Agriculture committee  I'm not sure how you would even do a study to come up with an exact number, because you're looking at what people haven't bought. It's pretty hard. It is fair to say that this is what my 13-year-old daughter would call a “no-brainer”, that if people think they're buying something from Canada and are actually buying something from somewhere else, a Canadian farmer has lost out.

Agriculture committee  I certainly can speak to another number of anecdotes of people who have faced barriers trying to value-add here in this country, and beyond just labelling. But I want to come back to this issue of whether it's mandatory. We have a certain set of laws in this country that we follow, that we put in place for very good reasons, around labour standards, environmental standards, and health standards.

Agriculture committee  Mrs. Skelton, you have the floor.

Agriculture committee  If I could just follow up on what Mr. Smith had to say, the farmer members of the NFU have looked at this option. There are basically two options that have to be followed. One is that if it's a product that's coming into this country and being sold on our shelves, it should be meeting our labour standards, our environmental standards, our food safety standards, and so on.

Agriculture committee  I think you're on the right track, Mr. Steckle. The problem with “Product of Canada” is it's now become so discredited that it's difficult for a lot of consumers--even with a really strong promotional aspect--to get their minds back around the fact. Now people are so skeptical about that term.

Agriculture committee  The National Farmers Union and our members want to thank you for the opportunity to be here with the committee, for examining this issue, and for allowing us to express our concerns and recommendations. NFU has been working on these labelling issues for a very long time, and it's nice to see that we may be making some progress on this issue.

Agriculture committee  I guess I look at NISA more from a younger perspective, and NISA, in a way, feeds the full. You have to have something to be able to put in it to begin with, and it doesn't help the young end of the farm generation. So I'm concerned that if we move that way.... To begin at the beginning, which is where I started, CAIS and a lot of these programs are a bureaucratic response to a market problem, and we have to deal with the market problem.

Agriculture committee  Yes, I do.

Agriculture committee  I don't know that I have the answer to what you should do, but part of the problem is that if you continue with a margin-based program, which is what CAIS is, in a declining income situation, the margin is always smaller. So every year, the next year is worse. And when you get into whole farm, and you look at a situation like our operation, which is incredibly diversified over a number of commodities, we never qualify.

Agriculture committee  Income is clearly a key, but we also have to look at the big picture. We have a demographic crisis looming in primary food production. One of the major impacts is just the cost of starting to farm. Even if you inherit the farm, you're probably looking at half a million dollars in start-up.

Agriculture committee  If you look at the U.S. Farm Bill, that is a national policy around food and around agriculture and around rural communities, for good or ill. There are lots of problems with the U.S. Farm Bill, but it's actually a policy. We don't have a policy around these issues in Canada, and I think that's where we see some of these debates over the Wheat Board, for example.

Agriculture committee  It is not just zones during BSE. Our herd goes back three generations in our family and has always been either forage or farm-fed grain. Nobody asked me if they'd pay me a little bit more because of that during the BSE crisis. So there are a lot of issues. We are going to have to get serious about the fact that there is another disaster coming.

Agriculture committee  Personally, and on behalf of the National Farmers Union, I thank you for the opportunity to be here. Before I start I want to make a request of all of you. Actually, it's probably more of a plea. I was a participant at the first round, on science and innovation, and I've gone public about this.