competitive. They recognize that Canada currently has no strategic policy to develop organic food in farming.
Therefore, the petitioners are calling upon the Government of Canada to give Canadians better and more affordable access to the foods they want by establishing bold policies and programs that would encourage growth in the domestic supply of organic to meet the market opportunity, which has multiple economic, environmental, social and health benefits for Canadians, and to meaningfully recognize and incentivize sustainable, resilient food systems, such as organic, across all departments that relate to Canadian food policy.
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- Feb/13/24 2:14:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there are some incredible challenges facing Canadian farmers: changing markets and price fluctuations in commodities; rising debt levels; and climate change-driven extreme weather events. Despite these challenges, farmers in Canada continue to confront and to overcome adversity while showcasing the innovative ways they are leading us into the 21st century with advances in food production.
Farmers are certainly not fans of the “Ottawa knows best” approach. Instead, as New Democrats, we want to partner with our farmers to help them build their resilience against climate change and confront the corporate greed that is driving up their input costs to unsustainable levels. To help our farmers, we need a government that is ready for action on a sustainable agriculture strategy, a critical input strategy and a mandatory grocery code of conduct.
Today is Canada's Agriculture Day. On behalf of the NDP caucus, I hope we can all take a moment to celebrate both the hard-working Canadian farmers who grow the food we love and the essential contributions of agriculture to our nation's prosperity and well-being.
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Madam Speaker, it is nice to be able to resume where I left off back in December.
Just to refresh the memory of everyone in this place, we were discussing the 10th report of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food.
I have been a proud member of that committee for six years now and I would say that it is the best standing committee out of any committee of the House, because we often arrive at our decisions on a consensus model. We certainly have our differences, but the collegiality stems from the fact that, no matter what political party we represent, we all represent farmers in our respective ridings and have a great deal of respect for the work they do.
This particular study is unusual, if we look at the long list of studies the agriculture committee usually embarks on, in that we are dealing more with a retail issue, which of course is the subject of food price inflation. I am happy to say that this 10th report was the result of a unanimous vote on my motion for a study. The study was also backed up by a unanimous vote in the House of Commons when the NDP used our opposition day to move a motion backing up the committee's work.
Given the brutal food price inflation rates that many Canadians have been experiencing over the last couple of years, the political and public pressure of the moment, I think, really helped focus parliamentarians' efforts on this important issue in making sure we were paying it the attention it deserved, given what many of our constituents were telling us they were suffering through. Therefore, it was nice to see that unanimous vote and the fact that we were able to get into this study.
If we look at the news these days and the experts who research this particularly brutal problem, we already know that a record number of Canadians are having to access food banks. I certainly hear from my constituents in Cowichan—Malahat—Langford that they are having to make those difficult decisions every single week. It has affected not only the quality of food they have been able to buy, but also the quantity of food.
I think that is an enduring shame on our country, given that we pride ourselves on being an agricultural powerhouse. If we look at our standing vis-à-vis other nations around the world, we are a very wealthy country, but what we have seen over the last number of decades is that wealth is increasingly being concentrated in fewer hands, and too many of our fellow citizens are struggling to get by on the basic necessities of life.
I think this is a call to action for all parliamentarians. It is obvious that the policies we have put in place over the last 40 or 50 years and this sort of obscene corporate deference we have seen from successive Liberal and Conservative governments and the neo-Liberal orthodoxy that exists are not serving our fellow citizens right. We need to take a critical look at why that is.
This report contains a number of recommendations. I want to focus on a few of them, particularly on recommendations 11 and 13. Recommendation 11 is something that we heard not only in the course of this study, but also in other studies. It deals with the fact that many people who work in the food value chain, particularly the ones on the other side of the ledger from where the retail grocers come into play, have long been calling for a grocery code of conduct.
Initially, the calls were for a voluntary code. I think there was a tremendous amount of goodwill and a bit of leeway given to the industry to figure this out on its own and to come up with something whereby all players could develop the issue and have faith in it. However, what we have seen recently is that some of the big grocery retailers, namely Loblaws and Walmart, are now indicating they are uncomfortable with the direction the code is taking. In my humble opinion, this code simply cannot work if it is going to exclude major players like Loblaws and Walmart, so we may be arriving at a point at which the government needs to step in and enforce a mandatory code. That way, the rules are clear, concise and transparent, and all players in the food supply value chain can understand what they are and abide by them.
What we are seeing is that there is a complete lack of trust in the grocery retail sector, and for good reason. Grocery retailers have been accused and found guilty of fixing the price of bread. They have engaged in practices that, on the surface, look a lot like collusion. They have often followed each other's leads in setting prices and so on. Recently Loblaws was forced to climb down from its decision to reduce the discounts. There used to be a 50% discount on items that had to be sold that day. Often people are looking for those kinds of bargains. Loblaws was going to reduce that to 30%. That company consistently shows that it is unable to read the room and that it is completely tone deaf to the public environment in which it is operating.
Not only have consumers lost trust in grocery retailers, but on the other side, the suppliers, the food manufacturers and the hard-working men and women who work in primary production and farming have also lost trust, because when they are trying to get their goods put into a grocery market, and let us understand that 80% of Canada's grocery retail market is controlled by just five companies, which is a brutal situation and a totally unfair stranglehold on the market by those five companies, they were often subjected to hidden fees and fines for which they had no explanation.
As such, I am glad to see that recommendation 11 calls for a mandatory and enforceable grocery code of conduct.
I am also happy to see in this report recommendation 13, which asks the Government of Canada to strengthen the Competition Bureau's mandate and its ability to ensure competition in the grocery sector. The first two bullet points were about giving the Competition Bureau more legislative muscle through the Competition Act and making sure the competitive thresholds the Competition Bureau uses to evaluate mergers and acquisitions ensure that competition does not suffer.
I think, based on the hard work of this study and the recommendations of this report, we have actually seen legislative change come to this place, and it was great to see, in particular, Bill C-56 receive a unanimous vote in the House of Commons. It has passed the Senate, and it has now become a statute of Canada by virtue of the Governor General.
There are more measures contained in Bill C-59, and our leader, the member from Burnaby South's private member's bill also includes a number of very important changes. Of course members of Parliament are going to have the opportunity tomorrow, after question period, to vote on that bill, and Canadians will be watching to see which members of Parliament are serious about stepping up to fix that particular problem.
I also want to talk about the supplementary report that I included as the New Democratic member of the committee, because committee reports reflect the majority view of the committee. In the case of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, that is almost always the unanimous view of the committee. I do not think I have ever really seen a dissenting report, but sometimes some recommendations that some members would like to have seen added to the report do not get in there.
I agree absolutely with the main thrust of the report. I think the recommendations were very strong. There were some additional ones, some supplementary ones, that I would have liked to see added. We heard from a number of witnesses who asked our committee to recommend that the government embark on legislative recognition of the right to food, so one of our recommendations would have been:
that the Government of Canada acknowledge its obligation as a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights to respect, protect, and fulfill the human right to food by adopting a framework law that would enshrine this right in Canadian law and require the federal government to legislate binding, specific, and measurable targets toward realizing the policy outcomes it set out in 2019 in “The Food Policy for Canada”.
Again, when so many in our population are going hungry, it is incumbent upon us as legislators and policy makers to really step up to the plate and meet that need in the moment with specific action. I think that, given that this recommendation came from people who are directly involved in the national food bank network and are dealing with this issue every single day, we would do well as policy makers to listen to that on-the-ground expertise and follow through.
I also want to take some time in the final four minutes that I have to really recognize two witnesses who appeared before our committee. They are both economics professors who go against the prevailing orthodoxy of corporate deference that so many economics professors practise. They are, particularly, Professor D.T. Cochrane and Professor Jim Stanford, who I think offer a refreshing and alternative view to the dominant orthodoxy, to look critically at why systems are the way they are.
I just want to quote Dr. Jim Stanford:
Greed is not new. Greed long predates the pandemic, but greed has had a good run in Canada since the pandemic. After-tax profits in Canada during the pandemic or since the pandemic have increased to their highest share of GDP in history. Amidst a social, economic and public health emergency, companies have done better than they ever have.
In response to one of my questions, he went on to say:
At the top of the list, there's no doubt about it, is the oil and gas sector. The excess profits earned there since the pandemic account for about one-quarter of the total mass of profits across the 15 sectors I identified in that work. The increased prices that embody those huge profit margins then trickle through the rest of the supply chain. Food processors have to pay that, so they have higher costs, nominally, but then they add their own higher profit margin on top of that. The same goes for the food retail sector. By the time the consumer gets it, there's been excess profits added at several steps of the whole supply chain. That magnifies the final impact on consumer price inflation.
Two things have been true over the last number of years. Canadians have been suffering through brutal inflation. They have seen the cost of almost everything rise to almost unsustainable levels, in fact, to unsustainable levels for too many of our fellow citizens. That is one truth of which we can see empirical evidence.
The other truth we are dealing with is that since 2019, many corporate sectors have been raking in the cash. Those two facts exist side by side, and we know for a fact that when profits are increasing in many different corporate sectors that Canadians rely on, that money has to come from somewhere, and it has been coming directly from the wallets of the constituents that I represent, the constituents that every MP in this place represents from coast to coast to coast.
I will wrap up my speech there by saying that this was an important report and these are important recommendations. I am glad to have been a member of the committee that produced this report. Of course, I will be voting to concur in it. With that I will conclude my remarks.
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- Dec/14/23 4:12:14 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is indeed a great question from my hon. colleague, whom I have the pleasure of sitting with on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food.
All I can say at second reading stage is that this is a debate and vote on the principle of the bill, and that is one provision of the bill that I have personally identified as problematic. That is something I hope my colleagues from all parties who are sitting on committee will take a close, hard look at, because I do not understand why we need that length of time when this issue is so serious and workers need legislative safeguards to make sure they have an even hand with their employers.
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- Dec/13/23 5:45:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I do enjoy working with my fellow colleague on the agriculture committee. He will be familiar, from the multiple times that we have heard from grocery executives, that they are often talking about how they work in a low-margin industry. I think they present a slightly misleading argument. First of all, it should be pointed out that, in the last three years, their margins have doubled. If we look at it today, yes, when they are operating with a margin that is between 3% and 3.5%, it may look small. However, what people have to realize is that, when their gross revenues continue to climb, even though that margin may seem static, of course their profits will continue to rise as a result.
I just wonder if my colleague can add a bit more to that because I have noticed a bit of defensiveness from the grocery CEOs and not enough attention is being paid to the fact that we do just have five companies controlling 80% of the market. Perhaps the member has some ideas on how we can try to turn that number around so that there is a bit more flexibility and competition there.
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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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- 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 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 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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Madam Speaker, I am extremely proud to be standing in the House on behalf of the fruit and vegetable farmers in my region of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford. My region and the Cowichan region have a long and storied history in agriculture. I would like to remind all members that the Cowichan Valley is in fact Canada's only Mediterranean climatic zone. The Halkomelem language is the language of the Quw'utsun; the Cowichan name is the anglicized version of that, and it roughly translates into the “warm lands”.
We are an agricultural powerhouse in the Cowichan region. I have been proud to call that area my home for over 30 years, and I am proud to be standing in this House in support of Bill C-280. This is a measure that has long been talked about in this very chamber, and we now have an opportunity to actually change the law. As many colleagues have pointed out, this is going to be of no cost but of huge benefit to the people it directly concerns.
I want to thank the people who have spoken before me: the sponsor, the member for York—Simcoe; the member for Kings—Hants; and the member for Berthier—Maskinongé. I have the pleasure of serving with two of those colleagues on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. I have been the proud agricultural critic for the NDP since January 2018, so I know this subject very well. This is my third Parliament on the agriculture committee, and this subject has come up time and time again.
I do not want to delve too much into the details. We know that this issue matters because of the nature of the product we are talking about. Fruits and vegetables only have a tiny bit of shelf life before they have no more value. This is a unique product, and that is why we need to have this kind of a deemed trust.
It is not as though farmers, who are taking all the risk, can recoup losses by taking the product back; it is perishable in nature. We know that farmers deal with high costs. They have high input costs. It is expensive to buy machinery and erect greenhouses. In fact, almost all farmers' money is tied up in infrastructure, whether that is machinery or land. They are, in other words, land rich but cash poor.
This is a business model that is based on the tightest of margins, and anything the Parliament can do to ease up and make the payment process more guaranteed is something we should look at seriously. I am happy to say Bill C-280 would do that.
I would argue that, instead of this being just a Conservative bill, this bill is expressly non-partisan. I know the NDP has been fighting for this, as part of our electoral promise to Canadians, since 2015. Moreover, it is non-partisan by virtue of the fact that the second reading of this bill was unanimous. It sailed through committee. We had three meetings; we heard from a variety of witnesses. However, we decided as a committee to report this bill back to the House without amendments. It has the committee's stamp of approval, and I hope members in this chamber take note of that and seek to give it rapid passage.
This bill has been the subject of many committee studies. I have almost lost count of how many times, at different committees and different parliaments, we have seen a recommendation for this type of measure to be enacted by the House of Commons.
The time is now. I would like to see this bill pass through third reading, get to the Senate and start getting the traction it needs. The Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada, the Canadian Produce Marketing Association and the thousands of people they represent are watching us. They are waiting for action.
I will conclude my remarks by proudly saying that I will be supporting this bill, along with the NDP caucus. We look forward to its speedy passage to the other place; hopefully, it will eventually find its way to the Governor General's desk and receive the royal assent it deserves.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member for York—Simcoe for the bill. It is clearly important that we establish this kind of financial protection for our fruit and vegetable growers.
In the agriculture committee, we learned during a recent study that oil and gas profits had climbed by over 1,000% over the last three years. Would my hon. colleague agree with me that changing the law in this way and offering fresh fruit and vegetable growers this kind of financial protection would help them stand up against the price gouging that oil companies are putting on citizens of Canada?
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- Feb/15/23 2:16:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today is Canada’s Agriculture Day, and I want to take this opportunity to recognize and thank the amazing and hard-working people who produce such an amazing abundance of food and drink in Canada. This is a day to showcase the innovative ways our agriculture and agri-food sectors are confronting the challenges of food production in the 21st century.
Food matters, and its journey from the farm to the factory to the fork is an important topic of discussion. This is especially true when so many Canadians are struggling to feed their families and so many farmers are struggling with debt while corporate grocery chains are making record profits. My NDP colleagues and I are committed to taking on those corporate profits and reinstating fairness for both farmers and consumers.
Let us raise a fork to the food we love and to the people who produce it. As the NDP’s critic for agriculture and food price inflation, and on behalf of the entire NDP caucus, I wish all my colleagues a happy Canada's Agriculture Day.
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- Feb/13/23 3:34:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am proud to present e-petition 4190, which was actively promoted by singer Jann Arden and signed by more than 36,000 people across Canada, making it the third-highest petition of this Parliament. The petition is to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food.
The petitioners recognize that banning the export of live horses for slaughter is in the Minister of Minister of Agriculture's mandate letter from the Prime Minister and in the Liberals' 2021 election campaign commitment. They recognize that horses are flown from Canada to Japan in cramped wooden crates in journeys that can commonly take more than 24 hours. They recognize that horses panic easily, have strong flight or fight instincts and have extremely sensitive hearing. They also recognize that since 2010, the NDP has introduced three private members' bills to ban the export of live horses for slaughter.
Therefore, the petitioners call on the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food to halt the export of live horses for slaughter.
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- Dec/12/22 1:13:52 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-8
Mr. Speaker, I enjoy sitting on the agriculture committee with my colleague.
I think there is general agreement in the House that what is in the bill is important, and there is a desire to get it to committee. However, I would like to ask for the member's and the Bloc Québécois's thoughts on what is missing from the bill and what could be worked on at committee. For example, the bill would not fix the lack of parliamentary oversight. The bill would not fix the clarity issue of why some names are added to the sanctions list and some are not, and for what reasons.
I am wondering if he could offer some thoughts on those two key missing pieces that could have been in the bill and how that might inform committee work at the next stage.
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Madam Speaker, I offer my congratulations to the member for Montcalm for bringing forward this bill for us to consider. I appreciate having this bill because it allows me to talk about my riding and the long, storied and very rich agriculture history of the Cowichan Valley. We have multi-generational farms there.
For Cowichan tribes, in the Hul'q'umi'num language, Cowichan means the warm land. We are blessed with a beautiful little microclimate in the Cowichan Valley. We get copious amounts of rain in the winter, but we are absolutely blasted by the sun in the summer. It allows for a very unique growing climate where there is a very strong connection between local farmers and the population that they grow food for.
As to supply management, I am very lucky to have a number of dairy farms in the Cowichan Valley and a number of egg farms. In my seven years as a member of Parliament representing that amazing riding, I would be remiss if I did not point out how welcoming supply-managed farmers there have always been to me. They have always extended the courtesy of an invitation so that I can go and tour their farms to see how modern they are, how efficient they are and how the supply management system is able to give them a good income and also allow them to plan for the future.
That is a real strength of the system. It is a system that rests on three key pillars. It was brought in because a lot of farmers back in the 1970s and before were suffering through very wild price fluctuations, especially on commodities. It was really hard to try to plan for the future. Many farms experience that to this day. If one does not know what one's income is going to be in the year or years ahead, it makes it that much harder to do financial planning around the farm, and that is critical.
If one wants to stay competitive and have an edge, investment in technology and machinery is absolutely critical. Supply management has always allowed farmers to do that. When one goes to some of the dairy farms around the Cowichan Valley, one can see that they are actually serviced by remarkable robotics. It is quite incredible to see the level of technology on display.
Those three pillars are production control, pricing mechanisms and import control. Like a three-legged stool, if one were to weaken one of those pillars, the whole system would be at risk. It needs all three to work in tandem, in harmony, and to also be strong.
Under our system, we have not had so much trouble with production control, which is issued through quotas, or on the pricing part. The part that has always been targeted by governments of a variety of stripes is import control. The way we do this is through tariff rate quotas. We do allow imports of certain dairy products such as eggs and poultry. They can come in at a certain rate, but once they go over the maximum amount that is allowed, a huge tariff is placed on them. That is to protect our homegrown system.
I am sure if one were to ask any Canadian, their preference would be to always have locally sourced food. I think it is a point of pride that we have developed a system where our farmers can not only thrive but also produce that good local food for their local communities.
That brings me to why Bill C-282 is before us. I can understand why this bill was brought forward. I was here in the 42nd Parliament. I remember hearing the news of how the TPP had been negotiated, the CETA and also, later on, CUSMA. Each one of those agreements started carving out more of our supply-managed market and allowing more foreign imports to come into Canada. That was despite repeated pleas from the industry to the Liberals to leave their sector alone. Now we have a bill that is going to specifically address that and curtail the ability of a foreign affairs minister to negatively impact it.
I have been very curious to see where the Conservatives will land on this bill because, in the previous Parliament, when Bill C-216 was brought before this House, I believe the Conservative caucus was split. About a third of them supported it and two-thirds were against.
I can understand the awkwardness for the Conservative Party because at one time it almost had mad Max as a leader, the famous man from Beauce. He was almost the leader of the Conservative Party. It went down to, I think, the 13th ballot. Maxime has always been very vocal in his opposition to supply management, which is a very curious thing given the region he comes from, and it may explain why he is no longer here as a member of Parliament. It will be interesting to see, when this bill comes to second reading vote, what the blue team will be able to do on this.
I will read out a few facts and figures. Last year, Canada had over 9,000 dairy farms. It is an industry that contributes 221,000 jobs and nearly $20 billion to Canada's GDP. We have over 5,200 poultry and egg farms. One statistic that has always stood out for me is that Canada, with a population of around 36 million people, has over 1,000 egg farms. In the United States, which has 10 times the population, there are just over 100. This shows the differences in the systems.
We have a system that has allowed 1,000 egg farms to thrive on a population that is a tenth the size of our southern neighbour. We know the state of Wisconsin produces more milk than our entire country. Farmers there, unfortunately, have suffered negatively from wild price fluctuations. I know, from talking to farmers, that many of our southern neighbours do look north in envy of the system we have in place here.
Bill C-216 was successfully referred to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade and reported back to the House. Unfortunately, in 2021, we had to deal with an unnecessary election, which had the effect of killing the bill outright. I hope we have enough runway for this bill to make a longer push this time. I am certainly going to be giving my support for it to be heading to committee, just as I proudly did last time.
If we look at the mechanics of this bill, we need to take a look at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Act. Section 10 basically spells out all of the functions, duties and powers the minister of foreign affairs has. For example, the ability to conduct diplomatic and consular relations on behalf of our country and foster the expansion of Canada's international trade and commerce. These are a few examples of what the powers and duties are, as they currently exist in the act.
What Bill C-282 seeks to do is to basically prevent the foreign affairs minister from making any kind of a commitment by international treaty or agreement that would have any effect of increasing the tariff rate quota, so basically allowing more foreign imports to come in, and of course reducing the tariff rate on that particular quota that is coming in.
Again, it is born out of the experience of dealing with Liberals over the last seven years, where they repeatedly stood up in the House and said that they were the strong defenders of supply management, but every single trade deal that came through the House and was enacted was always slicing a bit more of the pie away. I understand why this bill is before us.
I am always happy to have the opportunity to talk about farmers, not only those across this great country but also those in my riding, and I am always happy to stand here as a strong defender of supply management, as all New Democrats always have been. I look forward to this bill getting another turn at committee. I congratulate the member for Montcalm for bringing it forward.
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Madam Speaker, it is indeed a great honour to rise today to speak to the government's bill, Bill C-32, which is an act to implement some of the measures announced in the fall economic statement just a few weeks ago before we were all home for the week of Remembrance Day in our respective ridings.
Many of my colleague from all parties have spoken about this, but this comes at a time of great struggle for constituents in Cowichan—Malahat—Langford. Overwhelmingly, the correspondence I get in my office regards the high cost of living and the fact that their wages are not keeping up.
We know that the increase in food prices is forcing families to make very difficult decisions at the grocery store. For that reason I am very glad to have won the unanimous support of the agriculture committee to commence a study into that and to have also had a unanimous vote here in the House of Commons acknowledging that this is a very real problem and supporting our committee's work in the weeks ahead. I, for one, am looking forward to hearing representatives of large grocery stores speak to what their companies are prepared to do to address this issue.
There is, of course, the high cost of fuel. The war in Ukraine has sent shockwaves through the energy world. We know this because Russia is a major exporter of oil and gas. Through their geopolitical manoeuvring and attempts to punish countries that are supporting the Ukrainian people in their fight for freedom and in their fight to halt Russian aggression, we have a situation where fuel prices for all sorts of fuels have spiked dramatically.
We have a very real problem of private companies involved in those industries engaging in what I would, frankly, call war profiteering. They are taking advantage of geopolitical tensions to rake in billions of dollars of profit, at a rate that we have never seen in this country before.
As for our health care system, and I think that this is the big sleeper issue in Canada that is only just now starting to get the attention it deserves, it has gotten so bad in my riding that, while it falls largely under provincial jurisdiction, constituents are now coming to me as a federal member of Parliament and pleading with me to do something.
We need to have a nationally focused amount of attention on this crisis. We need to have a Canada where people can be assured that they can have access to primary care when and where they need it. We need to find innovative solutions to help this crisis and address it. I am disappointed that the recent meeting between provincial ministers and the federal minister has yet to result in anything concrete to address the crisis.
Of course, while Canadians are struggling, they see a situation in which it was reported that we collected $31 billion less in corporate taxes than we should have last year. At a time when Canadians are struggling with costs to make their own family budgets work and are seeing more and more of the burden falling on their shoulders, they see Canada's largest and most profitable corporations getting away with it, through innovative tax schemes and hiding their wealth offshore to escape the burden of paying their fair share in this country. That is an issue that we absolutely must pay attention to.
In response to these big issues, my friends in the Conservative Party have focused a lot of their attention on the carbon tax. Yesterday, at the agriculture committee, I agreed with my Conservative colleagues in taking a small step to address some of the challenges that our agricultural producers are facing. We will be reporting Bill C-234 back to the House.
However, on the larger issue, I think that what is ignored by my Conservative friends is the fact that the federal carbon tax does not apply in all provinces. What they are advocating for will have no effect on residents in my province of B.C. because we, as a province, have chosen not to have an Ottawa-knows-best approach on pricing pollution.
We, as a province, have preferred to retain autonomy, so our policy is determined in the B.C. legislature in Victoria under the good and sound guidance of the B.C. NDP government. It allows our province to basically take that revenue and distribute it in ways that it sees fit because we, as a province, do not think that Ottawa should have control over that policy, so we, as a province, have decided to retain autonomy.
The Conservatives' fixation on the carbon tax does not take into account the fact that the inflationary pressures we see in the world are the result of things that are largely beyond the control of Canada as a country. In the United Kingdom, the Labour opposition is blaming a Conservative government for the same thing Conservatives in Canada are blaming a Liberal government for. This is a problem we see in many of the G7 countries. It is not limited to one side of the political spectrum or the other.
Again, if one is going to talk about inflationary pressures and completely ignore the massive profits oil and gas companies are making, one is doing a disservice to one's constituents. One is not addressing the elephant in the room here, which is that corporations are using inflation to hide and to pad the massive profits they are making. We need to have a serious conversation about that.
If we truly want to help Canadians with the unexpected costs that come with heating their homes and fuelling their vehicles, we need to develop policies to get them off fossil fuels. It has always been a volatile energy source. If we go back to the 1970s when OPEC, as a cartel, decided to cut production, we see what that did to North America. It has always been volatile, and as long as we remain dependent on it as an energy source, no matter what the tax policy is, we are going to suffer from that volatility. If we want to truly help Canadians, we need to encourage things such as home retrofits, and encourage programs that get them on different sources of energy.
In the meantime, if we want a policy that is effectively going to help Canadians no matter what province they live in, why do we not go with the NDP policy of removing the GST on home heating fuels? That, in fact, would benefit residents in British Columbia, unlike singly focusing on a federal carbon tax.
When I look at Bill C-32, there are certainly a few good things. I appreciate that the Liberals are starting to see things such as a Canada recovery dividend are necessary. They are limiting it to the large financial institutions. We would like to see such a model be not only not temporary but also extended to oil and gas companies and to the big box stores. This is about putting fairness into the system because right now the free market, the so-called free market, is largely failing Canadians. The free market is trying its best, but the wages are not keeping up with rising costs.
One thing members have not yet mentioned either is that there is a critical mineral exploration tax credit in Bill C-32. Canada has a very troubled history with mining, and any projects that go forward need to absolutely be done in conjunction and in consultation with first nations. If we are truly going to transform our economy into the renewable energy powerhouse it should be, those critical minerals that Canada has an abundance of are going to be key to developing that kind of technology.
What I have often found with the Liberals over my seven years of being in this place is that there are a lot of good ideas but they are not fully fleshed out. They do not go as far as they could have potentially gone to make the full impact we wish they would have done.
There is a lot in Bill C-32 for the committee to consider, and I hope it takes a lot of feedback from a wide variety of witnesses. There are measures here that are building on what we, as new Democrats, have been able to force the government to do, such as doubling the GST credit, providing an interim benefit for dental care and making sure there is help for renters.
I am proud that a caucus with less than 10% of the seats in the House of Commons has been able to achieve these things. This is what I came to Ottawa to do. I came to deliver for my constituents and bring tangible results that make a difference in their lives. Through this and other measures, I will continue to do that, to make sure they are getting the full benefits and assistance they need to weather these tough times so they can come out even more prosperous on the other end.
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- Oct/6/22 10:19:01 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for Kings—Hants and all colleagues on the agriculture committee for supporting my motion yesterday. It is going to be a very important inquiry to get the answers Canadians deserve.
I am trying to approach this issue from the perspective of one of my constituents. Two things are true. Prices on food items that people need to survive are going up faster than the general rate of inflation. That is the first truth. The second truth is that the large corporations that have cornered the grocery market are making profits. These two things exist at the same time, and it is about time that parliamentarians took this issue seriously, started an inquiry, got answers and met the challenge with effective policy that is going to tackle inequality in this country.
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- Oct/6/22 10:08:08 a.m.
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moved:
That, given that,
(i) big grocery stores have made massive profits in the past year, not long after several were investigated for bread price-fixing,
(ii) workers’ wages and the prices paid to producers in the agricultural sector are not keeping up with those corporate profits, or with inflation,
(iii) Canadian families are struggling with the rising costs of essential purchases,
the House call on the government to recognize that corporate greed is a significant driver of inflation, and to take further action to support families during this cost-of-living crisis, including:
(a) forcing CEOs and big corporations to pay what they owe, by closing the loopholes that have allowed them to avoid $30 billion in taxes in 2021 alone, resulting in a corporate tax rate that is effectively lower now than when this government was elected;
(b) launching an affordable and fair food strategy which tackles corporate greed in the grocery sector including by asking the Competition Bureau to launch an investigation of grocery chain profits, increasing penalties for price-fixing and strengthening competition laws to prohibit companies from abusing their dominant positions in a market to exploit purchasers or agricultural producers; and
(c) supporting the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food in investigating high food prices and the role of “greedflation”, including inviting grocery CEOs before the committee.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I wish to notify the House that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie.
Today is a good day in the House of Commons because we as New Democrats are forcing parliamentarians to deal with the issues that are concerning Canadians. The motion that we as a party are bringing forward for debate today is specifically calling out the massive corporate profits that are occurring in so many sectors, often at the expense of what ordinary Canadians are able to afford.
Canadians see this week in and week out. They see it when they fill up their vehicles with fuel and they see it when they are at the grocery stores. It is reaching a breaking point for many families. It is forcing too many families to make difficult decisions that no family in a country as wealthy as Canada should have to make. These are decisions on whether their family budgets can afford to pay the rent or mortgage, decisions on whether we can get as much fresh produce for our young children as we used to get and decisions on whether we should only fill up the car with half a tank this week because we need to save money for next week.
This is the reality for too many families, and not only in my riding of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, but across British Columbia and across Canada, from coast to coast to coast. For far too long, these Canadians have been looking at the profits that have been made, especially over this year. Some oil and gas companies are making over 100% more compared with what they were making just a few years ago. I hear a lot of talk in this place about taxes, but not enough talk is happening about the revenue we are losing, the revenue that would be there to support Canadians who are in dire need of it.
It is important that Canadians see that their members of Parliament are addressing their concerns. It is important that they see the people they have sent to this place debating this issue with sincerity and making policies that are going to address it. That is why I am such a proud member of the New Democratic caucus. We have been the only party in this place to call out massive corporate profits and champion an excess profits tax. We will continue to champion that until policy-makers see the light in this place and respond with effective policy.
I want to segue to the remarkable success that Canadians enjoyed yesterday at the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. I want to thank my colleagues from that committee who agreed to my motion to study the excess profits in the grocery sector in particular.
I want to centre particularly on food because food is the great equalizer in our society. No one can live without food. Everybody needs to eat, but some in our society are able to eat without worry. Others have to make difficult choices. When it comes to our nation's children, we know that a healthy and balanced diet is incredibly important not only for their growth, but for their ability to achieve a good education. In a country as wealthy as Canada, far too many children are suffering.
Juxtapose that reality with the fact that the three largest grocery chains in Canada have been raking in the money. We can look at Empire's net profits, which are up by 27.8% in two years. Loblaws profits are up by 17.2% compared with those of last year, and Metro's are up by 7.8%. I know that the CEO of Sobeys has recently been in the news complaining about us taking up an examination of their profits and shining a spotlight on this issue, but if I am in the bad books of a corporate CEO, I think I am doing my job properly in this place.
Those profits are publicly available, but I also want to identify the fact that calls are coming from inside the house. Last week, my office received an email from an employee. I am going to keep him anonymous. I am not going to mention who he works for, because he is afraid of reprisals, but I will quote him. He said:
I have noticed a worrying trend over the last year of large quantities of retail price increases being sent down on a weekly basis.... However, cost increases on these items don't match the increases of retail prices that are sent down....
I have noticed a trend where retail prices consumers must pay for products will increase, and cost increases will come down months after the fact, if at all. Based on what I know of our systems at [the] store level this means that the profit margins on saleable goods will increase for the company until a related cost increase brings it back down. Thus prices consumers must pay are overinflated until costs align with the retail change....
...That is why I believe that a federal probe into grocery store price increases should be supported in our parliament.
I would say to that employee that the New Democrats have heard their call. We are taking action and we are leading the initiative in this Parliament, not only at committee but in the House of Commons, to address this person's concerns and the concerns Canadian consumers have.
We are not going to stop there. We are also going to go after oil and gas. It is one thing to talk about the carbon price, a price on pollution, but if the government is going to completely ignore the massive profits that oil and gas companies are making off the backs of working Canadians, I think it needs to do some reflection on where its policies stand.
We are at a point where the CEO of Shell is being more progressive than the Liberals and calling out something the Conservatives will not even touch. I do not know what kind of a topsy-turvy world we live in when we have to depend on a CEO to be more progressive than our own government, but it is shameful.
In British Columbia, my constituents know the price of gas. They see it all the time, but they can also match that up with what large oil and gas companies are raking in right now. We need to follow the lead of other countries like the U.K. We need to implement an excess profits tax. That natural resource is owned by Canadians. Private companies have the privilege of bringing it out of the ground and selling it back to us, but it is a resource that is owned by Canadians. It is high time we put in place policies to make sure we are getting the full value out of it.
We also heard earlier this week that last year alone we did not collect $30 billion in corporate taxes. That is the difference between what corporations actually paid and what they should have paid. We are having this talk about the structural deficits we see in our housing and the structural deficits in supports for Canadians who are going through hard times, and then we look at what $30 billion in one year alone could have paid for: How many doctors could we have hired? How many school food programs could we have implemented? How many workers could we have retrained with that money to prepare them for the 21st-century economy?
That is the fundamental question before us. It is a question of what we want to be as a country. Do we really want to pursue well-funded programs that help lift everybody up, not just those at the top? I know where I stand on this matter, and I hope colleagues and other parties will do some genuine reflection on where they stand as well.
We are in a place where there has been extreme inaction from both the Liberals and Conservatives. If we were to follow Conservative tax policy, the Margaret Thatcher cosplay they are so often engaging in, we need only look to the United Kingdom as to what Conservative policy would result in. The Conservative prime minister there has single-handedly caused the U.K. economy to go into an absolute economic free fall through tax policies that rightly belong in the 1980s and have no place in the 21st-century economy, especially when we are trying to address massive inequality.
I know I am in my last minute of this speech, but I want to assure my constituents in Cowichan—Malahat—Langford and people in British Columbia and people right across this great country that, for as long as I have the privilege of standing in this place, I will never let them down. I will continue to aggressively pursue these progressive policies. I will do that until we actually see the fundamental change we need to see.
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- May/17/22 5:20:37 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, on the contrary, as the NDP's agriculture critic, I am very proud to say that the technology already exists. Canada's farmers are leading the way. If the federal government wants to make a real difference, it will help farmers in rural communities make that transition to things like regenerative agriculture, paying attention to soil science and making sure that soil carbon sequestration is a centrepiece. I believe that our farmers have an important role to play in this whole conversation. They want to be placed on that pedestal as climate leaders. They are already doing this, but they need a partner in Ottawa to do it, not investments in an unproven technology.
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