Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 25 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Tuesday, December 4, 2001
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 6:15 p.m. to examine international trade in agricultural and agri-food products, and short-term and long-term measures for the health of the agricultural and the agri-food industry in all regions of Canada.
Senator Jack Wiebe (Deputy Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Deputy Chairman: We will get the meeting under way. I must apologize to our witnesses that we are a bit late tonight.
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry is charged to examine international trade in agriculture and agri-food products, and short-term and long term measures for the health of the agricultural and agri-food industry in all regions of Canada.
Two witnesses who will appear before us tonight. We have the Canadian Farm Women's Network and Statistics Canada. It is my understanding that we have the President of the Canadian Farm Women's Network with us this evening.
Ms Brown, you may begin with your presentation. After that I am sure many senators will have questions they would like to ask.
Ms Judy Brown, Canadian Farm Women's Network: Good evening, honourable senators, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Judy Brown. I am the President of the Ontario Farm Women's Network. We are affiliated with the Canadian Farm Women's Network.
I sincerely wish to thank the esteemed Senate committee for extending to our organization the opportunity to present our views and opinions on the status of rural communities in Canada. I also want to thank Mr. Charbonneau, the Clerk of this committee, for his encouragement and support in the preparation of this presentation.
The rural communities of Canada are currently affected by federal, provincial, municipal and corporate regulations that are beyond the control of the average Canadian farmer. Farming has changed and progressed into a rural industry representing a dynamic economic influence. The days of the nostalgic trips to your grandparent's farm have largely disappeared and have been replaced with modern and technological advances making this rural industry an ever-increasing financial investment. Capital investments are required beyond the capacity to service the debt. The number of women operating farms has also increased.
Global competition and world trade has influenced the industry, making the marketplace inhospitable to the average small Canadian farmer. Third World economies utilizing North Ameri can technology and products now produce grain that directly affects the price structure dictated by multinational corporate entities.
Farmers who market their own products should not be obligated to use the marketing boards and pay the fees if they are marketing their own products at home. The Canadian farm industries need effective implementation of a stable financial environment to sustain growth through these changing times.
Nutrient management and environmental accountability are legitimate, although costly, measures to implement and maintain. Regulations intended to create a safer and more accountable food supply industry have legislated capital investments to the farming community that create input costs exceeding the financial viability of the operation. When these two singular factors are joined, only corporate farmers can endure due to the corporate tax advantages. The inherent problem with this is that Canadian farming has traditionally been a family-based industry succeeded through generation to generation.
When young farmers attempt to enter the business of farming, they are faced with family break up, if they have that corporate set-up. If they are on their own, they must compete with other family members for that farm.
Added costs of wages in corporate accounting and corporate accounting are not often recouped in the operation. Measures must be taken at the federal level of government to ensure that the youth of this country are able to continue farming without the concern that Revenue Canada and financial institutions will force them off the farm because of a balance sheet that has been scrutinized by accountants that do not understand farming.
Our vibrant and educated youth at this point are aware of the hardships and challenges on the farm and are questioning the future of the farm. Our educated children can add and subtract now. They cannot have a positive answer for farming. They want to leave the farm. Clearly, we as parents, have the responsibility to find solutions to rectify this situation, not just for our children, but also for our other ambitious youth who desire to become farmers. Tax incentives could be created for young farmers who enter the agricultural industry and follow through with the necessary commitment to be in agribusiness.
The education and training necessary for young people to become farmers today should be considered as much an investment in the farm as any other capital cost. It cost me $10,000 a year to send my sons to the University of Guelph, and, from my point of view, it was money well spent. They have the ability to access and use information and technology of which many older farmers have not been able to keep abreast. It is in the best interest for the rural communities of Canada to nurture the farm youth of this great country.
In order for us, as a nation, to compete in the global marketplace, we must be informed and prepared for changes and situations to maintain our viability as farmers. The current global pricing structure inhibits the entrepreneurial spirit that is necessary for innovation and growth. Countries as well as corporations do price-fixing and dumping of product in order to eliminate competition. We, as Canadians, must consider incen tives to buy Canadian. The Canadian school system should provide better education in the aspects of agriculture and food production. We have the safest food in the world. However, we must support our industry.
The short-term effects of imported food products, which are not subject to the same stringent testing and guidelines as the same Canadian products, do provide a sustained source of product. However, the long-term effect of this is a disadvantage for Canadian farmers in the marketplace because of the input and capital costs necessary to be producers in Canada. This can be found many times in the pork, fruits and vegetables and grain industries.
The federal and provincial programs created to assist the farm community are difficult for the Canadian farmer to access. Available programs are often buried beneath pages of bureaucratic guidelines that are the making of accounting nightmares. Much must be done to simplify an inadequate system of communicating information to the Canadian farmer and the accountants respon sible for administration and utilization of these programs.
The closure of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, OMAFRA, offices in Ontario created a void in the industry. They were the link between government and farmers. Information and services traditionally handled by this ministry were suddenly removed from rural communities. From that point, older farmers had a problem knowing where to go. Young farmers are willing to go farther to seek answers. They need a place to turn for advice and assistance with specific and practical issues.
I recently had an interview with a local pork producer in Middlesex County who had attempted to access money available through the Ontario Whole Farm Relief Program. The producer was unable to find an accountant familiar with the information required to determine if he was qualified and what the qualification was for the procedure. Clearly, more must be done to convey information to accountants in regard to the farm business.
A mechanism already exists within the federal and provincial systems that could efficiently administer assistance programs. The creation of a new entity is not necessary. The Net Income Stabilization Account, NISA, program and AgriCorp are familiar bodies in Ontario that already have farm statistics and the relevant information for the effective administration of government programs.
These programs should be supported across the country, not just in Ontario. The NISA program, being an income stabilization program, already contains information and government support money. Logically, before additional government moneys could be accessed by farmers, existing allocated funds contributed by the government to their accounts would have to be exhausted in order to be reviewed for additional support. That would help to prevent successful and corporate farmers from double-dipping and maintaining large NISA accounts by hiring knowledgeable accountants.
The AgriCorp administration, as crop insurance and market revenue authorities, has the data to effectively administer and oversee government programs for allocation of fair funding. Crop insurance and market revenue are separate issues and should not be undermined or deleted by short-term programs that could be implemented as disaster relief. Farmers who choose not to use assistance programs would be prompted to participate if financial support were fairly dispersed here.
In recent years, almost everyone within the agribusiness world will recall the Huron County dilemma with the agricultural and geopolitical effects of corporate farm ownership. Whole commu nities were affected in Huron County as home after home was destroyed and farm families were displaced. Large corporate agribusiness does not make healthy rural communities, and it can, if the economic advantages change, leave an area as quickly as it came.
At the Ontario Farm Women's Network Conference, a presentation by Dr. Helene Cummins, a professor from the University of Western Ontario, made me realize and finally understand the emotional tie farmers have to their land that prompts endurance of financial hardship by their families in order to keep their farms. This does not happen in the corporate world. Farm families stabilize communities through community partici pation. Spouses function in the local job market to operate supplemental farm business ventures to bolster family income and to help pay operating costs and make mortgage payments or equipment loan payments.
To help the situation, you can offer training to women or men who want to work off the farm. Farm women are not the only ones to take off-farm jobs. Sometimes men take the jobs and women operate the farm. Farmers, in general, are independent and competitive. Traditionally, at least at the business end of things, they prefer to stay independent.
The security of one sector within agriculture sacrifices the other sectors. For instance, milk producers enjoy a defined quota system and relative income stability while cash crop farmers are losing their farms due to world commodity pricing and unpredictable weather conditions. By the same token, environ mental demands on the dairy industry are causing their incomes to deplete. Thus, any policy of aid must not be transposed into immediate cash windfalls but dispersed in order to help farmers manage their expenses.
Farmers who have enjoyed the economic stability of quotas are now benefiting because of the misfortune of other farm sectors, such as beef, fruit and cash crops. Farmers who enjoy income stability purchase available farms, which are utilized as supple mental acreage to acquire more quota. Only those who inherited their quotas or bought them early have that financial stability. It is not the young farmers who have had to purchase those quotas.
There is also evidence of young farmers coming from outside the country and receiving foreign money. It is hard for young farmers here to compete with that. Once the money runs out, there is instance after instance in our area where these farms have gone broke.
I honestly hope that we are not again allowing agricultural industries the opportunity to become environmental hazards by not controlling growth or accountability until after the damage has been done. Farmers with emotional attachment to farms, where they raise their families, become good stewards of the land and are concerned about the environment. All a farmer wants is to get paid enough for his product to live and support his family. As a nation, we owe it to ourselves to preserve and protect our agricultural sector.
The constant urban sprawl in areas of prime agricultural land under cultivation has led to encroachment by urban lifestyles on rural communities. Once-functioning farms are now used as places of residence. The barns are destroyed and the land is rented as supplemental income. The farm family has had to sell its land because ever-increasing tax burdens and depleted income have created urbanization of rural settings. The increased value of land due to its proximity to the developmental rim of any given city has made the profitable operation of the farms in these areas difficult. Tax loads around some cities have increased by 100 per cent because of market value assessments and not increased mill rates. Farm residences in these areas are assessed at residential tax rates, imposing another unfair tax grab by the city. Urban people enjoy the country but often destroy the family farm by adding legal costs from lawsuits to the farmers who are trying to operate.
The Ontario Farm Women's Network currently operates a service called the Farm Line. The demographic of the calls on the line are 60 per cent male and 40 per cent female callers. Financial inquiries seem to be the highest priority for the male contingent of callers, and female callers are requesting managerial assistance due to the breakdown of the family unit precipitated by health and stress-related illness. They are losing their spouses at home. The farm industry is in a fragile state of balance at this point in time. Consecutive seasonal crop failures and low commodity prices have pressed usually stable family farms to the brink of collapse. Operating loans are increasing because of successive years of added regulations and low prices.
Tax relief for the farm is necessary. Simple tax relief goes a long way. When farmers have money in their pockets, they spend it. Spent dollars stimulate the economy. A stimulated economy grows and tax dollars are generated. It is my humble opinion that now is the time to allow complete tax credits for such things as college education for farm youth and repayment of student loans for individuals in the farm industry. Let them repay their loans, but let them get a tax credit for paying it back. Incentives must be created. Tax shelters, such as the elimination of probate taxes on farms, would protect those succession farmers who have chosen to carry on the family farm, raise children and maintain the industry. Relief from provincial and GST taxes for the farm industry implemented for a five-year term would create billions of dollars worth of sustained growth.
The creation of a farm identification card distributed by provincial federations of agriculture could be tracked, much the same as a bank card, according benefits to farmers. This type of program would save the government and the farmer countless hours and mountains of paperwork currently used to administrate programs and tax rebates. The windfall for the government would be the in-depth data compiled by tracking farm spending over a five-year period.
The result of tax relief would be a much healthier farm industry. A 15 per cent tax break to any farmer would be a welcomed benefit to being a viable farm business. Current registered farmers and new succession farmers would be encouraged to register and thus support their federations.
Finally, I wish to present an idea that affects all of us at one time, and that is retirement. The traditional farmer works until he dies. The farm is the pension. As I mentioned earlier when speaking about the youth of this country continuing in agriculture and the probate tax exemption for farm succession, the need to borrow huge amounts of money in order to inherit a family farm must stop. The individuals in this country who are willing to work the long, hard - and, I might say, dirty hours - to be a farmer are becoming rare. Probate taxes should be eliminated for inherited farms, provided the inheritor continues the farm operation for a dictated period of time.
In conclusion, stability must be created to effectively service excessive debt loads required to become a farmer. The youth of this country must be encouraged with incentives or programs to stay on the farm. Education of our youth is paramount to progress and stability in the industry.
The Canadian marketplace must be educated and encouraged to buy Canadian. There must be more effort by government to make programs more accessible and user-friendly to the average farmer. The use of existing government programs would streamline and effectively administer future financial aid. Utilization of a farm card would effectively track farm spending for a period of time and provide tax relief. Succession tax and probate tax structures should be eliminated for ongoing farm operators.
Once again, I thank the committee for taking the time to hear my point of view and for inviting me to share my thoughts while representing the Farm Women's Network.
Senator Hubley: Welcome, Ms Brown. I must say you have a very fine report. You have covered many of the issues that farm families and farms are dealing with today.
Could you tell us a bit about the Farm Women's Network organization? Is it represented in each of our provinces?
Ms Brown: When we have our Canadian conference, there is someone from B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan - I do not remember the delegate from Manitoba, but there is one - Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, P.E.I., Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. It is pretty much right across the country.
Senator Hubley: That is wonderful. I come from Prince Edward Island and I was pretty sure we had the Farm Women's Network. We also have the Women's Institute. I believe that is a sister organization.
Ms Brown: Yes.
Senator Hubley: I was interested in your comments on education and the steps we should take to encourage young people to stay on the farms. You discussed tax relief and things of that nature.
Would a lot of the information that you have brought forward today have been presented at your annual meetings right across the country? Would that be correct?
Ms Brown: We actually presented with our board for the province of Ontario. We also brought issues forward from the Canadian conference.
Senator Hubley: How old is your organization?
Ms Brown: It began in 1981.
Senator Hubley: It is about 20 years old. Have you seen many changes on the farm? What is the most pressing problem? Would that be having a fair return for things that are produced on the farm? Is it the whole change in what the farm is like, both in size and how hard people have to work to maintain the farm? What would farm women identify as the most pressing problem?
Ms Brown: Keeping the youth on the farm is the biggest problem. Many aging farmers want their children or some young people to take over their farms, and they do not know how to accomplish that.
Senator Hubley: Do you have organizations in other parts of the country like the 4-H clubs?
Ms Brown: Our members sit on 4-H committees and Women's Institute committees. We work closely with the Women's Institute. However, we stipulate that our members must be farm women working on farms. The Women's Institute encompasses a great many more women.
Senator Hubley: I was interested in how youth organizations are getting on. Do young people attend those organizations as they are growing up?
Ms Brown: Those groups are losing their memberships. Junior Farmers was always very big when I was young - a while ago - but now it has trouble retaining its membership. University of Guelph has quite a large component of agricultural students and it maintains that the majority of those students return to the farm. Yet when I talk to parents, many tell me that their son or daughter comes home from school wanting to farm, but when the kids pencil it out and realize that it will not pay, they leave.
The Deputy Chairman: You mentioned in your brief the Farm Line where farmers could get management ideas. Is the Farm Line financed by the Ontario government?
Ms Brown: The Ontario Farm Women's Network runs that line and that is a volunteer organization. We get our money by doing projects. We usually receive provincial support money for agricultural projects. The Ontario Federation of Agriculture, OFA, has given us some money and Farm Credit has given us a portion. We apply for support.
The Deputy Chairman: Do you have a counselling service available for combatting stress and that sort of thing?
Ms Brown: We have a psychologist on call. We have a person who answers the phone within the office of the psychologist.
The Deputy Chairman: In my province of Saskatchewan, the provincial government runs what is called the Farm Stress Line.
Ms Brown: Yes, that is the same idea.
The Deputy Chairman: Do you have statistics on the frequency of telephone calls? Is it increasing or decreasing? How many calls relate to suicide, family breakup or spousal abuse?
Ms Brown: This line has only been in operation for a year now. There were 62 repeat calls. The counselling calls are broken down into different areas. At our last board meeting, a comment was made that there was an increase in phone calls from women whose spouses had mental or stress-related illnesses, leaving them to operate the business on their own. They were in partnerships and they do not know how to run the other part of the partnership. They were having problems managing. That is why they were asking for managerial assistance.
The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, known as OMAFRA, used to have a wonderful program years ago called the Farm Family Advisor Program. I know of some who received help from there, but it is no longer available. Some good programs have been lost. That was hard for some farmers, but they are adjusting now. They may have to go farther, and farmers are not very good at wanting to go to town.
The Deputy Chairman: You may not be able to answer this question, but what would be the average farm size owned by your membership?
Ms Brown: The specific membership on our board or in the Farm Women's Network is not that big. We do encompass all of the smaller community or county organizations. Our members come from those smaller groups. The people who belong to those smaller groups do not necessarily belong to ours, but we are their umbrella group. They may come to us for help. Sometimes we go to them.
The Deputy Chairman: You mentioned that farmers must pay marketing board fees if they market at home. Can you enlarge on that a bit?
Ms Brown: If you produce wheat or soy beans, the marketing board gets its fee when you harvest the crop to be sold. Even if you wanted to sell privately, you would have to pay those marketing board fees on the basis of an amount per bushel. I do not have the numbers with me.
The Deputy Chairman: The arrangements for marketing are handled by the marketing board. Is that correct? You are paying it a fee for looking after that transaction.
Ms Brown: That is right.
The Deputy Chairman: Does it issue a cheque to you or do you receive a cheque from the buyer?
Ms Brown: The marketing board issues the cheque.
The Deputy Chairman: It is somewhat similar to our Canadian Wheat Board and the system for the West Coast.
Ms Brown: Yes. This year was a fairly good year for wheat in Ontario. However, when we had very wet wheat with fusarium in it, a large amount of the wheat was not food grade. There were some areas, such as one near Peterborough County, which had excellent wheat. Those farmers received no more for their wheat than the farmer who had the problem wheat. That is simply not fair. Once you go into a marketing board, you lose your say on how you market your produce and what you will receive for it. The marketing boards are wonderful when it comes to marketing your product overseas, because the average farmer cannot do that marketing. Somehow the farmer should have control over his crop.
The Deputy Chairman: Are you referring to the marketing boards that deal with field crops? You are not talking about the Milk Marketing Board or the chicken or egg marketing boards.
Ms Brown: Do you mean the boards with the quotas?
The Deputy Chairman: Yes.
Ms Brown: I have spent many hours interviewing different farmers in different areas, because I am not in dairy any longer. I grew up on a dairy farm, which my father sold when the quota system came into effect. That was his choice. I had had enough and I did not want to do it. Now I know of young farmers who would like to expand on their parents' dairy farms, but they cannot afford to buy the quotas, yet the parents have so much money. If they had the quota to begin with and did not have to purchase it, they were fine. However, many of them have had to finance to buy more quota, and that is causing financial hardship too. I do not know what the answer is. At least they enjoy some accounting return for their money because it is supposed to be factored into what they receive. We must be fair to all of the agricultural sectors. Somehow we must provide stability for the other sectors so that we can keep the competition in farming fair.
My brother claims that cash crop farmers do not work all the time. I cash crop, and I went to school to try to learn about all the new products, the new sprays, the new seeds and the new technology. To keep up with all of that, you must have time out of the field.
The Deputy Chairman: Are there any other questions?
Senator Johnson: Could you tell me if there are any Aboriginal women in the Canadian Farm Women's Network?
Ms Brown: I am not sure because I do not ask members about that.
Senator Johnson: There are many Aboriginal women in the rural areas of Canada. I wonder if they are involved in the mainstream activity of your network.
Senator Tkachuk: There are not any in farming.
Senator Johnson: They are not in rural farming, but they are residing in rural Canada.
Ms Brown: To be honest, I really do not know, but I will try to obtain that information for you.
Senator Tunney: Thank you for coming and for the work you put into your report.
The Canadian Farm Women's Network was started in 1981. Do you remember when interest rates went from about 6 per cent to about 22 per cent? For farmers who had not locked into an interest rate, it was horrible. That is what started the Farm Women's Network.
It also prompted the establishment of the Farm Family Advisor Board. It is gone now, but it was taken over by a federal program that was called the Farm Debt Review Board. You should know more about that because it is of tremendous help. Now, it is called the Farm Debt Mediation Service.
Ms Brown: I talked to someone on the board about it.
Senator Tunney: There is a branch in each province, from Newfoundland to British Columbia. It has had tremendous success in saving farmers who were destined for destruction. It has also had success in helping farmers out of the industry, where that is the best option.
I served on that board for some years, and that is why I am so committed to it. It would be tremendous if you had somebody who could become more familiar with the board. By the way, many farmers, bankers and financial advisers do not know it exists. That is one of its failures. The board is not used often enough and it is not well enough known.
Your report is rather depressing. I know there is a great deal of bad news around, but there is also some good news.
You may know that 80 per cent of the food is produced in this country by 20 per cent of the farmers. There are many other farmers producing smaller amounts of food and they are much greater in number, of course. When 20 per cent of the farmers produce 80 per cent of our food, there have to be many other farmers who are producing small amounts. Those farms are not viable, but perhaps it is because people choose to have that way of life and perhaps have an alternate income.
Do you envision your organization growing, shrinking or maintaining its size? Is it as active as you would like it to be?
Ms Brown: I would like to have it grow, of course.
Before I add to that, I want to tell you that we made 38 referrals to the Farm Consultation Service, 13 referrals to the Farm Debt Mediation Service and 36 referrals to the OMAFRA contact centre for help. We are familiar with those organizations.
Senator Tunney: Would this be across Canada?
Ms Brown: The referrals have been in Ontario only because I do not have the statistics on the other help lines. I just received these numbers.
Regarding the question about our organization, we are volunteers and we are limited in how much we can do. Our work often dictates when we can be there. Ontario is a big province to get around, but we have representatives from all across the province and from every sector of farming. Our issues mostly concern problems in the farm family. We are concerned with farm families. Right now, we consider our youth as necessary to help farms go on. Youth need some kind of a youth program to help them.
Senator Tunney: Some of our brightest and most industrious young people are coming from schools in Guelph, Kemptville and New Liskard. Most of these people will be good farmers.
The Deputy Chairman: Ms Brown, thank you very much for agreeing to appear before us tonight. We sincerely appreciate it. I want to echo Senator Tunney's comment that you certainly put a lot of work into your presentation and brief. We thank you very much.
Our next presenter will be from Statistics Canada. He has many figures for us. Mr. Bollman, welcome to our committee.
Mr. Ray Bollman, Chief, Research and Analysis Section, Statistics Canada: I am pleased to be here. Thank you for the invitation to present information on rural Canada.
This is based on a presentation I gave to the Agricultural Institute of Canada in July 2001 where it was suggested that I talk about the state of rural Canada coming from strength and going forward. I hope that you appreciate that I have not prepared all of this material myself. Some of my colleagues from Statistics Canada are here to ensure I interpret their numbers correctly.
Also, I am pleased my daughter is here. She will observe if I can answer the questions or not.
It is a bit of challenge to follow Ms Brown. I grew up on a farm and, fortunately, I left before they made those big balers. I could never figure out how to lift those big bales of hay on the hottest day of the summer and the coldest day winter. I am working out of rural Saskatchewan, so I am back in a rural milieu.
My presentation is organized along the lines of strengths. Rural Canada is moving from a demographic strength, from a resource sector strength, from and to a manufacturing strength, to an Aboriginal identity strength, to a rural amenity strength and to a community cohesion strength.
I will begin with the demographic strength. Before Confeder ation, 80 per cent of Canada's population lived in centres with a population of less than 1,000. This is not my favourite definition of "rural." That definition comes from our history. Over time, both populations have been increasing. In about 1966, the rural population decreased a bit, but increased again in 1976. According to the definition of "rural" being centres with a population of less than 1000, we have 6 million rural Canadians, or 22 per cent of the population is rural.
At the same time, 78 per cent of the population is urban. If I ever get invited to make a presentation to a rural community, this is the graph I would take to make the point that the market for selling goods and services from rural areas is an urban market. I would add the point that it is a growing market. It is growing in richness, and it is diversified.
There is a rural development opportunity to encourage local entrepreneurs and local communities to identify what niche markets exist and to invest in niche market research. Commu nities have to find something new to export.
To export the old commodities like wheat, two-by-fours, cod and pickerel, you need fewer and fewer people. To stabilize the population in communities, we have to find something new to export. There is a real development opportunity here.
Rural Canada is moving from a demographic strength. We had six million people before the Second World War in rural Canada, so it is a relative loss that we are losing. In Saskatchewan and Newfoundland, there has been an absolute decline in the rural population since the war.
Within that rural population of 6 million before the war, two-thirds of the rural population lived on a farm family. If you were creating agricultural policy then, you were affecting two-thirds of rural people. Agricultural policy was basically a rural policy back then. Over time, the farm population has been declining, and the non-farm population in rural areas has been increasing such that now we have 13 per cent of the rural population that live on a census farm.
The senator was quoting numbers about the many small farms. A census farm is any producer with goods for sale. Twenty- five per cent of those census farms had gross revenue of less than $10,000. Fifty per cent of those census farms had gross revenue of less than $50,000.
Statistics Canada wants to capture all those farms and count their inventories. If a cow is sold, we want to know in order that we know the total cattle production. It is not clear that we always want to count those farms. If 50 per cent of those farms had less than $50,000 gross revenue, maybe only 6.5 per cent of the farms are getting rural policy for agriculture.
My observation is that the bigger the farm, the more agricultural policy you get. I have observed that 13 per cent of rural people live on farms and 40 per cent or 50 per cent of them are big enough to receive any agricultural policy. Perhaps40 per cent of the 13 per cent of rural people get rural policy through the agricultural department. Therefore, perhaps agricul tural policy is no longer rural policy.
I will move to the next strength from which rural areas have moved, the resource sector. Shipments of coal, wheat, livestock and cod are increasing.They are not declining. It is being done with less and less labour. There are fewer workers. Fewer and fewer people are working in these resource sectors. In my view, that is not a strength for rural development because there are not people working in them. However, it is certainly a strength for the export sector and for the trade balance.
You all know the history of the price of wheat. It is higher now than it was in nominal terms. After you adjust for inflation, the long-term trend for the price of wheat is down. By definition the price is going down for any commodity. However, the amount of change does not matter. It will not have any impact on rural development because people will get a bigger farm and a bigger tractor. There will be fewer people working in farming and fewer kids going to school. Farm communities will continue to decline.
The price of labour is going up more than theprice of machinery and is causing this decline. If you buy a $150,000 combine, it is hard to argue that that machine is cheap. However, it would be even more expensive to hire labour. Over time, the price of labour is going up relative to the price of capital, which is good because we are all better off.
People are better off, but there is always an incentive therefore, to substitute capital for labour. This trend is ongoing regardless of the price of wheat or the price of two-by-fours or the price of nickel. There will always be an incentive to substitute capital for labour. Communities dependent on the resource sector will always have fewer and fewer people working in the resource sector. The price of labour will increase relative to the price of capital. Bigger machines will replace farmers regardless of the trend in the price of commodities. Farms will get bigger, and farming and mining communities will have fewer mining or farming families.
This map shows where agriculture is relatively important. Dark green is where 15 or more per cent of the work force in 1996 was in farming.
This examines the impact of agriculture on population change. Here are census divisions. They are not counties in the west, but are equivalent to counties. It goes from zero per cent share in agriculture in 1981 to 50 per cent share of agriculture in 1981. We can see some places lost 20 per cent of their population over 15 years, and some places gained 45 per cent of the population over 15 years. The line is negative, which means if you start with the big share of your population in agriculture, your population growth is smaller. In fact, eight census divisions here in the Prairies started with more than 38 per cent of their work force in agriculture, and all of them lost population over that 15-year period. That was a pretty big challenge for communities in those regions to find something new to export to substitute or make up for the shedding of labour in the farm sector.
Here is the census division that started with 30 per cent of its work force in agriculture and lost 15 per cent of its population. Here is a place that started with the same level, 30 per cent, and gained 10 or 12 per cent of the population. There is hope. There is a wide variability of outcomes there. Everyone is not on the line. It is not all gloom and doom.
Agricultural output is up. Labour is down. Fewer people are required in agriculture. This trend is ongoing regardless of the price of farm outputs. Consequently, I think the challenge for rural communities is to find something new to export to maintain a population base. That gets back to this idea on niche market research, which is just one option of many for reaching this objective.
Moving to manufacturing, as you all know, manufacturing was everywhere in rural Ontario and Quebec. Wherever there was a waterfall, there was a manufacturing plant. All manufacturing at one time in Quebec and Ontario was rural, and then it became quite urban. This is just considering one of the biggest sectors in rural and small-town Canada. If I put all of the services sectors together, it would be the biggest sector. Here I have broken it out so I can make manufacturing bigger: retail and wholesale trade in rural Canada, 426,000 people; manufacturing in rural Canada, 425,000 people, and the primary sector in rural Canada, 401,000. Primary is agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, gas and oil.
In the manufacturing sectors in 1976, the rural was 85 per cent as intensive in manufacturing as Canada as a whole. Today, the numbers are continuing for 2000-01. Manufacturing now in rural Canada is as intensive as that black line, which is the Canadian intensity of manufacturing. Rural is getting more and more competitive in manufacturing because the intensity of manufac turing in rural areas is going up relative to Canada as a whole. That is one opportunity to concentrate on for rural Canadians.
This examines where the traditional manufacturing medium is more important, because the gain is over 15 per cent: fish plants on Bona Vista Bay, fish plants on the shore of Nova Scotia and South Eastern Quebec. Almost all of Quebec is light green or dark green, more than five per cent is traditional manufacturing, and dark green is largely forestry products, pulp and paper and furniture manufacturing. It is really an intensive part of the employment in that part of Quebec. There is not too much green in Southern Ontario or the Prairies.
This is complex manufacturing, more on the high-tech side. Again, notice in Southern Quebec, more than five per cent of the work force in complex manufacturing, and also in Southern Ontario. Again, the Prairies are quite conspicuous by their absence. The intensity in Southern Quebec is over 15 per cent. Oshawa and the 401 are also areas of high intensity complex manufacturing.
How does that play out in the population growth in rural areas? I find this an interesting graph. It is similar in other countries. Here are census divisions from zero per cent rurality to 100 per cent rurality, and one census division that lost 35 per cent of its population over five years, 1991 to 1996. A mine closed. Some centres gained 35 per cent of population over five years.
It is interesting that there is no slope in there. Regardless of the degree of rurality, you get the same scattering, the same outcomes in population growth, regardless of the degree of rurality. From that point of view, you can say that rurality is not a constraint. It is not an advantage, but it is not a constraint to rural population growth. For example, here is a place that started with 55 per cent and lost 5 per cent of its population. Here is a place that started about the same and gained 20 per cent of its population.
There is research underway in Europe and in Canada to figure out if the statistically lagging area can learn something from the statistically leading area. Here are some of these leading and lagging areas. Green is employment growth above the national average in three out of three periods, 1981-86, 1986-91 and 1991-96.
Employment growth was above the national average in the North due to an Aboriginal boom. There were more people involved because of the population boom.
Can you commute to Calgary or Thompson? Can you commute to Winnipeg? Can you commute to Toronto? Can you commute to Ottawa? Can you commute to Montreal? Can you commute to Moncton? The county with the Halifax airport is the only place in Nova Scotia with successful growth, in three out of three periods, above the national growth. On this one, urban centres and access to urban centres would explain a lot of this growth above the national average.
The next one is on Aboriginal identity strength. The point would be that the socio-economic gap between rural and urban areas is about the same. The Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal gap is the same for rural and urban areas. It is the other way around. There are more Aboriginals in rural areas, so because of the demographic intensity in rural areas, it is more a rural issue, in my view.
This is considering the Aboriginal population pyramid for Canada as a whole. You know how to read one of these. For Aboriginals 15 to 19, 4.8 per cent of the population is Aboriginal population, for Aboriginals 10 to 14, 5.5 per cent, and Aborig inals five to nine years of age are over 6 per cent of the population. The Aboriginals at zero to four are even more. Each younger group has more and more people in the Aboriginal community. That is a population boom.
This is the population pyramid for the Canadian population as a whole. Each five-year age group has about the same number of people right up to the age of 30. This is the population pyramid for the rural population. These folks have gone to town. Each time you look at this, no matter what period, 1971, 1981, 1991, there is always that loop in there between 20 and 30. They have gone to town. Some of them have come back. They do not all come back. That loop is going all the way up.
This is making the point of the demographic pressure. You can see in the right-hand side in rural Manitoba, six or seven per cent of older rural Manitobans are Aboriginal. Less than five years of age in rural Manitoba, 37 per cent of children in rural Manitoba are Aboriginal. Any age under 35 years of age, over one-quarter of rural Manitobans are Aboriginal.
Of all the children under 5 in the territories, 85 per cent are Aboriginal. In Manitoba, it is 30 per cent and in Saskatchewan it is just over one-third. In rural Alberta, about 18 per cent of kids under 5 is Aboriginal. Although the percentage is not big in rural Ontario, it is a large area, so it has the most Aboriginal kids as an absolute number.
The socio-economic gaps are the same across the geographies. Rural areas have higher unemployment rates. Aboriginals have a higher unemployment rate. Aboriginals have a higher share of high school dropouts, but it is the same across geographies. Aboriginals have lower income than non-aboriginals and that is the same across geographies.
The gap is the same across all rural and urban geographies. My point is that there is a demographic pressure on rural areas to address the Aboriginal situation and rural development opportu nities. In terms of opportunities, I would suggest targeting one and two, the Aboriginal communities.
Moving to rural amenity strength, this graph shows where people are moving. On average, from 1971 to 1991, each five-year period, 20 to 24 rural areas lost 12 per cent of their youth. The average rural area lost 12 per cent of its youth ina five year period over that 20 years. Some people think that 12 per cent is terrible. Ms Brown thinks it is terrible that we are losing our youth. I think 12 per cent is terrible, too, but it should be 100 per cent because nobody in those areas has access to post-secondary education. I would argue that 100 per cent of the youth should leave for education and then you want to attract back the best with the opportunities. I am not sure if the glass is half full or half empty. There is a net loss of youth. There is no argument on that.
There is a net loss of older, retired people, those over 70 years of age. Rural areas are competitive in attracting peopleaged 25 to 70, particularly young adults of 25 to 35 years and early retirees. Where are the young adults moving? They are going to any place in British Columbia. Some commute to Calgary or Edmonton. Very few are moving to Saskatchewan. They are commuting around Winnipeg but not moving into Winnipeg itself. They are moving everywhere north of Toronto but not into Toronto itself; to all the towns around Ottawa, but not into Ottawa; to north of Montreal, Sherbrooke, Sorel, Quebec City and some places in the East.
Where are the retirees moving? Of people aged 55 to 70 years, 20 percent have moved in the last five years. This is shown over four censuses. They are heading to sunshine valleys inSouthern B.C.; to Kananaskis Country; none to Saskatchewan; a few into Manitoba; to cottage country in Muskoka and the Laurentians north of Montreal and to North Hatley in the Eastern Townships.
Young adults are moving to consume the rural amenity of the countryside within commuting distance of cities. That is a strength for rural areas. Retirees are moving to consume the rural amenities of cottage country. That is another strength for rural areas.
I ponder on what is development and where does it start. It is worth thinking about Robert Reisch's book, The Work of Nations, in which he argued that financial capital and technological know-how are pretty hard to keep in the countryside. However, in the country, the work force is less mobile. The most fixed resource is people. We call that human capital or human capacity. We want to build on the knowledge and capacity and ability of our people. Those are the assets on which to develop our strengths.
Reisch argued the ones with the most capacity for development are "symbolic analysts," people who play on screens moving symbols around. They are the ones who really create new wealth. There are two ways to attract symbolic analysts to your community such as easy access to a city or to cottage country, or you can grow your own locally. Symbolic analysts work with symbols on computers and they can sell their product over the Internet. If you have a community where a symbolic analyst wants to live, that person can work there via the Internet.
Where does development start? Reisch, in a Time magazine article, makes the point that the ability to deal with all this chaos is really developed in children in the time period from minus-nine months to three-plus years. People have known that for decades. There are many books on assessing children under three. Recent research, such as that done by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in Toronto, says that the more you stimulate the young human brain, the more synapses are grown and the brain develops. The largest return on an investment takes place at minus-nine months to three-plus years. A greater return to investment after three years of age is very low.
If our objective is rural development, I would argue that our first development should be in nutrition and nurturing of kids aged minus-nine months to three-plus years. If we are backing out of rural development, the last program to be cut should be early childhood programs.
From all the discoveries of neuroscience labs, the finding that electrical activity changes the physical structure of the brain is a breathtaking finding. The brain is not a computer. Nature does not cobble it together and turn it on. It is built and developed. On the time scale, the most important year is the first. By age three, a neglected child bears marks that are virtually not erasable. A baby does not come into the world as a genetically pre-programmed automation. Philosophers may debate whether nature or nurture calls the shot, but that debate is not of interest now because the genes and the environment interact. It is not a competition. It is a dance. This dance begins around the third week of gestation. Nature is dominant but nurture plays a vital role. That is the key investment in a rural development program.
This graph shows rural communities where more than20 per cent of children live in lone-parent families. They may be at some risk of getting less nutrition and nurturing than is needed. That group amounts to 25 per cent of all kids in rural areas and the number is growing.It is a more intensive rural problem. In those communities where more than 20 per cent of kids live in lone-parent families, we find 34 per cent of those kids are in low-income families. That may mean a problem with getting nutrition and nurturing. That share in urban areas is about the same.
In some communities, more than 60 per cent of kids live in two-parent families, with both parents working. Maybe that is good. Perhaps they are getting lots of attention. Maybe these families have lots of money for daycare. Maybe they are not getting the right attention. This is 25 per cent of all rural kids. That is more a rural situation than an urban situation.
There may be a rural development opportunity to unleash the rural community social cohesion that we have all heard about. If the community were to come together to help and encourage and nurture kids and mothers, then, five years from now, grade one teachers will be lining up at the door to teach at that school. Young parents will want to move to that community because it is such a welcoming community.
Rural development can take up to 20 years. These kids will be ready in 16 years or 18 years to stimulate their community. They will want to stay. They will be able to deal with all these ideas and the chaos and change that is coming at us.
On number 2, invest in niche research; on number 3, target one and two to Aboriginal communities. Those are my comments.
The Deputy Chairman: Mr. Bollman, that was an excellent presentation. You certainly presented tremendous food for thought. I will now open the floor to questions.
Senator Tkachuk: I have a couple of questions. I followed you until you got to the nurturing stuff because that is what the country should be doing. We should have public policy that strengthens the family unit. The government should do everything in its power to make sure there is a man and a woman living in a home, who are married, who are stable and caring and all the rest of it. I do not buy the argument that people who have more money have healthier kids. I have not seen any evidence of that.
The Great Depression produced a wonderful set of children who were hard working and participated in the Second World War. It is probably the greatest generation that we have had in this century.
I like all your other stuff.
With members' indulgence, I will ramble a bit. I grew up in a rural area. Technology changed the farm next to the town that I grew up in. Obviously, if you have an automobile, you do not need towns five miles apart. Thirty miles and 100 miles make more sense. Farms increased in size because of transportation. Technology changed things. When I grew up, four quarters was a huge farm. They were the guys driving the Buick from whom my Dad, the gas retailer, was trying to collect money. Perhaps the technology that is changing rural Canada today is harder for us to understand and therefore more difficult to deal with.
You raised a couple of issues. No matter what the price of the commodity, we will have less people farming. I believe that.
The challenge of our committee and all politicians and society will be to figure out what is happening, what can we do about it and if there is anything we can do to stop it. In other words, why waste a whole bunch of money to avoid something that is going to happen anyway. I think we often do that.
I offer those observations and will let others comment.
The Deputy Chairman: Mr. Bollman, before you respond to that, I would be remiss if I did not mention that I have a history of making a long presentation before I ask a question. Senator Tkachuk sometimes asks whether my comments were a presenta tion or a question. I am happy to ask, Senator Tkachuk, was that a presentation or a question?
Senator Tkachuk: I did not even ask a question.
The Deputy Chairman: Mr. Bollman, would you please respond.
Mr. Bollman: I am happy to respond.
I agree that having money does not cause good parenting. There is excellent research by colleagues at Statistics Canada who are involved with the national longitudinal survey on children and youth. They have measures - I have not read the reports, only the summaries - of the outputs of good parenting and that is not highly correlated with income. I can find out more about it, if you want to dig into that.
I agree that, if farmers keep producing commodities, there will be fewer and fewer of them. If they get into niche products, perhaps some of that can be turned around. I do not know what a good niche is. Ostriches were a good niche at one time, but they went feathers up. There should be some niches for which farm families can produce niche products. It is a problem if they are producing commodities.
Is there a new technology that they can use? Everyone is touting the Internet. Of course, retailers in rural Canada were doing fine until the post office got there and Timothy Eaton came along and he was a lot cheaper. Retailers still did fine until they paved the roads and more people left than came. People were doing fine in rural Canada until the Internet came. Now there are bank machines and no banks. Rural people can buy on the Internet.
I met a person who sold an Artic Cat snowblower into Nunavut from his shop in Yorkton - lowering the business of the retailer in Nunavut - by selling on the Internet. One rural area is competing with another. That will happen anyway, I agree. The flip side is to determine how rural people can use the Internet as a technology for increasing their access and increasing their ability to sell goods and services. That is a good question. I do not know the answer.
Senator Tkachuk: I have a lot of relatives who are farm families. I have a particularly intriguing cousin who buys old equipment. He takes it is all apart, cleans up all the parts, sells off the excess metal and markets, on the Internet, all of these parts from all of this equipment for all kinds of farm machinery equipment. If I knew his Web site I would send it around. It is very profitable business for him. He is an ingenious little guy and doing quite well. Rural people are figuring out solutions for themselves. Our genius would be to not to interfere, but to find ways to encourage that.
Senator Hubley: I thank you for your presentation. I must admit that I am not quite sure about a number of the graphs. This is not to discourage you. The second graph is called "Population trends, Rural minority in Canada in 1931." That comes up to 1991, I believe. We have been told that 20 per cent of the farmers produce 80 per cent of our food. Does this graph somehow reflect that?
Mr. Bollman: No. This graph considers who is living in the countryside versus who is living in the city. When I was talking about the next graph, I said that 13 per cent of rural people live on the farm. Then I said that only 40 per cent or 50 per cent of those people have a farm big enough to support themselves. Thirteen per cent of the farm group sells 80 per cent of the products. Thirteen per cent of rural people live on farms; only 20 per cent of that 13 per cent require agricultural policy. They are all producing a little bit of goods, but they are not doing enough for agricultural policy.
Senator Hubley: Do any of your graphs indicate the number of farmers who are able to hire experienced off-farm labour? Do you have any handle on that? You mentioned machines versus the number of persons required. Is that because they have to get somebody to run a new piece of equipment? Is there a spin-off there for off-farm labour? What are the employment opportunities in the rural area?
Mr. Bollman: There is an issue of more farmers hiring labour.
Senator Hubley: Yes.
Mr. Bollman: I think the preference is to buy a machine rather than to hire labour.
Senator Hubley: Are they not able to get experienced farm labour?
Mr. Bollman: I only know what I read in the newspapers. I have no statistics to come up with that. Maybe I could dig them out and get back to you. Certainly, one of the problems is that many farmers, especially in the grain sector, do not need labour all the year around. Pig barns can use labour all year around. You can have permanent labour and train employees and so on. Seasonality is one issue.
Senator Hubley: The other interesting point was agricultural output is up. That means we are producing more in agriculture. Labour is down. We are using more machinery to do the work that at one time we would have hired people to do. That is the trend we observe.
Mr. Bollman: Yes.
Senator Hubley: You discussed manufacturing in two different terms. Perhaps you can help me here.
Mr. Bollman: That is probably not in the package. Traditional manufacturing is high-tech: food processing, beverage production, tobacco processing, rubber industries, plastic industries, leather industry, primary textiles, clothing production, wood, furniture manufacturing, and so on - closer to the primary sector.
Complex manufacturing is just a little more high-tech. Printing, metals, fabricated metals, machinery, machinery production, car plants, transportation equipment, electrical, electronics, re fineries - a bit more technological. All manufacturing in this classification is either traditional or complex. It is a grey line. We just drew a line here and put them into two groups.
Senator Day: I was fascinated with one of your slides when you spoke about the nurturing and nutrition of children at minus nine months. What is involved in nurturing and nutrition at the minus-nine-month point?
Mr. Bollman: Every once a while, one sees an article in the newspaper stating that if a fetus hears Mozart, the child does better than other children who did not hear Motzart as fetuses. Certainly, her lifestyle and what a mother eats and drinks make a big impact on the development of the fetus, therefore: Mozart plus food.
Senator Day: In fact, there are some expectant mothers who play music. Can you tell me about the electrical activity of the brain cells and what stimulates the electrical activity? Why should we assume that good nurturing and nutrition would stimulate electrical brain cell activity rather than otherwise?
Mr. Bollman: I should refer to the articles. I can repeat what I have read, but it is fairly complicated neurological science. I do not know. Certainly, the idea is that interaction and stimulation make a big difference as opposed to not getting interaction and stimulation. That is the easy part. The next part is whether a loving grandmother or mother is better than being in daycare. The articles get a bit more complicated. Certainly, this concerns stimulation and the brain working all the time. Apparently, if the brain is working all the time, the synapses and the electrical activity create more brain capacity. I remember stories in the newspaper when the Iron Curtain fell about people who went to orphanages in Romania where children had delayed development because they lacked stimulation. They were living in a very sterile situation. That is the bad case. The good case is the research is showing that more stimulation in early periods has a big impact years later.
Senator Day: We talked about transportation, technology and highway improvements and their impact on the size of farms and the rural development, or lack thereof, in relation to farming. Earlier you were asked a question in relation to the rural service industry for the farming community. You give a total population figure, and, presumably, you are including in that not only farmers and rural services, but also urban workers who dwell in the rural communities with this new technology and better transportation. Do you believe they are offering a contribution to rural community life by living there in the evening and bringing their urban-generated dollars to the rural community where they live during the weekend and in the evening?
Mr. Bollman: I do not have good numbers on that. The quick answer is I do not know. In some articles you read that they spend most of their money in town, so it is not a contribution to rural communities. Other articles say they do not volunteer in the local community. However, I think their kids attend the local schools. There is that type of contribution. I am not sure if the glass is half full or half empty. You are right. It is not the same as living and working in the community. Just living there is different from living and working there.
Senator Day: You did not talk a great deal about that community, which, in my experience, is the growing part of the rural population.
Mr. Bollman: That is right. The growing population in most of these charts should be side figures. That is a problem that most of rural Saskatchewan would love to have. You are right. Around bigger cities, that is an issue.
The Deputy Chairman: We are dealing with 1996 figures. We just completed our new census in May of this year. When will those figures relating to population in rural areas be available to us? How long will that take?
Mr. Bollman: The census of population counts will be out in April 2002. For some of these charts, Statistics Canada has annual estimates of population by census division.
The Deputy Chairman: Those are "guesstimates," though.
Mr. Bollman: They are a dash close to what the census is. When the census is published, it will only be a quiver. You are right. It is an estimate. We know in what census division people are born. We know the census division they died in. People move. We get the mobility data. We have access to tax records in Statistics Canada if we know the change in address. We get all the migration data from income tax. We get a pretty good estimate of the population in each census division each year. I have some maps in a different presentation you can look at later, if you wish.
The Deputy Chairman: Could that information in two or three pages be made available to us now? Would it be current? Could you forward that to our clerk?
Mr. Bollman: Yes.
The Deputy Chairman: Many of the slides presented to us tonight were not included in the hard copy you gave us.
Mr. Bollman: That is right. I have a bilingual copy of the main conclusions, but the maps were in the larger copy that I gave to the clerk.
The Deputy Chairman: Can we instruct our clerk to make that available to each member?
Mr. Bollman: Yes, it is public information.
Senator Tkachuk: Could we have it on a disk?
Mr. Bollman: I can send you an e-mail with the whole thing.
The Deputy Chairman: Can I take from what you presented tonight that in those provinces that do have an increase in rural population, the increase is located in the rural areas within a 50-mile radius of a large urban centre? Is that a proper assessment?
Mr. Bollman: Generally that is within 50 miles. However, the North population is growing due to an Aboriginal demographic. That is not a city impact. Some of the growth is in Muskoka. Canmore and Kananaskis are more than 50 miles from Calgary, so there are some retirement places. Saint-Georges-de-Beauce, down by Maine, is 20,000 perhaps. That is a big city, and it is fighting with Quebec City to keep its people, but it is growing.
The general answer is yes, but there are specific cases where population is growing more than 50 or 60 miles away.
The Deputy Chairman: You mentioned that Saskatchewan was the province that had the largest decline in rural population. You may not be able to answer this question from statistics - and pardon the bit of preliminary editorial. When we examined the Agriculture Income Disaster Assistance, AIDA, payments that were sent out over the last two years, the farmers in Alberta and Manitoba received a higher average payment than the farmers in Saskatchewan. When I asked the Department of Agriculture why that was, I was informed that part of the reason was that when the Crow benefit was taken away, the farmers in Alberta and Manitoba opted to diversify their operations and go into livestock, whereas the Saskatchewan farmer, in his diversification, decided to go into pulse crops and that sort of thing. The base at which to start the AIDA payment was higher in those other two provinces.
Is rural decline slower in provinces where the agricultural unit is more a mixed farm unit than a strictly grain farm unit? Does mixed farming provide more farmers than does straight grain farming?
Mr. Bollman: The quick answer is I do not know. This map shows the population change from 1986 to 2000. The dark green area around Toronto indicates places that had population increases in 14 consecutive years. Humboldt, a great manufacturing success story, is dark brown. It has had continuous population decline for 14 years. This is a - dark to black - mixed black soil zone and mixed farming. The manufacturing employment increase has not been able to compensate for the shutting down and labour shedding in agriculture. That is my interpretation of this Yorkton to Humboldt situation. I would like to think that mixed farming would have an impact on and provide stability in the farm sector, on the whole work force and the whole population. I do not know. Down here, perhaps population declined earlier and now the decline up here is coming on later. The situation, for the last 14 years in that black soil zone, is there has been continuous population loss in 14 out of 14 years.
The Deputy Chairman: From the trends that have taken place over the last 15 years, is it your opinion that agriculture is the answer to the survival of our rural communities?
Mr. Bollman: I live in a small Saskatchewan rural community, so it is hard to give an objective answer.
Commodity production will be done with less and less labour as we go on. If agriculture is to be a component of saving a rural community, it must be niche production. Ostriches did not work, but maybe bed and breakfast, borage or elk velvet will. I do not know. If it is going to be farming, I think it has to be niche production and labour-intensive farming.
The Deputy Chairman: May I be allowed an opportunity to make a short presentation? Your last answer generates this. It has been said that the rural population started to decline the moment that they invented the tractor. Do you agree with that?
Mr. Bollman: I suspect in other places it declined earlier, but the tractor may have been responsible, yes.
The Deputy Chairman: I am intrigued by your comments in regard to the niche market. What kind of niches do you go into, and what kind of niches do you go into that someone else does not copy? You also have the same problem we have now with our grain, which is overproduction.
Someone also mentioned that there is not anything in a barrel of oil that cannot be grown on a farm. Perhaps instead of competing with each other as farmers, we should be competing with the oil producers in the Arab countries and this sort of thing. We have bio-diesel and ethanol. We now have a large research project going on to develop the production of rubber out of sunflower. This is an area where you are certainly not going to provide an oversupply. That is my editorial comment. I do not know whether you want to mention anything about that or not.
Mr. Bollman: I agree that if you get too many people in the niche, it is no longer a niche. Could there be two people buying up old machinery and selling parts? Maybe there is just room for one. If I were in a rural community, I would say there are enough niches in urban markets around the world, one niche for each rural community. If two communities got into the same niche, I am not sure there would be a niche any more. Then you start competing. What that niche is, I do not know. I think each community has to find that itself.
Senator Tunney: Thank you so much for coming.
I would like to respond to the question you posed a second ago: Are there too many used tractor farm machinery dealers now? The answer is no, there are not. At least in Ontario, we do not have enough. We have far from enough. One of our problems here is that the Americans are sweeping up all of our used farm machinery, particularly our antique farm machinery, with62-cent dollars. The farm machinery dealers that we have in Ontario - and I do not know about the other provinces - cannot keep up with the demand. Really, there are only two of them in Ontario. They say they should be several times bigger than they are. They just cannot keep up. That is kind of an answer and a reaction.
You may know that food manufacturing is first in manufactur ing in seven of our ten provinces. It is second in the other three. It is a huge part of our economy. One-third of our Canadian trade surplus comes from food exports.
I will ask a little different question on your statistical work. I hope that you do not do statistical studies just to amuse us, and that somehow that information gets properly used to expand and to make our economy more buoyant. I suppose, after statistics are developed, the economists study that. They probably advise investors and entrepreneurs. There would be all kinds of information going to you, and what you develop guides our economy through the phases and stages of development. I hope you do not make a lot of errors. We sometimes think you do, because we will say that Statistics Canada does not altogether know quite what it is up to. We might know better, you see, as farmers who are over on the back road somewhere.
We have a big fight on our hands in agriculture. That is what this committee is about. The fight is not within our boundaries and it is not even so much with other countries. We sell food. We export to 190 different countries around the world. Our big problem is WTO and the rules that are made for us by people that we never see.
Just yesterday a ruling came down from the WTO tribunal. I thought we had lost that one. We came close. I would not like to see the dairy and poultry industries return to what they were before there was a board and supply management - before common sense was brought into those industries. I would prefer that the other sectors of agriculture were brought up to the level of dairy farming. It just takes common sense and determination.
I was a little concerned when the first witness said she did not like the idea of paying fees for the sale of commodities domestically. I would say that if you do not like that, you would like it even less if there were no board.
Do you anticipate expanding your statistical studies to more closely define what we should be doing to give us guidance? As farmers in the agricultural community, we need guidance. We need a lot of studies and good sound policy development.
Mr. Bollman: That is a hard one.
Senator Tkachuk: What was the question?
Mr. Bollman: I interpreted the question as: Does Statistics Canada have the solution? The quick answer to that one is no. Today in Ottawa the agriculture division had its annual meeting of the Advisory Committee on Agriculture Statistics. Agri-business people and agricultural professors were advising, on agricultural statistics, how the division should move to get better statistics. That conversation has been going on annually over time.
Statistics Canada is always trying to give helpful information for people to make decisions. The numbers are no good unless they impact on a decision. When a decision is made, based on a number, that turns out to be the right decision then that number has a big impact.
We always want to provide helpful statistics. The chief statistician has to decide two years in advance on the data set, the surveys and the questions to ask. We cannot just push a button and get numbers. Statistics Canada is in the business to provide helpful information, but we must know what information the community needs to move forward. What information does farm business need to move forward?
What will the price of wheat be next week? That is not our business. We can provide a lot of background information to help analysts and consultants and government advisers to make those recommendations. Did I state that one well enough?
Senator Tunney: You did very well with that.
Senator Hubley: My question is on the collection of data. How is it collected and who decides what questions to ask? Are those questions available?
Mr. Bollman: There are a number of places where priorities get set for agricultural statistics. One of the key areas in Statistics Canada is the National Accounts. If a number feeds into the National Accounts, it must be collected. A lot of the income and expenditure data that we ask farmers to tabulate is required to produce the National Accounts.
The advisory committee met today. That is another source.
About three years before we do the census on agriculture, we hold a consultation across the country. One year, the Canadian Farm Women's Network had a representative at each one of those meetings encouraging us and insisting that we include questions about the role of farm women as operators and so on. That consultation happens before every census.
At Agriculture Canada, the federal and provincial ministers of agriculture meet every year and give input to the agricultural statisticians. They indicate the changes that have to be made.
Budgets are tight and it is not easy to make big changes within tight budgets. A significant share of the agricultural statistics budget comes from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to support information it needs for designing safety net programs. We have a lot more data on farm size and farm income revenue sources than we would need just for the National Accounts.
The Deputy Chairman: Ms Brown would like to ask a question of our presenter. Committee rules do not allow questions from people other than members of the committee. However, the rules do allow a witness to make a comment on another witness's presentation. I will allow her to do that.
Ms Brown: One of the statistics was about the population in rural areas around urban centres. That is greatly affecting the farming situation in those centres. You say, yes, they have a market, but I say it affects the ability of farmers in those areas to farm. Many who live there have to give up farming because of the people from the city, or non-farmers who are living in the rural areas. I know of many lawsuits brought by people who come out to the country because it is a lovely place to live, but who do not like the farm atmosphere at certain times of the year.
The Deputy Chairman: Thank you, Ms Brown. Mr. Bol lman, do you want to comment on that comment?
Mr. Bollman: I agree, although I do not have numbers on that. That is certainly the situation I read about in the newspapers. I also support the observation that the University of Guelph has its School of Rural Planning and Development. In Southern Ontario, planning is a bigger issue than development.
The Deputy Chairman: Mr. Bollman, thank you for your presentation.
The committee adjourned