THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Thursday, May 28, 2026
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met with videoconference this day at 8:03 a.m. [ET] to examine and report on the role of the agriculture and agri-food sector with regard to food security in Canada.
Senator Mary Robinson (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: My name is Mary Robinson, and I’m the chair of this committee. Welcome to members of the committee, our witnesses and those watching the meeting online.
I would like to start by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is on the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation.
Before we hear from our witnesses for today, I would like to start by asking the senators around the table to introduce themselves.
Senator Burey: Good morning. Sharon Burey, Ontario.
Senator McBean: Marnie McBean, Ontario.
Senator Black: Rob Black, Ontario.
Senator Muggli: Tracy Muggli, Saskatchewan, Treaty 6 territory.
The Chair: I would like to ask all senators to consult the cards on the table. We all know about accurate interpretation, transcription and captioning.
Today, the committee is continuing its study on the role of agriculture and the agri-food sector with regard to food security in Canada. We have the pleasure of welcoming in person: Alexis Whalen, Chair, Land Over Landings; and Chris Bodnar, Assistant Professor, Agribusiness, University of the Fraser Valley. Thank you very much for joining us and accepting the invitation from this committee.
Due to technical difficulties, we were unable to hear your testimony from the Ag101 study on the disappearance of agricultural land a few weeks ago. Thank you so much for being here.
We will begin with your opening remarks before we move to questions from members. You will each have five minutes. The floor is now yours, Ms. Whalen.
Alexis Whalen, Chair, Land Over Landings: Good morning, honourable senators. Thank you for the invitation to appear before you today.
I am the chair of Land Over Landings. We have been standing on guard for prime farmland for over 20 years and are respected as the current torchbearers of the longest farmland protection movement in Canadian history.
Our mission is to ensure that the federally owned prime agricultural land in Pickering, northeast of Toronto, is permanently protected for the benefit of future generations.
I have two interrelated themes to cover today, both of which have an impact on our future food security.
In 1972, 18,600 acres of Class 1 farmland in north Pickering were expropriated by the federal government for an airport that was never built. About half of the land eventually became part of Rouge National Urban Park. The rest was kept in suspended animation and deep economic depression for over five decades. Farming there was reduced to cash-cropping, halving agricultural economic output. While unintentional, this situation did protect the land from development. But it also prevented it from being used to its full agricultural potential.
In 2025, the airport project was cancelled for good. The government is now deciding what to do with these lands. The choice is to sacrifice them to urban development or add them to the park, where they can continue to be farmed.
We, and a great many others, are fighting tooth and nail for the park option. Protecting these lands as an irreplaceable natural resource and national asset, and ensuring their permanent use for agriculture, also protects our national food security.
However, the land is only half the equation; we also need a next generation of farmers. That brings me to our second topic.
Today, new and young farmers are facing nearly insurmountable barriers to obtaining suitable farmland due to its high cost. Our future depends on those farmers. If they are priced out of suitable land, fewer in the next generation will be able to nourish us, and we risk compromising our food self-sufficiency.
Farmland access is a country-wide problem. But in the Greater Toronto Area, the federal government holds the key to a solution and has the power to use it. That key is the Pickering lands. They constitute one of the country’s largest contiguous blocks of federally owned prime farmland. The power lies in a single cabinet decision, which will occur at some point in the coming months.
We are facing a pivotal moment here — one that directly aligns with your work on a national soil strategy that strengthens and protects Canada’s food security.
Under the stewardship of Parks Canada, the lands could support a new model: long-term renewable leases that would allow farmers — especially young Canadians and skilled newcomers — to build viable businesses without the prohibitive cost of land ownership, enabling investment, innovation and long-term stewardship of the soil itself.
The recent agricultural economics study entitled A Future for the Lands showed how the 6,700 acres of workable land, if used to their maximum agricultural capacity, would become the agri‑tourism hub for the Greater Toronto Area.
This development would have a significant economic impact. Annual economic output on the lands would increase 34-fold to nearly $238 million, while long-term jobs would increase 39-fold to more than 2,100 jobs.
The lands could, once again, be an area of mixed farming — from fruits and vegetables to beef, dairy, poultry and oilseeds. They could help meet the rapidly growing demand for ethnocultural food — estimated at $800 million annually in the Greater Toronto area alone — thereby supplanting imports vulnerable to geopolitical disruption.
An incubation centre on the lands could pair experienced farmers with entrants, and a research and innovation centre could advance climate-resilient agriculture, soil health practices, fertilizer efficiency improvements and high-value crop production.
In short, if the government protects the Pickering lands, it will be protecting our best soil, supporting our farmers and building a more resilient and productive agricultural future. The federal government can do this. It can take advantage of this last opportunity to save the largest contiguous block of federally owned farmland in Canada.
It would be setting an example for all levels of government, making clear the fundamental fact that food security starts by protecting farmland.
Thank you. I invite your questions.
The Chair: Thank you. Next we have Professor Bodnar.
Chris Bodnar, Assistant Professor, Agribusiness, University of the Fraser Valley, as an individual: Honourable Senators, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today on the question of food security in Canada.
My name is Chris Bodnar. I’m an assistant professor in agriculture and agribusiness at the University of the Fraser Valley. I’m also president of Organic BC, representing organic producers and processors, and I’ve spent 20 years farming in the Fraser Valley as part of the Glen Valley Organic Farm Cooperative.
When this committee asks about the role of the agriculture and agri-food sector in Canada’s food security, the answer begins with a simple recognition: that food security has a physical foundation, and that foundation is farmland and the farmers who work it.
Without productive land and a viable next generation of producers, every other ingredient of the food security policy is built on sand. That foundation is eroding, not growing.
Between 2001 and 2021, Canada lost approximately 6 million hectares of farmland — an area larger than Nova Scotia. Ontario alone is now losing 319 acres every day; that’s nearly double the rate of five years ago. Only about 5% of Canada’s land base is arable.
When we consider the land base of Canada, we think we have a lot of land, but we don’t for farmland. Roughly 1% is prime soil, and what we are losing is irreplaceable.
When farmland goes under pavement, it does not come back within any policy horizon that matters. Soil takes centuries to form. We are sealing it in a generation.
Every hectare lost is a permanent reduction in Canada’s capacity to feed itself and the world. This is where food security collides with the economic-growth narratives that drive land-use decisions in this country. Farmland conversion is recorded as a gain: a new subdivision, a new logistics centre or a GDP number. We measure an economic indicator as housing starts. However, the food security ledger never appears. We count the houses built, but not the meals that are foreclosed.
British Columbia has the strongest farmland protection in Canada: the Agricultural Land Reserve, established in 1973. It works, but it is not enough. A peer-reviewed study of Metro Vancouver’s agricultural land reserve, or ALR, lands found that approximately 10% of Class 2 to 4 prime soils — soils sitting inside the protected reserve — are already permanently sealed.
Zoning is necessary, but not sufficient. It draws a line on a map. Outside British Columbia, that line largely does not exist. There is a second food security dimension. Even where farmland stays in agricultural use, the financial structure of farming is being undermined. Farmland prices have climbed far beyond what production can justify. That is, farmers can’t pay for farm land by farming it.
Farms have become land-rich and capital-poor, and the next generation cannot afford to buy in. Investors, pension funds and real estate investment trusts increasingly purchase Canadian farmland as an inflation hedge — not to farm it. Empty barns and absentee landowners do not produce food.
The federal government now has more authority here than is commonly recognized. I want to flag four levers, none of which require Ottawa to step on provincial jurisdictions, each a direct food security investment.
First, tax incentives. An AgriGift program, modelled on the Ecological Gifts Program that already exists, would allow landowners to donate farmland or conservation easements and receive tax recognition. EcoGift is an effective and low-cost program. AgriGift would be the federal government’s first significant retention instrument for food-producing land.
Second, federal land disposal. Federal departments, as we’ve heard, can dispose of Crown land in agricultural areas with no required assessment of agricultural value. A required agricultural-impact review would prevent the federal government itself from contributing to the very problem this committee is investigating.
Third, farmland trusts. A federal framework supporting provincial and community-led farmland trusts would multiply local conservation capacity at virtually no federal cost. What we now lack is a federal policy framework within the charity directorate to recognize farmland trusts as legitimate food security infrastructure.
Fourth, restrict speculative ownership of farmland. Every dollar of speculative bidding raises the floor a young farmer must borrow against. This is squarely federal jurisdiction. Some provinces have acted. However, a coordinated federal approach is overdue.
Honourable senators, in testimony earlier this month, a B.C. colleague of mine asked why the next generation would invest. That was Tyler Heppell. That is the food security question right now.
Every farm that does not transition to a new generation of farmers is a permanent reduction in productive capacity. Every hectare paved is a permanent reduction. We can rebuild a factory in three years. We cannot rebuild a working farm in any policy horizon that matters.
Food security in Canada is not, fundamentally, a question of what we produce today. It is a question of whether we will retain the capacity to produce tomorrow. The instruments to act exist. What is missing so far is the federal will to put them on the table, and the Senate and your committee are uniquely positioned to change that.
Thank you. I welcome your questions.
The Chair: Thank you, Dr. Bodnar. That’s very interesting. We will now proceed to questions from senators. Senators, you will have five minutes to ask your question and have it answered.
Senator Black: Before I start my time, I have a question: Will the testimony we hear today be included — or could it be included — in both our loss of farmland short study and the food security study or is it one or the other?
The Chair: That is a great idea, and we will get back to you if that’s all right.
Senator Black: I think it’s important. Thank you.
I’m putting this question out early so that we don’t end up on a sad note. This is for both of you. I have this fear — and it does actually keep me up at night — that we will come to a time in our lives when we won’t be able to feed our province or our country, let alone the world, which we are being asked to feed today. What do you think about those words, do you foresee this and what would you like to say about that?
Ms. Whalen: Thank you for the question. I’m originally from a very small place. I was born and raised in Barbados and moved to Canada when I was 11 years old. Coming from a very tiny place, I am acutely aware of the vastness of Canada, in theory, but that vastness predisposes us to a sense of wastefulness and squandering resources, because we think that there is land to lose without quantifying or understanding the quantity and the quality of what we’re losing collectively across the country.
When something is lost in a very tiny place, it is extremely noticeable, and it’s a clear call to action. But in a vast place, we must have a critical mass, and I’m hoping that we’re starting to get to that critical mass across the country, where the incremental loss is stacking up, we’re inventorying it, and these are the conversations that we are now having. So yes, it keeps me up at night too because I don’t think we can hold in our minds all the loss that is happening across the country that impacts our vitality, health and ability to feed ourselves.
Mr. Bodnar: When I teach first-year agriculture students about our food system and the complexity of how food gets to our plates, they are astonished. The infrastructure, the logistics, and the number of people employed to feed us every day are mind-blowing. It takes them a long time for it to really sink in and to start to connect the dots. It is because of that complexity and the infrastructure that we have in Canada that we take food for granted. So they don’t understand that there is a team of people across the country that starts working at 5 a.m. every morning doing brokerage work to make sure that every truck crosses the border when the border opens. They don’t understand that there are tens of thousands of coolers across the country to make sure that cold chains aren’t broken and that if we have a failure in one area, there are buyers on the phone working the market across the continent and overseas to make sure that that product, wherever it’s from, is still on the shelves.
So we take it for granted. It has only been in recent years during the pandemic and in British Columbia during the catastrophic floods we had in 2021, when people walked into grocery stores and there were empty shelves. We don’t realize how resilient and robust that system is and yet how fragile it can be. When we don’t understand where the food comes from and we don’t value the soil, or we classify highest and best use as simply a dollar value for what we can turn over in this fiscal year, we lose sight of that.
So I share that fear. It is also very hard to articulate it to people because we’re not hungry as a society overall. Particularly, when most of us have the resources to afford food, we’re not always aware of the challenges that other people have when prices spike, and we’re not able to feed ourselves, for example. We have food insecurity in our society; it’s not to say we don’t. It is a complex issue and one that we can’t take for granted.
Senator Black: Thank you. Ms. Whalen, I understand that Land Over Landings received some extremely frustrating news on Monday evening of this week. Can you speak to this and share with the committee what happened?
Ms. Whalen: Certainly. As you might be aware, there is an ongoing consultation by Transport Canada with regard to the future of the Pickering lands. The City of Pickering, where the federal lands are within, held its council discussion and decision on what their preference would be for the future of the lands. While some of the remaining lands were preferred to be added to the Rouge National Urban Park, a sizeable area of 2,000 acres of Class 1 soil — Class 1 farmland — was assigned to industrial-commercial future uses as the city’s preference.
There was no true recognition that 2,000 acres is a sizeable chunk of an agricultural system, and what they seek — and you touched on this in your delegation — is considered acceptable practice within municipal and regional decisions to squander prime farmland for these other commercial-industrial uses because that is seen to be more lucrative for a municipality.
So we’re in this realm of debating the financial status of a municipality when it comes to the soils that we’re trying to protect.
Those discussions are incredibly frustrating because they become untethered from that which all of us need: food, clean water and clean air every day. Farmland is the foundation for that. Warehouses, data centres and logistics corridors can be placed elsewhere. There are brownfield sites; there are other already designated lands. These lands are not needed for that purpose.
Senator Black: Thank you.
Senator Burey: Thank you so much. This committee has such rich discussion. I happen to be on the Social Affairs, Science and Technology Committee, and we are doing an AI study. One of the big things coming out of that is, of course, the likely impacts of unemployment, especially for youth, and the displacement of workers. This government has said that it wants to have a skill development strategy. Agriculture, of course, would be one of the big things where there is so much technology, there are so many skills needed, and it is under-resourced. It would bring young people in. Have you added those kinds of discussions to your interventions with the governments?
Mr. Bodnar: As an agricultural educator, I would speak to that and say that in British Columbia alone we bring in tens of thousands of farm workers a year because we don’t have the labour capacity in the province to meet the needs of the sector.
On one side, that has rightfully pushed the discussion around automation and mechanization of some work in the sector forward, since that work is often low paid. Often, workers are not working in the best conditions. We need to be able to move beyond such labour dependency, and farms have depended on it because labour has been cheap. That has been a problem.
We would like to look at a new generation of farmers, asking how we can educate people to be innovative within the sector to take advantage of both the technology available to us and the efficiencies that we have. We have seen lagging productivity in Canadian agriculture over the last decade in particular. That is something that our skills training really needs to be part of.
In British Columbia, I teach at a teaching university as opposed to a research university, so we have students coming through who want to work in the sector, and it is something we constantly think about: How do we make sure we are putting students into careers that are viable and will pay them enough? It is challenging because agriculture has been relegated in a lot of discussions. A lot of agriculture programs now don’t graduate students to go into agriculture; they go into associated areas of the sector, like research and development. Those are all important, but we need smart, intelligent and capable people running our farms.
I come from a generation in which my mother was sent to university as was her mother. Education was viewed as foundational to rural communities in Canada. Unfortunately, in the 1980s, agriculture was viewed as a failure in many places. You stayed on the farm if you couldn’t succeed elsewhere. That mentality still exists when it comes to farming, and we need to move beyond that.
Senator Burey: Did you want to speak to that, Ms. Whalen?
Ms. Whalen: Yes. There are three streams we have integrated into our discussions in terms of employment. We are battling a perception that protecting these farmlands in north Pickering is the status quo, and there would be no difference in the employment outlook. That is just absolutely false.
There are three different streams of employment that we see associated with protection. First, of course, is the conservation and restoration economy that allows professionals and students to be employed with Parks Canada and with the Rouge National Urban Park. Then, of course, we have a burgeoning agri-food sector in the Durham region and Pickering, where there are employment opportunities not just on the farm but in the value chain as well.
As I spoke to in our presentation, one of the significant economic profiles of protecting these lands is agri-tourism. So while agri-tourism and tourism may not be full-time, long-term employment for many youths, it is often their first job.
Across Canada, it is documented that most young people’s first experience in the workforce is in tourism and agri-tourism, and they are developing skills of resilience, resourcefulness and interpersonal skills, which set them up for future opportunities.
We liaise quite regularly with Durham College, where they have the Barrett Centre of Innovation in Sustainable Urban Agriculture. We also certainly have allies at the University of Guelph and continue to make new allies across the country in our agricultural educational centres.
So jobs, jobs, jobs. That has always been part of our message because, as we move beyond the perception that agriculture is one man and a tractor, we are a massive employer across the country, and that profile exists here too.
Senator Muggli: Thank you both for being here. I really appreciate it. Mr. Bodnar, I really like your comment about meals foreclosed. We don’t think about that. It could probably be a campaign for the Pickering issue.
I wonder, Mr. Bodnar, if I can just offer you some time to expand on the mechanics of charitable land trusts: how that might work or what that could look like.
Mr. Bodnar: Right now, we have organizations that have attempted to get charitable status to hold farmland in trust, and they have generally been denied unless they have another mechanism. We have some that have that status from before the CRA started scrutinizing charitable requests more closely. The response that’s come back is that the CRA does not see holding farmland as a charitable activity. That makes sense in the longer context of agriculture being an economic activity, and there is difficulty in differentiating between the economic private business aspect of operating a farm and the charitable aspect of making that farm, holding that farm, preserving that farm and making it available to farmers at affordable prices.
The irony within this is that investors understand that differentiation — that they can own farmland and not have to worry about being the ones to farm it. Those two activities are not necessarily one and the same.
We see in Ontario, for example, that the Farmland Trust here has existed for 20 years, and it has functioned by holding easements on properties. Just last year, they started accepting land donations to see how it would go. That was a provision they had put in their charitable objects when they started, and so they were allowed to do it. They had a test plot that someone was donating, and by the time they finished accepting that donation, there were about 10 other property owners lined up wanting to make a similar donation.
So it is a tool in the toolbox. It is not to say that everyone wants to donate their farmland. It is not feasible. But when we look at the number of Canadian farmers who don’t have someone in their family to pass the land to, they want to see it continue to be farmed, and they don’t necessarily need to get their equity out of it, or they have other equity that they can pass on to their children.
Number one, that’s remarkable that people are willing to make that contribution, but it is also sad that we don’t have a mechanism for them to do it. Most of that right now goes through the Ecological Gifts Program, where if a farm has a wetland on it or a forested area, it can be deemed to have ecological value and fall under that program or at least a portion of the land. But the reality is that we have a charitable system in Canada that could offer another pathway to succession that is not within the family. Right now, our succession strategy and all our tax laws are built around the assumption that that succession will happen within the same family from one generation to the next. At a point where one in four Canadians was not born in Canada, we’re excluding a significant portion of people who would be interested in working in agriculture, in farming, from being able to farm. So I think that’s really where the opportunity is right now, with land trusts partnered with an agri-gift program. I think the two really need to go together to realize their full potential.
Senator Muggli: How does our recommendation read in our report on this?
Mr. Bodnar: Right now, there is an agri-gift working group, made up with people from across Canada, including staff within provincial ministries of agriculture who have been studying this. They have a full-policy recommendation, which I will forward to you, to make sure that you have that. They have done that work.
The two pieces are working with national revenue in understanding the opportunity for recognizing farmland trusts as a category of charitable activity — that is one piece. The second piece is looking at an agri-gift program, likely that would fall under the jurisdiction of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Those are the two ministries that would need to be flagged on that, and the two pieces are there.
My colleagues and I have been having these meetings with elected officials. We have, for the most part, had positive feedback, but the key questions that come back from the public service are these: What is the cost? What is the potential tax‑revenue loss to government? How do we avoid abuse of such a program, because for every tax advantage, there are people looking for loopholes? It has to be set up well and thoughtfully, but I think that work has been done by this working group.
Senator Muggli: I should be asking how many meals are foreclosed.
Mr. Bodnar: Exactly. What is the opportunity for a future generation to be able to continue farming viably?
Senator Muggli: And feed us. Thank you.
Senator McBean: Ms. Whalen, we have another member of the committee who, unfortunately, can’t be here today: Senator Sorensen. She has been the mayor of Banff, which is a town inside a national park. We hear the pros and cons that go with that, and then there are other times when we have looked at the creation of other national parks. So we have heard a lot about the management of land that is owned and managed by Parks Canada. I’m just wondering if you can talk me through why the advantage is to move this land that you want farmed into Parks Canada ownership instead of zoning it to ag land and making it available to own.
Ms. Whalen: Fair question. Thank you. The Rouge National Urban Park is a unique national park in the sense that it has three pillars: nature, culture and agriculture. When it was created, the legislation made space and made it possible for farming to be within the park. As we, over the years, have looked at various mechanisms and tools for permanent farmland protection of the remaining acres in Pickering, Parks Canada is the natural next step for permanent protection.
In Ontario, we have a bit of a fraught history with protecting agricultural land that is zoned agricultural. In Pickering, we also have the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve, which was considered the most easement and legally protected agricultural preserve in the province, and that protection was still rolled back a number of years ago in the Greenbelt struggle.
There are not foolproof mechanisms in Ontario today to permanently protect farmland. Parks Canada is it. It may be not the perfect solution, but there is, as we understand it, no other national mechanism that permanently protects this farmland. I believe that Parks Canada has come to learn and understand deeply that farmers are environmental stewards. Ecological integrity and restoration can be advanced in partnership with agricultural partners in the park, and so we remain very hopeful that the Parks Canada solution will be the right one for the Pickering lands.
It also allows, in the agricultural leases, for an assignment of the lease to a next generation or a next partner so that succession planning is well identified and planned within the national park structure so that there are incentives and on-the-ground proofs to investing in your farm, your farm business and your agritourism farmgate experience, and that that investment is not a wash, that you can pass that on to the next steward, as you see fit.
Senator McBean: Thank you. When the park was created, was that part of their discussion? When they opened up that ag category, were they intentional in being open to receiving new lands in the future? Sometimes I know when we have discussions, it is about, “Oh, when this land becomes available,” that can come in. Do you know if that was part of their discussions at all, or were they happy to get the first 9,000 acres?
Ms. Whalen: I was not involved specifically in those discussions at that time. I could certainly get back to you.
Is there room for growth? Absolutely. Parks Canada has made it abundantly clear that the health and integrity of what happens outside the park border are important to the park. Park health doesn’t stop at roads and municipal borders. It is an ecosystem; it is a bioregion. So their lens is wider than the park border is itself.
I don’t want to put words in their mouths or give you the impression that the legislation is written that way, because I don’t know.
Senator McBean: Closing on that, Professor Bodnar, do you have any thoughts on Parks Canada owning the agricultural land? Are there other areas in the country where that’s the case?
Mr. Bodnar: In other areas of the country, I don’t know. I do know that it is certainly not unprecedented for different levels of government to own land that is used for farming. In most provinces, the province itself is the largest owner of land, whether that is Crown lands or otherwise. In British Columbia, half of the land in the Agricultural Land Reserve and is owned by the province. It comes down to political will as to how the land is used, what it is used for and how it is made available to people. I don’t know that it is unprecedented, but when we look at a national park, with this specific example, the opportunity to demonstrate a viable model that the community supports and is engaged with is valuable.
The other piece here that is really important is that when farmers are part of a community and there is accountability, it changes the way people farm. So when we have corporately owned land that is leased to farmers at a high rate, the objective is to get what you can off of that land. It is not to put back into the land and preserve it. Flying over the Prairies this winter, I saw big chunks of land with no cover, and it was like someone had smeared across the landscape, and all the soil had blown miles and miles away from where that was. That’s poor stewardship of that land.
In Manitoba last week, we saw winds of 120 to 130 kilometres per hour, and the ditches were full of soil. A lot of this is land. I was talking to a colleague earlier this week who had pictures of it, and she said, you can see that this is land that is corporately owned and leased to farmers versus the land across the street that is owned by the farmer. The practices of care are very different.
With an example like this, the community is engaged, they are supportive of the farmers and there is accountability. It literally changes the landscape of how it is managed and how people are engaged in understanding food production.
Ms. Whalen: If I could add one more little piece, it would be pride. Being a farmer and having a long-term agricultural lease within a national park will help rebuild pride in this area because that has been stripped by over half a century of extractive, transactional practices. So the ask of Parks Canada is bigger than just holding space for protecting farmland. It is to help a community return to a place of health, vitality, pride and dignity.
The Chair: Dr. Bodnar, I would like to return to your statement about how food security has a physical foundation. I appreciated that. With regard to the comments about renting versus owning and pride, for people outside of agriculture, we just have to think of what it means when you rent a car versus owning a car or what it means when you rent an apartment versus owning a home. It impacts the things you are willing to invest in with your time and how it reflects on you as an individual. That’s just renting versus owning. When we look at land, and we see a generational legacy of ownership of land, there is a value there that is difficult for people outside of agriculture to understand.
Dr. Bodnar, I wanted to go a little further into what Senator Burey was asking about on labour. We see this complexity over and over, and we hear about low-paid labour within the ag sector. Could you give us a bit of insight about what you might teach on that: the complexity of it, and how, on one side, we want the cheapest, highest quality and most available food we can get, and on the other side, we want it as cheaply as we can get? Can you talk about how the labour situation might be fixed? What do you teach your students?
Mr. Bodnar: You can look at the history of food production and the differences in types of agriculture. For example, we can do cropping agriculture, which is largely mechanized. One individual can operate a combine, for example, covering thousands of acres in a day. We have made significant progress there. But it is a different commodity than fresh fruit and vegetables. So horticultural production is incredibly labour-intensive, as is livestock production.
For much of our horticultural production, as a society, we have offshored it. The term “banana republic” exists because of intensive efforts to keep countries’ entire economies subservient to Western countries to produce cheap food. We see things like what is happening right now in the United States, with the crackdown on illegal immigration and people being afraid to go to work. This is the backbone of the horticultural sector. These are the people who do backbreaking work that no one else wants to do within society, and they do it for dollars a day, paid under the table. So it is exploitative.
When we don’t recognize the exploitative nature of some of our food systems, we avoid making difficult choices. There is a premium that’s paid for domestically produced food. It costs more to produce food when half of your overhead is labour. If we increase the price of labour, that is going to affect the price of food. But at the same time, that needs to drive innovation. It is not fixing problems in other countries to fly people in as temporary workers and have them work here when we should be looking at how we produce this food using more technology that does not require people to put their physical bodies at risk to produce food so that we can have cheap food in our stores.
Our food security has to rely on making people’s lives better throughout the food system, not just for the end consumer of that product. When we think about it like that, it makes the conversation more difficult, but it also gets us to real solutions for understanding the price of food, what is lost when we lose the land, when the land becomes more expensive and when all of your variables become costlier. It makes it more difficult, and people are prone to walk away from it and say, well, we can just buy food from somewhere else.
At this point in time, when we realize how vulnerable we are as a nation and how much we are dependent upon other countries, particularly for this type of production, we need to do better. We need to find those solutions. We’re smart, creative and intelligent people. We can innovate and overcome this, and we can continue to make Canada a major player in food production.
The Chair: The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council reported $3.5 billion in lost sales to primary production because of unfilled positions and workforce scarcity. One third of employers reported receiving zero job applications from domestic workforces. So we have a fundamental issue on labour, and if we are going to look at our food security, if you wanted to put pen to paper, you could give us some ideas as to how, within our report, we might inform and make a recommendation as to the role that labour plays in helping secure our food production, because that is a trend.
We see this, and they tell us that AI is going to eliminate the three d’s: the dirty, dull and dangerous jobs. But right now, we have this huge gap of unfilled labour. How do we deal with that? You have spoken about the inability to be profitable enough to justify investment in land. If we can’t find people to help work that land, and we look at high-value horticulture situations, we really have to spend a lot of time finding solutions to the labour situation. I would love it if you had the appetite and the time to give us your thoughts on that because I’m out of time.
Senator Black: Thank you very much to both of you for sharing your passion on the issues of food security and land-use planning. Ms. Whalen, what do you think government officials or policy-makers most often misunderstand when considering agricultural land for future development?
Ms. Whalen: The opportunity cost. Every industrial use that I have seen proposed on prime farmland in the last 10 years could be sited someplace else and is often crafted based on a trend, a whim or a market report that somebody paid for, and it is all untethered from our basic human needs.
Senator Black: Professor Bodnar, you have talked about, with respect to food security, both preserving protected farmland and maintaining a financially viable agricultural sector. What do you see as the greatest threat to each of these?
Mr. Bodnar: The viability of farming right now is a huge issue, and in British Columbia, we’re feeling that acutely. A lot of our operating costs are significantly higher than other parts of Canada. Our margins are half of what they are from similar sectors in other parts of the country. So we’re a bit of a case study of what happens when land becomes unaffordable and inaccessible to farmers, along with other rising input costs. How quickly that creates a crisis. Tyler Heppell said, as I quoted, “Who has an incentive to invest?” That’s really it: getting young farmers to see a 25-year horizon where that investment is going to be worthwhile and that they want to make that their life’s work.
Senator Burey: I would like you, Professor Bodnar, to talk about the agricultural impact review or assessment as a recommendation and if you can’t finish it, then send it to us.
Ms. Whalen, I would like you to speak about land trusts and marginalized groups getting access to farmland and the social cohesion that that could bring.
Mr. Bodnar: From a policy and procedure point of view, requiring an agricultural impact assessment on the dispossession of land at a federal level simply sets a benchmark against which decisions have to be made.
If that’s a requirement and that’s the report that comes back in terms of how that decision is made, we have something that is tangible and that is harder to ignore. It requires it to be on paper and understanding what the potential loss is.
Ms. Whalen: Can I just pick up on that a bit and say, at the municipal level or the regional level, they receive the agricultural assessment report and say, “Oh, yes, it is soil. Great. Dirt to build on.”
In terms of leasing and the invitation to invite new entrants in, it is a powerful change of the message in that we recognize that there are barriers for you to contemplate a business in farming, a business that speaks to your strengths and your goals for your career path and your life. In setting up an agricultural long-term leasing structure within the park and in land-trust situations, we give people who have otherwise given up the opportunity to dream about how they can contribute to a local food system and help build community. I think that, for a long time, we have stripped options out of agriculture. We have created a very well‑defined conventional pathway, but in the margins were conversations that were happening in community gardens, at farmers markets and among students who are graduating from agricultural sectors. They say, well, I did this because this is my passion and I’m well grounded in education of it, but I can go no further. So this changes the channel and opens doors where there weren’t doors to open before.
Senator Muggli: Mr. Bodnar, I have been thinking a lot about the B.C. situation. I’m curious about the food products that we will lose in our domestic food chain if we continue to lose land in British Columbia that is turning into estates and other developments, recognizing the unique landscape and that’s the only place we grow some things.
Mr. Bodnar: Yes. In terms of highbush blueberries, British Columbia produces almost all of Canada’s supply. The rest is a lowbush from the Maritimes, which is a nation apart, in terms of the distance.
The one that I think is interesting is cranberries. When the Agriculture Land Reserve was created in 1973, there were significant amounts of acidic bog soil that was included, and this irritated a lot of people because they said, “This is not farmland. This is not viable.” By designating it as farmland, it required some creative thinking, and people realized, “Wait a minute. These are native soils to here.” Cranberries, blueberries and various biological relatives have grown here for millennia, and it was the foundation for B.C. having a viable cranberry industry. That has been a sector that wealth has been built on. By simply saying that land is not productive in that format, we lose the opportunity to think creatively about what can be done there.
Horticultural production in British Columbia: We feed significant portions of Western Canada with those products, and those are the high-value and perishable items that we require and desire in our diets, and we can’t lose that production.
Senator Muggli: Just to end, in case there is not time, feel free to send us something in writing. I will start with Ms. Whalen. How can we educate the public on the importance of maintaining agricultural land?
Ms. Whalen: Power of the plate begins in our homes, looking at the choices that we have made for our meals, connecting it back to the producer. I know that there is a tremendous amount of education that goes into schools, but maybe not enough of a return to really, truly understanding the value chain of employment opportunities, from field to fork. Hey, you want to be an engineer; hey, you want to be a veterinarian. Well, those sectors can fit right into our daily food system, really reorienting and returning pride of place, pride of hand, to agricultural. Wouldn’t we all love to see the same amount of attention going into agriculture as the defence and the auto sectors and others? This is our health and well-being that we are talking about, and the foundation is at risk. What’s that expression? The frog in the boiling pot doesn’t know how to jump out. This is, I feel, the situation that we’re in.
Senator Muggli: If you can supply something in writing on that, that would be fantastic.
Senator McBean: Professor Bodnar, you mentioned something in your four recommendations: When the feds do land disposal, it requires them to assess the agricultural value of the land. I was just surprised that they don’t. Could you dive into that recommendation again?
Mr. Bodnar: It is simply having that benchmark to evaluate decisions against. There needs to be a framework against which land sales are done; we need to have that as a criterion. So where we do have federal lands that are currently being farmed, that should be something that is considered as to what is the contribution of that economically to livelihoods and so on.
I do want to acknowledge that my university is built on lands that were federal lands, and there is an Indigenous component here. We can see lands as food lands and farmlands, and there are productive capacities that go well beyond the way that we think of agriculture from a Western perspective. All of those perspectives need to be taken into account in making decisions about the viability of our food supply.
The Canadian Federation of Agriculture has done work on this. There is work that has just been done in Ontario around provincial guidelines for doing agricultural assessments on land. Work has been done, and we can follow that lead. So that’s where I would point you to.
Senator McBean: Thank you.
The Chair: I wanted to share with you that I had the pleasure recently of hearing the Minister of Health, Minister Michel, speak at an industry event. To build on one of your points, Ms. Whalen, about how this is our health and well-being that we are talking about. As Minister of Health, she made the point very strongly that she feels Health needs to see agriculture as being profitable. That will not only ensure the production of our food, but it will also fund a lot of what we want as far as our health and our health care system. It is quite a symbiotic situation we are in, and when we look at agriculture, we are seeing this government really adopt this economic lens. I think that’s so important because it will drive so much of the solutions that we need to see as far as how producers can access and have secure access to land for production into the future.
With that, I’m going to thank you so much for coming here and for being patient to come back when we couldn’t have you initially. I really appreciate all of the work and effort you put into preparing your statements and answering, obviously, questions from a very engaged committee here.
Thank you again for your time.
For the second panel today, we have the pleasure of welcoming from Cowessess First Nation, Chief Erica Beaudin and Councillor Terry Lerat. Welcome. Also, with us in the room, from the National Circle for Indigenous Agriculture and Food, we welcome Kallie Wood, President and CEO. Lastly, from the Manitoba Métis Federation, we welcome David Beaudin, Minister of Agriculture; and Marci Riel, Senior Director, Energy, Infrastructure and Resource Management.
Thank you very much for joining us. We will begin with your opening remarks before we move to questions from members. You will each have five minutes.
The floor is now yours, Chief Beaudin and Councillor Lerat.
Erica Beaudin, Chief, Cowessess First Nation: Thank you. Good morning. Madam Chair and honourable senators, I would like to thank you for this opportunity for my colleague and uncle Councillor Terry Lerat and I to present to you on behalf of Cowessess First Nation on the topic of the role of agriculture and agri-food sector with regard to food security in Canada.
Cowessess First Nation has a long and proud history in agriculture. Both Councillor Terry and I come from a proud history of farming families. We know how farming families, from the time of breaking the soil on the Prairies to the sophisticated machinery used today, have created self-sufficiency for the individual families as well as for our collective.
I am one generation removed from farming, but Councillor Terry is the second generation of four generations of farmers on our beautiful homelands.
Despite restrictive federal policies like the Peasant Farming Policy and the Pass System, Cowessess families continued farming, raising livestock and contributing to the Prairies agricultural economy well into the mid-1900s until today.
Our people understood the value of land stewardship, food production and economic independence long before those ideas became part of today’s conversations around food sovereignty.
But generations of restrictive policies, land loss, lack of access to capital and federal control over Indigenous economies weakened those agricultural systems and disrupted the transfer of farming knowledge from one generation to the next. The impacts of that history are still felt today, especially as Cowessess continues waiting for resolution of the long outstanding 1907 Land Claim — a delay that continues to affect opportunities for agricultural development, food security and economic growth within the Cowessess First Nation.
As the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is dedicated to ensuring that Canada is economically independent, so are we on Cowessess First Nation.
Agriculture, animal husbandry and all other types of responsible land, water and air stewardship are integral to the independence and interdependence of Cowessess First Nation. Both Canada and Cowessess can work together to achieve our goals, much like how our veterans stood together for freedom in the world wars.
Cowessess is still rebuilding. Like many First Nations across Saskatchewan, the community is part of a growing movement focused on reclaiming agriculture, restoring food sovereignty and creating a future grounded in self-determination and connection to the land.
I now present to you Councillor Terry Lerat, who is not only a custom farmer on our lands, but is also a rancher and beekeeper who has spent his entire life dedicated to honouring our agricultural and food sustainability heritage. He is also committed to the future of Cowessess being sovereign, not only in monetary wealth, but also in ensuring that Cowessess continues its proud of agriculture.
Thank you.
Terry Lerat, Councillor, Cowessess First Nation: Good morning, everyone. When we talk about agriculture in Saskatchewan, Cowessess First Nation is an important part of history, not only because of the challenges our people faced, but because of the resilience that our community has shown for generations.
Many people do not realize that, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, through the treaties with the Crown, our First Nations agreed to share the lands and take up farming and ranching. Our forefathers quickly became successful when they made that move. We were offered our 50,000 acres of First Nation land, and we were successful farmers.
The local settlers started campaigning and protesting to the governments that First Nations farmers had unfair advantages because we were farming next to the railroad, and we had easier access to markets.
That led the government instructors to implement the Peasant Farm Policy, which restricted the First Nations farmers from using modern farm equipment. They had to revert back to ancient ways of farming and harvesting their grains. That set them back a lot.
They also implemented the Farm Pass System, where the First Nations members had to seek permission to leave the First Nations to sell their commodities and their produce. That created hardships and limited the advancement of their lifestyles into modern lifestyles. Next, they were forced to sell a portion of their farmland. Twenty thousand and forty acres were lost. That was our prime farmland. Again, that created personal loss because, where they were farming on prime farmland, they lost their farms. They lost their efforts in developing their farms on our First Nations.
Despite these barriers, our membership continued farming and raising livestock well into the mid-1900s. That perseverance matters because it shows that our people never lacked the ability to work or the work ethic to succeed in agriculture. What was lacking was fair and equal opportunity.
By the 1960s, however, the combined impacts of restrictive federal policies, land fragmentation, lack of access to capital and exclusion from modern markets caused the Cowessess agricultural economy to decline sharply.
Next came another blow to our lifestyle on the First Nations: the welfare system. People were already weakened by struggles with restrictive farm policies. Families that accepted the settler lifestyle were despondent and became increasingly dependent on federal policies for income support.
The impact went far beyond economics. Lifestyles rapidly changed. Pride and knowledge that had been passed down through generations began to decline. First Nations communities experienced growing poverty, hopelessness, addictions and loss of autonomy after being pushed out of meaningful participation in the agricultural economy. But our Indigenous communities fought back against that cycle.
In the 1970s and 1980s, programs like the Saskatchewan Indian Agriculture Program, or SIAP, were created to help rebuild the Indigenous agricultural past, and this program was dearly needed on all First Nations.
It was dearly needed because all the federal and provincial agriculture assistance programs were geared towards taxpaying farmers. First Nations were not taxpaying. That put restrictions on our ability to improve our farms and to expand. It created hardships to make our families viable. The cost of modern farm equipment ruled the cost of production. Our cost of production could not be justified with our return on investment. It created a lot of problems. We were having a hard time getting assets for farming because we could not use our land as collateral. It was Crown land.
Many of our younger generations then walked away from farming because they were having trouble securing the guaranteed funds we needed to farm. It did not help that Indian Affairs, now ISC, was unfair in leasing out all our farmlands to non-First-Nations farmers for cash. That put big restrictions on us.
Today, First Nations farmers are taking back control of our own lands by farming and ranching. That is Cowessess First Nation. We have also acquired a small herd of breeding buffalo to grow our cultural, spiritual and food sustainability for our members’ needs.
Many First Nations, including Cowessess, continue to face barriers in accessing loans for agricultural needs and investments on machinery for agriculture and food subsistence facilities, greenhouse communities or market gardens. The list could go on and on. For Cowessess specifically, our unresolved 1907 land claim remains a major issue. We need this capital investment to continue farming and creating richer lifestyles for our First Nations. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Lerat, and Chief Beaudin.
Next we have Ms. Wood. The floor is yours.
Kallie Wood, President and CEO, National Circle for Indigenous Agriculture and Food: Good morning, senators. Thank you so much for this kind invitation. It’s good to be here today and see a lot of familiar faces. I see one left us already, so I’ll give him a little grief over that later.
From a First Nation’s perspective, food security is not simply about access to food. It’s about sovereignty and dignity, culture and land, water and language, and the rights of Indigenous Peoples to feed our communities according to our own values and systems.
For generations, First Nations and Inuit people sustained sophisticated food systems rooted in stewardship, trade, biodiversity, agriculture, hunting, fishing and forestry practices that respected the balance between the people and the land.
Colonization very much disrupted those systems through displacement and restrictive policies — as Chief Beaudin shared — environmental degradation and barriers to economic participation. The impacts of these disruptions continue today.
In many Indigenous communities across Canada, food insecurity remains among the highest in the country. Families face extremely high grocery costs, limited infrastructure, lack of transportation, unreliable supply chains and barriers to accessing capital and agricultural opportunities, as Terry Lerat shared.
In northern remote communities, basic healthy food can cost two to three times more than in urban centres. Yet despite these challenges, Indigenous communities across Canada are not waiting to be rescued. We are rebuilding, and we are very much a part of the landscape of agriculture in Canada. Across the country, First Nations, Inuit and Métis producers are leading innovative work in agriculture, food production, fisheries, bison restoration, community gardens and greenhouses, seed saving, regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, forest foods, medicinal plant harvesting, youth education and, of course, traditional land stewardship.
Indigenous agriculture is one of the fastest growing areas within Canadian agriculture, but it remains significantly undersupported. Indigenous Peoples are the fastest growing demographic in Canada. It is an opportunity that we’ve missed.
As this committee also carries responsibility for forestry, I believe that it is important to recognize that forests themselves are part of Indigenous food security.
For Indigenous Peoples and communities, forests are not only economic assets; they are food systems, they are medicine cabinets and they are teaching spaces and climate protectors. Traditional foods, such as berries, wild rice, mushrooms, maple products, game and medicinal plants, all depend on healthy forest ecosystems. Sustainable forestry practices and Indigenous-led land stewardship are directly connected to long-term food security, environmental resilience and community well-being.
Indigenous knowledge has guided the sustainable management of forests for thousands of years. As Canada faces increasing pressures from climate change, wildfire and biodiversity loss, Indigenous-led forestry and land management must be viewed not as a secondary consultation but as essential leadership. Our voices need to be around the tables making those decisions.
The NCIAF was created because Indigenous producers and communities needed a national voice, one grounded in Indigenous leadership, Indigenous realities and the understanding of the uniqueness of every community in this country.
Food security for Indigenous Peoples cannot be addressed through short-term programming alone. It requires long-term Indigenous-led investment and policy transformation. We believe Canada has an opportunity to build a stronger national food system by recognizing Indigenous agriculture and food systems as essential contributors to Canada’s future.
We recently suggested in the budget that we put at least $25 million into an Indigenous agriculture fund, and this was submitted a couple of weeks ago.
Food security for Indigenous people cannot be addressed through short-term programming alone. It requires long-term Indigenous-led investment and policy transformation. We believe, again, that Canada has an opportunity to build a stronger national food system. That means investing in Indigenous-controlled agriculture and forestry infrastructure, expanding access to land and financing, removing barriers, supporting Indigenous food businesses and producers, investing in youth and workforce development and ensuring Indigenous representation in national, agriculture and forestry policy discussions from the foundation.
It also means understanding that reconciliation must include economic reconciliation. When Indigenous communities can grow, harvest, process, distribute and sell our own food and land-based products, we create jobs, strengthen our communities and local economies, improve health outcomes and reconnect your youth to culture and land-based learning. We also reduce dependency on vulnerable supply chains. This is not only an Indigenous issue but also a Canadian food security issue.
Indigenous knowledge systems hold valuable solutions for sustainability, climate resilience, biodiversity, regenerative agriculture and forest stewardship. Across Canada, we’ll increasingly rely on this in the years ahead. As senators, you can help shift the conversations from inclusion to partnership.
In closing, food security for Indigenous Peoples is inseparable from self-determination. When Indigenous communities have the tools, resources and authority to feed themselves and steward their lands and forests, communities become healthier, economies become stronger and Canada becomes more resilient. The work ahead is not just about feeding people. It is about restoring relationships with land, forest, community and with each other.
Thank you, hiy hiy. I look forward to your questions.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Wood. The floor is now yours, Mr. Beaudin and Ms. Riel. I understand you will be splitting your five minutes. Go ahead.
David Beaudin, Minister of Agriculture, Manitoba Métis Federation: Good morning, senators. Thank you for the invitation to appear before the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry regarding food security.
The Manitoba Métis Federation, or MMF, is the national government of the Red River Métis and represents tens of thousands of Red River Métis families across the Prairies.
From the bison hunt, which shaped our earliest democratic self-governance structure to the characteristic river lot system of the Red River Settlement featuring abundant gardens and hay land to the “kitchen table” discussion, Red River Métis culture and tradition are rooted in agriculture and food.
Today, the MMF’s agriculture portfolio represents the rights, claims and interests of the Red River Métis in the agriculture and agri-food sector. As we develop and administer programming and initiatives, the work is centred around citizen-identified priorities of community and climate resilience, food security and educational programming with immediate, medium- and long‑term solutions to build a resilient food system for the Red River Métis.
In the face of rising food prices, the MMF seeks to provide immediate relief to citizens facing food insecurity through our Food Security Initiative. From a network of greenhouses and community gardens across the homeland, the MMF distributes thousands of pounds of produce annually, as well as bison meat from the MMF’s own herd.
The MMF has also recently launched the citizen-led Community Garden Initiative and has constructed over 1,000 at‑home garden boxes for citizens, bringing local food production to citizens at large and helping to return traditional horticultural knowledge to the greater Red River Métis community.
The greenhouse and garden infrastructure, as well as the bison herd, are investments that will continue to serve, feed and provide educational opportunities in the medium term.
This is not to mention other skill-building or knowledge-transfer opportunities that the MMF has hosted, including food processing and preservation workshops, food safety training courses and recipe development in partnership with commercial kitchens, reimagining what Red River Métis food means.
Finally, through educational and support programs for farmers and ranchers, the MMF is setting producers up for long-term environmental and economic success of their operations, maintaining Red River Métis participation in this traditional economy.
This includes the Red River Métis On-Farm Climate Action Program, which has awarded over $13.3 million in funding to 196 Red River Métis producers, improving over 90,000 acres across the national homeland in its first three years.
While these programs have been incredibly successful, with significant federal investments, including from the Local Food Infrastructure Fund and On-Farm Climate Action Fund, successful programs are not meaningful in isolation. Reconciliation is grounded in permanency, government-to-government relationship building and policy, with consideration for distinctions-based approaches when working with Indigenous Peoples.
I will transition to Marci Riel for the second part.
Marci Riel, Senior Director, Energy, Infrastructure and Resource Management, Manitoba Métis Federation: Good morning, senators.
In the MMF’s experience, the agriculture sector is not well versed in navigating relations with Indigenous people. It is less informed of processes for engagement and consultation and of appropriate language when addressing our communities and governance.
Where space is made for Indigenous perspectives in agriculture, “Indigenous” is often misinterpreted by Canada and federal program directives as meaning First Nations. The Red River Métis and the Inuit are an afterthought, rather than considered at the outset as full and equal partners.
“Indigenous agriculture” is often thought to mean greenhouses, market gardens or school food programs, which are all initiatives that can more easily be implemented where there is a small, central geographic location, such as a First Nations reserve.
The MMF represents Red River Métis citizens across the national homeland, and programming offered must be a reflection of MMF governance. The homeland is not a dot on a map but rather a map of its own. At the same time, the scope of the national homeland means that no other Indigenous nation can provide the reach or scope that the MMF can.
This exemplifies the need for distinctions-based opportunities and funding allocations, and provisions for Indigenous people, including the MMF, to define their own systems and measures of success.
Industry stakeholders have come to this committee to recommend investments in processing capacity, market opportunities and research. The MMF, as the national government of the Red River Métis, is here today to remind government of its duty to consult and accommodate, and to invite industry and academia to consider the Red River Métis as partners in new opportunities.
While infrastructure and capital investments are acknowledged and appreciated, it is policy that affirms meaningful, long-term, distinctions-based participation.
As we approach the launch of the next policy framework for agriculture in 2028, the MMF looks forward to federal, provincial and territorial ministers of agriculture for appropriate consultation with the MMF on behalf of the Red River Métis. Indeed, it is vital that the FPT transition to an FPIT process to ensure meaningful participation of Indigenous Nations.
Resilient food systems for the Red River Métis are paramount to our collective goal of a sustainable, productive and equitable agriculture and agri-food sector for all.
Marsee.
The Chair: Thank you, all, for your openings remarks. We will now proceed to questions from senators.
Senators, you will each have five minutes in which to ask and have questions answered.
Senator Burey: Thank you so much for being here and for offering so much expertise. I just felt like I had a bit of a spiritual experience listening to the history and hearing about the resilience, strength and innovation. I’m so thankful to be here.
Let me get to my question, which is for everyone. Ms. Wood, you spoke about long-term investments and full partnership with Indigenous Peoples, taking into account First Nations, Métis and Inuit as essential contributors to food security for Canada. You spoke about having that as a pillar.
I would like your comments because we have to come up with recommendations for this study. You can expand on it, Ms. Wood, and then everyone else could take it.
Ms. Wood: Thank you for the question.
We have had the distinct honour and pleasure of being around the table for the last policy frameworks. This will be the third one I have had the opportunity to share my voice in. What I will say about the next policy frameworks is that, as we build out those programs across Canada in the provinces and territories, there are parameters around those programs that exist. When the first point in those programs is that you have to prove that you have $50,000 of farm income to be eligible, that’s very difficult for First Nations, given that they are tax-exempt, et cetera, when they are on nations.
I think the other piece of that is creating an Indigenous agricultural fund, as I talked about. Terry alluded to this in his comments in regard to SIAP, which used to be the Saskatchewan Indian Agriculture Program. That funding was set there, so it was separate and apart from provincial and federal funding programs that were there.
That program was set up such that they knew the distinction of each First Nation, the Métis regions and the Inuit who were applying. We’re a very small community when you look across Canada. We are very distinct people groups. However, we are all related.
What’s really important to recognize, as we start to look to the future on what Indigenous agriculture opportunities are out there, we really need to take a hard look at creating a fund that is Indigenous-led. I know MMF spoke about it here, as did David. We have the opportunity to create funding models where the government doesn’t have to have the difficulty of figuring out if this is something that they should be investing in for each individual community; it is not a one size fits all. As we go forward, that would be a game changer for Indigenous agriculture in Canada: food security, food sovereignty and understanding that.
Ms. Beaudin: Thank you for the question, Senator Burey.
I’m going to say this very succinctly and then expand on it: It is about “land back” and the fact that we talked about our 1907 land surrender, where land was taken away from us, and we have lost incredible opportunities for our people to have land stewardship.
The last panel spoke about the changes in climate and that when people have that investment in the land, then you take care of it. That’s what stewardship is about. We know that, increasingly, the wind is becoming an issue, especially on the Prairies, with topsoil. For us, it is about the innovation and reaching to the future as Indigenous farmers but also recognizing our connection to the land so that we take care of the land in the changing climate.
When I say “land back,” for us at Cowessess First Nation, the land in 1907 that went right to the railroad was the most profitable land there was. Due to federal policies, as stated, we lost out on that opportunity and those generations of knowledge being passed down. Right now, we are in a reclamation phase, reclaiming our history and what was ours. That is about self‑sufficiency and us being able to take care of not only our families through farming, ranching and all of the ways that we, on the Prairies, have always done, but also contributing as producers to the larger Canadian economy.
Mr. Lerat: Thank you for the question. I appreciate the responses from Kallie, our colleagues and Chief Beaudin.
I have to speak about what we are really trying to achieve on Cowessess First Nation. We are trying to achieve self-sufficiency through the use of our land. We looked at the umbrella of government programs to see what is spoken about government programs to help create an umbrella for us to use that land. Going into the future, we would like to use our land.
The future includes our future generations, too. I have to step back and take a look at where I come from and where I want to go. I grew up hanging onto my dad’s back pocket and learning. Today’s younger generations don’t have that; they lost it, and they lost the ability to farm through policies that were brought to us. Our future generations right up to grade 12 know nothing about agriculture. We should dwell on that. We should dwell on teaching them and introducing them to agriculture and the benefits of a healthy lifestyle of agricultural on our own lands and showing them the chance of a good, successful life by utilizing our own land instead of migrating off the First Nation and seeking other employment in industries that are taken for granted on the First Nation. There is no one connected to the land using it, like I do right now, like our parents.
I would like to see more of a focus on our next generations through agriculture in the classroom, learning about agriculture and what it does for them and opening the doors for them to go on to university — a school of ag and things like that — and coming back. You don’t have to come back to the First Nation to work; it opens up many opportunities in the agriculture sector to work.
Agriculture doesn’t mean farming the land, getting dusty like a dusty old farmer. There are so many opportunities out there that I work with, working the soils and crops with the University of Saskatchewan. I work with the Ministry of Agriculture to try and create better programs to utilize our land better to increase the wealth of our First Nation. That’s what it is all about.
I would like to take a step back and focus on our younger or upcoming generation to teach them about the future of agriculture and food sustainability on our First Nations.
Senator Muggli: Meegwetch and marsee for being here today. I really appreciate it.
I also want to acknowledge that Cowessess First Nation, along with many other First Nations across the country, have unresolved historic land claims and the limitations that it places on self-sufficiency and, quite frankly, food sovereignty and food security for all of us. I hope we can emphasize the point that these are things that need to be settled, because it does limit you from being able to invest, not only in agriculture, but in other investments.
I’m curious. As a result of that delay in settlements, have you had to delay agricultural projects at Cowessess? Also, Councillor Lerat, I believe you have an initiative to incorporate more youth to learn about cattle farming.
Mr. Lerat: It’s always the dream to incorporate more of our younger generations to learn about what we are achieving right now on Cowessess First Nation.
Senator Muggli: Can you tell us a bit about what you’re doing in the cattle farming area?
Mr. Lerat: In 2007, I initiated the 4C Farms program. The four C’s stand for Cowessess Community Cattle Company. The idea was to build a herd of superior cattle that, when we got the herd built up to 300 head, then we could start pulling smaller groups out, five or eight cows, and farming them out to individual band members who wanted to get into cattle production. While we were building the herd up to 300 head, the goal was to train band members in the management of cattle: how to raise and look after cattle. Then we would let them take home some cows for five years. We would loan them cows. In those five years, they would take all the offspring off the cows and pass five healthy cows on to another First Nation member who wanted to continue that. That was our dream when introducing livestock production back to our First Nations. It is still there. We are still working.
We now have a superior heard of 230 mother cows. Our next step is to start farming them out and lending little herds to our individual band members. Throughout the process, we’ve acquired enough land to make these little livestock operations viable.
When I was growing up, every First Nation house on our lands had four or five cows, horses, pigs, chickens and vegetable gardens. They were sustainable. When that welfare program that I spoke about came along, they quit that all because life was too easy; they put their hands out, and they were fed.
We would like to introduce that lifestyle back. First Nations people were originally in tune with livestock. They weren’t farmers. It’s easier to raise small herds of livestock. It doesn’t just have to be cows. Once they get into cattle operation, the next thing you know, they will have sheep, maybe pigs and chickens. It is a healthy lifestyle. That’s how I grew up, so I’m passionate about it.
Senator Muggli: I have another question about some of the work that you are doing. I’m not sure who is most appropriate to answer, but I understand you have recently acquired a specialized dome greenhouse.
Mr. Lerat: That’s through Bee Nature. We’re working on organic fertilizer, recycling food and making compost. With that program, partnering with Bee Nature on Cowessess First Nation, we will be the first First Nation to have this system. The funds were founded to build a greenhouse and use composting waste from our market gardens and community gardens. With that program came the greenhouse, which starts the bedding plants and so forth. It is a great program. We are starting it now. We have one greenhouse and one community garden. We have two more greenhouses planned through the same program that are dedicated: one on the First Nation and one for our urban members in Regina. We are trying to introduce the valuable lifestyle of gardening and food subsistence to all our community members.
Senator Muggli: That sounds like a great program. Thank you for sharing that.
Senator McBean: Thank you all for your testimony here. I concur with my colleagues. Thank you also for reminding us of the barriers and the resilience that have been required just to farm and to keep your land.
One conversation always touches on the next. The panel before you was about protecting farmland from development. I also get that you just want your land back as a first priority.
Given the historical and ongoing barriers faced by Indigenous communities from fully participating in agriculture and agri-food, what challenges does your community encounter in planning land with the battle of developed land versus agricultural land and the financial benefits of one in the now versus food sovereignty and sustainability in the other? I would like to ask all the participants here the same question. How do you hold the conversation in your communities about managing the future sustainability of food versus the immediate return on land as development? Kallie, I will start with you.
Ms. Wood: Thank you for the question, Senator McBean.
When you are looking at an understanding of First Nations, we’re governed by the Indian Act initially. When we talk about increasing our land space or doing any of that sort of thing in communities — and it varies across Canada based on geographic location — the issue, obviously, for expansion, is exactly land back, as Chief Beaudin shared, but also understanding the Indian Act and what that means for our lands.
When we go into communities, every community is different when it comes to food security and food sovereignty, again, based on their geographic location in the country. There are a lot of barriers. It is not easy for a First Nation community because we can’t use our land as capital to get access to funding, so that is a very large barrier. Unlike the Métis Nation and across Canada, those barriers exist.
When we are talking with communities about where we want to go, we have communities reaching out to us saying, we have land here. We want to get into agriculture, but we don’t even know where to start. What do we do? How do we do it? Then you have advanced communities like Cowessess that we also work with and assist where we can to really look at what they can do for food security and food sovereignty in their communities. I’m not sure if that answers your question.
Senator McBean: I’m learning. Mr. Beaudin?
Mr. Beaudin: Thank you. Just to add to what Kallie was mentioning in regards to the communities, they are very large and spread out. Our Métis nation goes from Manitoba all the way up to the Yukon, so we’re always looking at how to reach out and deliver programs to our nation in a very effective manner.
With what we’re doing here, we are looking to have more consultation with the Red River Métis on the next policy framework of the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership, or SCAP, making partnerships with the Canadian government allows us to deliver more programs to our citizens. The SCAP has an Indigenous stream, but it does not require applicants to be Indigenous in order to apply. We need that government-to-government, nation-to-nation partnership that would allow us to identify all of the weaknesses in our processes when it comes to food security.
I’m not sure if that answers your question, but it is a deep topic for us, and I don’t want to completely take all the time here on the one question.
Senator McBean: Thank you for that.
I will turn to Cowessess First Nation. What I am trying to ask is this: How do you balance land to put homes on versus land to grow food on?
Ms. Beaudin: Thank you for that question.
We are very fortunate on Cowessess to not have that problem due to a lack of housing opportunities if you want to look at it that way. I say that tongue in cheek.
However, when you talk about hand in hand, when we say “land back,” we are not only talking about agriculture; we are talking about creating an economic base. As Ms. Wood stated, we are governed by the Indian Act, which puts us at a disadvantage, historically as well as in today’s world. If we don’t have our land back in order to have economic opportunity, then we don’t have the ability to leverage loans and different types of avenues that, in today’s world, we really need in order to be those sustainable farmers as well as to gain food sovereignty.
Historically, we would not be able to have loans unless they were government loans, and therefore, it kept us out of the economy as opposed to partners in the economy. That is the great opportunity that we have today in changing federal policy initiatives, program initiatives, long-sustaining, partner-based, as opposed to having us continue to be seen as those that are under the Indian Act.
It is very important, and it goes hand in hand. We need to have money, which comes from other economic opportunities leveraged in order to purchase equipment, in order to purchase even the seed and everything else to teach. So it is really important for us to recognize that reality.
Senator McBean: Thank you very much.
The Chair: We have heard testimony from some First Nations communities, in particular, our colleague Senator Nancy Karetak-Lindell from Nunavut, and I think she left an indelible mark on all of us when she told us about a $75 watermelon in her community. Within that, we heard about the challenges of transportation, freight and the high cost of energy.
Kallie, my question is for you initially. I had a chance meeting with folks from the small modular reactor, or SMR, industry. I understand that you represent or are here for many nations, and a lot of nations that would be fly-in nations. Could you speak around what we could do recommendation-wise around energy and the role that plays in food security for First Nations?
Ms. Wood: Thank you for the question, Senator Robinson. We do a lot of work in the North, Yukon and above, Inuvialuit, and the conversations that are happening there. It is that expensive to buy a watermelon and everything else. As we look to container gardens and that 12-month growing opportunity, the SMR piece of that is that we partner with the First Nations Power Authority, and those are conversations that we are having with their CEO Guy Lonechild, saying, how do we change this? Not only from the SMR side, but also for the internet, access to the internet, changing those capabilities there as well.
Prime Minister Carney has put a tremendous amount of funding into the North, and we are working very closely with that and with the North to really accelerate the opportunity that they can have there so they don’t have to pay those prices.
The freight is a tough one, but regarding the SMR piece, we’re happy, by all means, to have that conversation and further, if you need, following this. First Nations Power Authority does a tremendous amount of work in that area, and they understand it. They understand the dynamics of every individual community and what those needs are, and they have a great resource of people to support that work. We are happy to have a further conversation on that.
The Chair: That’s great. That’s the first time I have heard that entity referenced. So we will definitely have a look at that. That is fantastic intel.
I was wondering as well, Kallie, if you might be able to speak a little bit about aquaculture and the role it plays in food security for First Nations.
Ms. Wood: Absolutely. We just had our Blue Scale Foods event last night with Tim Kennedy, the head of Aquaculture Canada. As we tell the story of Canada, about food and Let’s Grow Canada, a very big part of that is, as we’re telling the story, aquaculture is agriculture; it’s food. For our communities, when you look across, we have the longest coastline in the world. In Canada, we’re missing a huge opportunity. When you look across the export markets in other countries — we were blessed last night to have several different countries represented at that event — and when you look across the world, they want Canadian products, and we need to tell the story better.
For our nations, it has been since time immemorial. If our oceans are healthy, our air is healthy; and if our air is healthy, our land is healthy. It is a cycle. When you look to Indigenous Peoples, we’re caretakers of the land, of Mother Earth, and I think that bringing that traditional Indigenous knowledge together with the Western culture of data, research and analytics is so important, because we need data, research and analytics. We need that Western lens, but we also need the traditional lens of making sure that what we’re doing is for the right reasons. It’s not always about money; it is about food security and food sovereignty.
By 2050, we have to feed the world, right? We have got big plans to get to 2050, and so to get there, let’s make sure that we’re telling the story correctly in Canada, and aquaculture is very much a big piece of that.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
I may ask senators to ask their question, and then we could ask our witnesses to give us written submissions.
Senator Burey: Thank you for being here. Ms. Wood, you gave me a lightbulb connection moment because one of the tasks is to connect the dots, not just for us, but for Canadians. You talked about the medicinal spaces in the forests and connecting that to health. So food security, as we know, is related to health security, and one health — we looked at that. So I would just like further written comments on the whole aspect of the medicinal aspect in food security and health security together, and why this is so important.
The Chair: Senator Burey is our doctor in the house, so that’s an appropriate question.
Senator Muggli: I have a question that I would love any written feedback on for Mr. Beaudin and Ms. Riel, and it relates to the comments made about your climate action program — the 90,000 acres. I’m interesting in understanding what kind of work you have done. You spoke about improving the land, so I would love to learn a bit more about what some of the activities or methods were that you employed on that initiative.
Then my other question is for Ms. Wood. You talked about seed saving. I am interested in any activities that are taking place in Indigenous communities or First Nations communities and the importance of seed-saving activities to food security and sovereignty for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Those are my questions. If you are able to provide something in writing, I would really appreciate it. Marsee, meegwetch.
Ms. Wood: We do have an NCIAF website. At the very bottom of that are videos of communities across Canada; Cowessess is one of them. Sioux Valley Dakota Nation has spent a tremendous amount of time in that area, and there is a video in there that you can see visually. I will also provide you something in writing.
The Chair: That concludes the questions we will be grilling you with, and I really want to thank you, in particular, Ms. Riel. I hope you get to go have some breakfast now. I understand it’s very early in Manitoba. Thank you so much, everyone, for preparing your remarks and for entertaining our questions. Your expert testimony is really going to help us inform our report when we come to that point in time.
(The committee adjourned.)