HALIFAX, THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019

SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE ON SUPPLY

3:50 P.M.

CHAIRMAN

Brendan Maguire

THE CHAIR: The Committee of the Whole on Supply will come to order. We are considering the Estimates of the Department of Agriculture.

Resolution E1 - Resolved, that a sum not exceeding $46,427,000 be granted to the Lieutenant Governor to defray expenses in respect of the Department of Agriculture, pursuant to the Estimate, and the business plans of the Nova Scotia Crop and Livestock Insurance Commission, the Nova Scotia Farm Loan Board, and the Nova Scotia Fisheries and Aquaculture Loan Board be approved.

THE CHAIR: The honourable Minister of Agriculture.

HON. KEITH COLWELL: It’s a pleasure to be here again. This is my fourth time in the Red Room. The first time I was up in Estimates was in the Chamber. It’s wonderful to be here again and talk about the great things that have happened in agriculture and, when we get to it, fisheries as well.

I’m just going to bring the committee up to date on a few things. In 2018, our cash receipts from the farm gates, overall sales were $564.2 million. Dairy, poultry, and field vegetables account for 50 per cent of those cash receipts.

This is also a very good news story. Primary employment in agriculture was up 11 per cent in 2018, to 5,200 people. It’s very important. Saying that, we have a great shortage of labour on farms in the province. The temporary foreign workers program has been very successful for us and has helped a lot of farmers achieve more sales and indeed help grow Nova Scotia’s economy.

Our growth in dairy is up 10 per cent to $143.4 million. Our apple industry, even though we had the bad frost this year, was up $2.8 million to $21.5 million. We lost a lot of the crop, but what has happened is the price of our high-end apples has really gone up and continues to go up. A year ago, a Honeycrisp apple was selling in Florida for $7.99 a pound. We don’t grow organically grown Honeycrisp apples. Washington State does, and their apples sitting beside ours are $2.99 a pound. Washington State is pretty upset that they can’t grow the apples the same as we do. It is all to do our climate, our soil conditions, and the innovation of our farmers, so I give them a lot of credit.

Vegetables, excluding potatoes, were up $2.9 million to $39.9 million - very, very positive.

Our export sector is something we’re working on, and we will be working on it a lot more in the next year and beyond as a growth sector. We’re looking at developing new markets. We have a lot of very high-quality products. Our apples are one of them that we could export, but unfortunately - and fortunately - we sell out every year. That is a good thing, but our crop is coming, and we’re going to have larger crops in the future. We’ll be able to export a lot more of the apples and products like apples and put more money into Nova Scotia’s economy.

Agri-food products are the third-largest export category in Nova Scotia. It stood at $360 million in 2018. Our major markets were the U.S., the Netherlands, and China. Wild blueberries topped our exports this year at $104 million. That’s a 39-per cent increase over last year.

Our fur industry, which has been really struggling for a long time, had $48.6 million in sales, a 66 per cent growth. This is very exciting.

Talking about wild blueberries, we had a really serious problem for a long time with wild blueberries and the fact that our production techniques got ahead of our sales. We have been consistently marketing in Asia, Europe, and other places in the world to ensure that our wild blueberries hit the marketplace. We’re even in the process of developing a high-end blueberry wine for the Asian and particularly Chinese market. That product is aimed at the high-end consumers of wine, and we’re looking at a target price of between $100 and $200 a bottle, and that would be in U.S. funds. It’s a small use of the blueberries, but it’s another value-added product.

Agricultural exports to China were valued at $28.7 million and represent 3.6 per cent of all the exports to China.Export leaders - we also do a lot of seafood, which I will talk about when we talk about our Fisheries budget.

Of course, we announced a while ago that we are part of the CAP, the Canadian Agricultural Partnership program. That means that over the next five years or so, we will have $37 million to reinvest provincially through programs that we agree upon with the federal government. This is a very important program. It was nice to be a signatory on the program with changes that we had requested. The programs will focus on markets and trade, science, research and innovation, environmental sustainability and climate change, risk management, value-added agri-food processing, and public trust - all very important topics to our farmers, indeed, to our province.

[4:00 p.m.]

We have another program that’s very unique to Nova Scotians, a very exciting program, the Small Farm Acceleration Program. We realized a long time ago that we have a lot of small farms in Nova Scotia. When I say small farms, that’s farms that are $10,000 per year or under. It was obvious in many meetings I had with some of the individuals I had the privilege of meeting that they’re very interested in growing their business to full-time.

I can recall one gentleman that I met with. I won’t say in what industry it is or anything, just to protect his identity. He said he made $8,000 last year, and he wants to become a full-time farmer. That’s what his income was, $8,000. He said, I don’t have the money, and I can’t borrow money to expand. I need a modest greenhouse. If I get a modest greenhouse, I can maybe get my sales up to $10,000, and I would be very happy.

Our staff really started to look at this problem. It’s an ongoing problem. How do you get the small farmer to a substantial size in a reasonable amount of time, with the training he needs to run the business, run not only financially but also how to grow the crops, get markets, and all these sorts of things?

I want to give a lot of credit to my staff for the work they have done on this program. This is the first time this has happened in Canada. What the new problem does would address that gentleman’s problem. He would set his own goal of what his growth is going to be. We’ll pay for a business plan up to something like $1,200 or $2,000, fully, the department will. The person who is doing the application can either write the business plan themselves, or they can hire someone to do it.

At the end of the day, they’ll come with a projection of where they want to be in a year’s time. They set their own goal, and we encourage them not to set it too high. Then in the business plan, we’re hoping that they’ll identify - in this gentleman’s case, it’s a greenhouse that he needs. Then we will proceed to help him get the greenhouse. The next year, if everything goes well and he meets his goal, then we’ll work with him in the following year and the following year and the following year.

However, if he doesn’t meet the goal, if he stayed at $8,000 and didn’t go to $9,000 or whatever his goal was, the next year would be a different story. We would have to see if he’s still interested. If he’s not interested, then he’d be out of the program. It’s that simple. We want to concentrate on people who really want to grow their businesses and, indeed, become self-sufficient in farming.

This Small Farm Acceleration Program helps farms with income lower than $60,000 a year. I’m not sure what the number is, but I would think, it’s going to be at $250,000 in sales a year until you could be a full-time farmer. That’s my guess, only my guess. If someone is at $60,000, to get them to $65,000 is a big step. If we can get them to $100,000 over the next few years, then all of a sudden we have somebody who is on the way to full-time employment.

We want to encourage young people in the industry. We have many things that we have done in that regard. It’s a very exciting program. We have not talked about it much, but we have a large number of people who have registered for it and are involved in it. It’s a very exciting process.

We have a specialized team that works on it. One gentleman in particular has a huge financial background. He used to be at their loan board. He’s working through all of the business plans with the individuals who are going through this process. We want to set them up for success.

We have the Building Tomorrow Fund, a $9 million program over three years to invest in the agriculture, fish, and aquaculture sectors. This supports new product, innovation, and processing methods.

We’re presently working on the development of some programs which we’ll be announcing at a later date, but they’re very exciting programs. We’re looking for products that may not be on the market yet, maybe opportunities to add value to other products and, indeed, help grow our economy, help employ Nova Scotians, and generate wealth in the province. I want to thank my colleagues in Cabinet for making this program available. As I say, those will be announced at a later date.

It’s pretty evident that we had a very severe frost and freeze event last June. There were significant losses totalling about $34 million. At the end of this month which is looming upon us very shortly, it’ll close, the provincial-only program. We put in $16.7 million to help support farmers through their financial losses. This money is designed to be used by a farmer so he can pay off his fertilizer cost from last year, his input cost from last year, and/or help him so he can get farming this year.

If it wasn’t for this fund, some of the farmers in the province would have gone bankrupt this year. It’s very, very serious, and again I want to thank my colleagues for supporting this. Indeed, the farmers of Nova Scotia will hopefully be off to a lot better start than they would have been without this money. It’s very important and in a few weeks, we’ll have more details on how many people participated in that fund and how successful that was.

I want to talk a little bit about the wine sector. In 2017, 263 acres of new vineyards were planted, just in 2017 alone. Wine sales have reached $23.4 million, including almost $400,000 in exports. We now have 94 grape growers in the province and 23 farm wineries. We had 700 direct and spinoff employees in 2017 and that has grown in 2018, but I don’t have those numbers yet. Acreage has grown from 640 acres in 2012 to over 900 acres now, a 40 per cent increase. It’s critical that we get more vineyards in the province to supply our wineries. It’s very critical. Our wineries are growing on an exponential basis.

Our wine is getting recognition worldwide. We have over 200 national, local, and international awards that our wineries have won in the last few years.

I’m going to tell you a story about one of them. It’s a small winery in the Valley. I love this story. It’s actually very exciting. It’ll lead into a quality program we’re working on. L’Acadie Vineyards, a very small winery, decided that they were going to take their champagne, which we can’t call champagne - bubbly wine - to Champagne, France, and enter the competition for the best champagne in the world. Champagne always said they had the best champagne in the world, and we’re finding out that they don’t anymore.

They went to Champagne, they put their wine in the contest, and they won the gold medal. After they won the gold medal, there was an error - error in tasting, error in the judging - so they couldn’t give them the award. This is fact. This happened. This is a few years ago now. They put it in a brown paper bag, did the competition all over again, and lo and behold, they won the silver medal. That was a fantastic award, a wonderful thing, but the main thing that made it very special was it’s the only bubbly wine outside of Champagne, France, to ever win a medal in history. Think about that - in history. Of all wines like a champagne, it’s the only one in history to ever win that award, and it was done here in Nova Scotia. It tells you the quality of our product.

In conjunction with that, I want to talk about the wine quality program that we initiated about a year and a half ago. I had been after the industry to probably go to a VQA, Vintners Quality Alliance, program for wine. They would keep telling me no, that’s not where we want to go. I said, we have to get a wine quality program. They said, yes, but we don’t want to go to VQA. I brought people in from Ontario to meet with our wine board and talk to the wineries and the grape growers and say, okay, what do you want? I brought them in from Ontario, and then I brought them in from B.C. We talked about wine. They finally realized that I’m very serious about quality. They said, let us go away and figure out what we need to do with quality. I said, that’s fine. They came back and wrote a proposal, and we decided to move forward with the proposal. They hired three of the top wine quality experts in the world to do this.

Halfway through the program, they came back to us and said, we have some good news and some bad news. I thought the bad news was they were going give up on the program, and that would be the end of that and we had spent that much money, gone. They said the bad news is, we’re giving up on the program, and I said to myself, oh, I was right. They said, good news is, we’re going to start implementing what we have.

They came to that conclusion because they checked all over the world to see what quality programs there are everywhere in the world and the best wine regions, the best quality they could possibly get and found out that, when it comes to sparkling wine, we probably have the best sparkling wine in the world. They wanted to set a standard that’s the highest standard for wine in the world. Think about that - little Nova Scotia, which has a limited number of wineries. When you look at 23 wineries in Nova Scotia, and there are thousands of wineries in the world.

We want to start implementing that. That was fantastic. I said, this is exciting - and it is exciting. They’re on the road now, developing that standard. At the end of the day, we will have the highest standard for wine in the world. That’s happening as we speak, and it will soon be implemented in Nova Scotia. That’s being done in co-operation and with full support of the wine industry in Nova Scotia, so it’s very exciting. When it’s all done, it will be fantastic.

Along those lines, fortunately we had the foresight to set up a world-class wine lab at Acadia University in the Valley. They had some hiccups in the start because it was a big undertaking, but now they have an unbelievably good staff, the right equipment, and the right things in place. Now we’re where at the point where we can start testing wine the way we need to test it for this high quality standard we will have.

We’re moving ahead. It’s a fantastic program. The province made a $12 million commitment over a four-year period to help all this development. Without that money, we could not have done the things I have been talking about and will continue to talk about here. We’re continuing to focus on expansion of vineyards, winery innovation quality, and new markets and opportunities.

Also with this, we have brought in the best viticulturalists in the world, out of France, to look at our vineyards. They have come in and have been working here for two years. I think this is their third year. The viticulturalists we hired have extensive experience in the viticulture industry to make sure that our plants are going to provide the grapes that we need to make the best wine in the world.

We’re not just talking about this. We’re backing this up with research, hiring the best people we can find, and moving the industry forward. I’m very proud of what our industry has done, very proud of my staff who have made this happen. It has been exciting working on this. This is a fun project, when you talk about wine. It has been really good. We have had our ups and downs amongst us all, but I can tell you that, at the end of the day, we’re united in growing Nova Scotia’s economy and growing Nova Scotia’s wine industry.

There are five projects out of Nova Scotia that were included in the new clusters that have been built. The Canadian wine and grape production region established the first ever national wine grape cluster, focusing on research and development. It helped us gain access to $8.4 million in related research that we wanted done that we couldn’t afford to do in Nova Scotia. It’s very exciting what the industry has done and will continue to do.

I can’t leave this topic without talking about the highest-priced wine in Canadian history, sold by Benjamin Bridge. Every time I see Gerry McConnell, who owns that, I remind him he undersold his wine. I think he sold it for $268 or $289 a bottle, 500 bottles in 24 hours without advertising. I still to this day think he could have got $1,000. I’m sure, when he comes out with the next lot - I know he has been aging some of his wine for 20 years. When that hits the market, I imagine it will be a limited release, and he’ll get $1,000 to $2,000 a bottle.

I’m not identifying one winery here for any reason because the success stories of all our wineries are the same way. There’s a Michelin restaurant in London, one of the highest-rated restaurants in the world, that has one of Benjamin Bridge’s wines on their very limited wine list - very high-end restaurant. That success story can go to all the wineries in the province. They all have their own success stories, and that’s just one I wanted to mention.

[4:15 p.m.]

We’re also working on innovation. If we are going to grow our economy, which we have been doing very successfully, we definitely have to come up with new products and evaluate our products. We cannot make money, anywhere in the world - you can’t make money in commodities if you’re going to sell your goods for 10 cents a pound, and your neighbour is selling them for 9.5 cents a pound, nobody makes money and never will.

We have to get out of that business and get into the business of specialized things. That’s why the apple advancement program was continued. That’s why we put the winery program in place - all value-added, and we want to do a lot more value-added. There are great opportunities in our blueberries. There’re great opportunities in our Christmas trees. Our Christmas trees have been sold and marketed, and there have been all kinds of issues with those, but we can go to more international markets with the right packaging and the right marketing and, indeed, make things happen.

Wild blueberries are the perfect food. Anyone who doesn’t understand the story behind wild blueberries should really get involved, especially if you have children. They help prevent juvenile diabetes and make children smarter in school, and the list goes on and on and on. Over the years, we have always talked about the antioxidants. Antioxidants are only a very small part of the value of a wild blueberry, and I stress a wild blueberry. These are real premium products. It’s really the superfood of foods. After we got the science, we realized what the science was. A 35-year study, not just in Canada but all over Europe, has proven that these things are true.

We have really changed our marketing approach on this and locally, very shortly, we’ll be changing the marketing by local program to ensure more Nova Scotians buy our Nova Scotia products. We’re working on many industries to add value and add awareness, and over the next year, we will be increasing those activities.

Wild blueberries are our largest export, as I said earlier, and I have already been talking about growing the sales domestically and internationally. It is working, and I want to thank the companies that have been working with us. We have several blueberry marketing and processing companies in the province. They have all done very good work.

There’s one company that has developed a blueberry juice that they have been selling in China very successfully, a very high-end product in a bottle. The Premier and I were there the day they signed the agreement. They usually cut a ribbon at one of these things, but there was a great big ice sculpture as long as this table is here, and everyone was given a bottle of blueberry juice. The sculpture was higher than the table, and you had to pour your blueberry juice into this sculpture, and it all flowed down through and turned the whole thing blue. That had to cost a fortune for the Chinese company that did that, but that’s the significance they found in that.

To give you a story on how important it is to go with their companies, that was my first trip to China, and I didn’t understand at all how it all worked at that time. That gentleman came over to me said, would you come and say hello to my potential customer? I said, sure. He was speaking Mandarin and couldn’t speak any English, and I can’t speak Mandarin, of course, so we had a gentleman who could speak both, and he interpreted back and forth. We said hi, and we were there a minute and a half and took a picture. Away I went and didn’t think anything of it. Three days later he came to me and said, because you came over and said hello - there’s a lot of respect for government officials in China; that’s the culture - he’s going to take an order to test sale this product in the Chinese market. He just happens to be the Perrier Water distributor for all of China. That’s pretty interesting.

I forget how many containerloads he sold at the time for sample. That was a sample. Since then, it has grown into an industry, and that’s a product that was developed in Nova Scotia, packaged in Nova Scotia, and shipped from Nova Scotia - 100 per cent Nova Scotia product, real added value. I don’t know what the price of a bottle of that blueberry juice is in China now, but I can tell you not one of us would want to pay the price here, which is good news.

This is a really good story too. They have also introduced a honey that’s made from bees that pollenate blueberries. A little jar, about that big around and that high, sells for $50 U.S. Talk about added value. That’s where we have to go. It won’t always work that way, but indeed that was good marketing, good promotion, good distributors, and good business relationships. It’s all about relationships.

These files are so exciting. You see, what’s happening in Nova Scotia companies, they can really grow their markets and grow the economy. Every dollar of exports, the number I have always been told when I was exporting was $7 for every dollar you export. We’re selling $2 billion in the fishing industry, for instance. That’s worth $14 billion to Nova Scotia’s economy. Agriculture is the same thing - everything we do. So it’s very, very important.

We have also done a lot of things around dike realignments. A while ago, we announced $50 million for a capital plan for provincial dike systems and a lot of things. We’re going to do some work in Annapolis River, Cobequid Bay, Cumberland Basin, and regular maintenance on a lot of the other ones. That work is continuing.

Another very exciting thing is, the federal government signed the CETA agreement with Europe, which came into effect in September 2017. On the surface, that may not sound like much, but it removed tariffs from 96 per cent of the export products. For example blueberries were at 9 per cent, and it goes to zero. Fresh apples were 9 per cent, and it goes to zero. Now Nova Scotia companies are competing, and they’re winning in markets internationally. Again, it goes back to solid marketing. We have to do the marketing, we have to do it properly, and we have to sell high-end products - not products that are seconds or anything like that. It has to be the best possible product to get the best possible price.

We have done marketing in the hospitality industry. We used chefs to help us market, and it is paying off. The amount that we spend on marketing, the return on the investments is exponential.

I also want to talk about a very exciting organization that goes unnoticed lots of times, and that is Perennia. Perennia’s purpose is to take university research or a business idea, wherever they might get the information, and turn that into a product, a value-added product that can be sold. It also provides extension services to producers and farmers. We extended it a couple of years ago into the fishery sector. I appointed an industry board, a true industry board of some of the best sharpest minds in business in the province. They now run Perennia and are accountable to our department. They have done some really interesting things.

Perennia now has a mobile bottling line, which we funded through our vineyard expansion program, to allow small wineries to quickly bottle their product in a very professional way, saving them labour and costs. They used to have to rent a bottling line out of Quebec, if they had the resources to do it. This is not a free service, it is charged for by Perennia, but it does make an economical way to do it. With the unit being in Nova Scotia, they can schedule and do so many cases and then come back another time and do some more cases.

That’s just one example of many services they provide. They recently established a marijuana-testing laboratory. It’s the only one in Eastern Canada as far as I know. It might be one of the very few in Canada, period. It’s very successful. It’s extremely busy, and it’s already starting to pay for itself. That’s the kind of thing I like to hear.

There was a lot of interest around the bee industry in Nova Scotia a few years ago. Two years ago, we started the first ever Beekeeper Symposium. We hosted that as a department, and we had a large turnout. We brought some experts in, along with our own experts, and have developed a really strong relationship with the bee industry. It’s so important to us. Bees are so important to Nova Scotia. We are now working on developing queen bees in Nova Scotia. We’re a little ways away from that, but that’s coming. That means that we won’t have to import queen bees anymore, and it would give us another product we can export out of the province in an industry that needs every added-value thing they can possibly get.

Also, Nova Scotia has the lowest winter losses of bees in the country. Last year, we were at 18 per cent. We’re consistently 2 per cent to 4 per cent to 6 per cent lower than anywhere else in the country. The beekeepers in this province have really, really done a great job, and I want to give them a lot of credit for that. Again, we had our second annual Beekeeper Symposium this year. It was well attended. I don’t know the exact numbers. I think the first year was 100-some people, and I believe this year it was even more. (Interruption) About 175. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get to it this year.

It shows the interest in the industry, and it shows it’s another industry that we can move forward with. When someone decides they want to get in the farming business, it’s an inexpensive way to get into the business and start them off to learn how to run a business. It’s an important business we need in the province. Really, there’s a tremendous amount of respect for the industry and the hard work that the farmers have to go through in that regard.

We have another program. Select Nova Scotia was started in 2007. It was focused on educating customers, with a social media online presence. It partners with farmers and farmers’ markets retailers. The idea was to buy local products and make sure we protect food security. This year, we’re going to change that program to really highlight some in a little bit newer direction so we can get a higher buy-in for people buying local products. There’s a lot of interest in it. We have done a very good job, and I want to commend my staff for the program they ran over those number of years. We’re going to take a little bit of a different direction. We’re going to set goals, and the goals are going to be quite high. We’re going to try whole new approaches. We’re actually going to apply the same theory that we have applied to our international marketing, and that has been tremendously successful.

We actually lead the country in marketing and marketing initiatives. That’s quite a statement, and that has happened over the last five years. When we look at the export sales and the sales and they evaluate our products, there has been phenomenal growth. It’s because of the innovation of our staff and of the industry and the willingness of industry to adapt to changing times. I think if we can apply those same principles in local markets, we can indeed have a lot more markets.

I’m interested in the market for three reasons. It allows our small farms and farmers to make a good living in Nova Scotia. It displaces imports so we know we’re getting safe food in Nova Scotia and have a safe supply. When you talk about supply, we have to feed our families in Nova Scotia. We only provide about 20 per cent, not counting the fishing industry - outside of that. The farming industry can only supply about 20 per cent of the food supply we have now. I want to see us in a situation where, if we get in a crisis at some point, we can supply all the food we need for Nova Scotians.

We also have to raise awareness with Nova Scotians to make them realize that things that they buy at the grocery stores don’t come from the backroom of the grocery store. It will be reality someday but not yet. We have to make them aware that every time they do that, it makes an opportunity for their children to stay and do whatever they want in Nova Scotia because some farmer and some farmer’s family is helping to feed them and create employment for other people. That is a goal we’re moving forward on. There will be a lot more information put out on that in the next months or so.

There’s another program too, the Trans-Pacific Partnership with Asia. Again, tariffs have been removed, and we have been marketing now in those areas. That’s another very positive thing that the federal government has done. It took a long time to get that in place, but that now is in place, and we look forward to growing our exports in markets we have not been into yet.

We really have to broaden our range of where we market our products. We have seen some issues with China and internationally, which have not caused us any problems to date in Nova Scotia. We have been very fortunate. We have built some really strong relationships with our customers there, and the Premier has done an excellent job of developing relationships at a high level, and that’s very important too, but that could change any time. We want to make sure we have a nice broad base of companies in different countries and different product lines, and we can get better penetration of the international market. That’s where the money is. That’s what brings the money back into Nova Scotia. That’s money that can help pay for education, roads, hospitals, and all the other things.

[4:30 p.m.]

There are a couple other pan-Atlantic collaborations I want to talk about just briefly. These are very important things for us because this means that we can share the costs of finding solutions to problems we jointly have in Atlantic Canada.

The first one I want to talk about is the Atlantic Tech Transfer Team for Apiculture. This is aimed at helping improve honeybee health and over-wintering success rates. We’re the example for the best ones in the country, by the way, when it comes to over-wintering, but we can still do better. It also promotes biosecurity techniques. That’s very critical to keeping disease and problems down in our industry.

Also, we have the Atlantic Poultry Research Institute, which is housed at the Agricultural College in Truro. There’s a multitude of projects, including growing chickens without the use of antibiotics, food security, safety for eggs, health of layers, feed costs, and a whole bunch of other things. One very interesting project they’re working on is grinding up lobster shells to substitute for some of the other products that they would use. It’s a small percentage within it. They came to find that the lobster shells, if you feed them a percentage that’s a little bit high, all of a sudden you get a pink yolk in the egg. That’s an interesting possibility. It would be great for the Breast Cancer Society when they’re trying to raise funds for that very important fundraiser.

With those few words, I will conclude my opening remarks.

THE CHAIR: We’ll now move to the Progressive Conservative caucus for one hour. Ms. Paon.

ALANA PAON: Thank you, minister, for your opening remarks on this very important file.

It’s a pleasure for me to be the Progressive Conservative caucus member who has this portfolio. Officially we call it the critic. I’m not sure if I’m a fan of that word, as it has a somewhat negative connotation to it, but the person who has an opportunity to speak towards the file from our caucus.

As most people know, I have been in farming for almost a decade myself. I’m not from a farming background at all, so I guess I would have been seen as a newcomer, a new entrant, into agriculture. The learning curve was extremely steep, as it is for most people who become involved in agriculture. It’s wonderful to hear that there will be assistance in being able to see smaller farms grow to the next level with some money going towards business planning and so forth.

I think we all also know, and anybody in agriculture knows, that there are so many variables that are involved in getting a product to market, whether it’s livestock or blueberries or whatever it is that you’re producing. There are so many variables that are not reflected in a business plan. I almost wonder if there should be an appendix to a business plan to take into consideration all those variables that one sometimes does not see. Hopefully, that will be taken into consideration with the program that you have mentioned with regard to people being able to meet the goals that they set for themselves.

Sometimes farmers do set goals, but unfortunately, as we saw with the Frost Loss Program, you can’t foresee that type of thing happening. It was the worst loss that we have ever seen, I think, here in this province. Sometimes you can’t meet your goals, and I hope that that is taken into consideration with the new farmers who are trying to grow their business through that program.

KEITH COLWELL: Could I make a comment on that?

ALANA PAON: Sure.

KEITH COLWELL: I totally agree with you. Farming is a very complex business, as you are well aware. This program doesn’t have any fixed parameters. For instance, if you need a course to do something, that’s probably something we will cover. If you need help with an outreach worker, that would happen. It’s all about building the basis for you to succeed, to move to your next level, whatever next level you want to go to. Indeed, the business plan is part of it, but the business plan has to take into consideration all kinds of things. You have to look at the markets, the possibility of packaging, and how you do all those things that you would have to do to be successful.

The Small Farm Acceleration Program is very unique. It’s not tied down the way it was before, where if a program was for irrigation wells, that’s the only thing you could do. That may help some big farms, but it wouldn’t help the little farms because they couldn’t afford to drill the well even with the subsidies. That program is designed to do exactly the thing that you are talking about.

ALANA PAON: The other thing, if I may continue on with your opening remarks, it’s very valuable, and we should be very proud of the growth we have seen in certain sectors over the last decade, especially the last few years. I agree that grape growing and the vineyards, mostly in the Valley, are really taking off. They are doing wonderfully. We’re doing well on an international stage.

Blueberries, we really had a hard time the year before last, as far as the blueberry producers. They’re probably going to be taking a hit again this year, of course, with the frost loss that has happened. Apple producers, very proud - I believe that the Honeycrisp birthplace is Nova Scotia, so very proud of the Honeycrisp apple, and honey.

I also want to make mention that, I think it’s 29 recognized agricultural commodity groups that we have here in this province. As you mentioned, we only produce about 20 per cent, if that, of what we consume in Nova Scotia. I personally find that absolutely terrifying, those types of numbers. It’s difficult to understand how we expect to achieve a true buy local program and a true understanding of not having our own local food sources available to the people of Nova Scotia. We talk well about exports, but what about our own people within our province to have access to local food, food that’s safe, food that, as you said yourself, we know what’s in it?

Are we going to meet those targets that I believe were set out for 2020, to raise the amount that we’re producing locally here in Nova Scotia? What is the plan from the Department of Agriculture to not only focus in on these specialized areas that we already know we’re doing well in, what about all the other sectors, those sectors that basically are the staple crops? People eat staple crops every day. They don’t drink wine on a daily basis, or not many people that I know do anyway. We eat apples, yes, but they’re only one aspect of our diet. We need the basics to be covered in this province. We need beef. We need all kinds of different livestock producers to do well in this province in order for us to be able to eat a healthy diet. What is being done for that sector of agriculture, all the rest of agriculture? With all due respect to the minister, I don’t often hear the minister speak of that. What is being done for that area?

KEITH COLWELL: We do a lot of things actually. Since I have been minister we have put in place, with industry, a CFIA-approved lamb processing facility for the meat. It’s the only CFIA-approved meat processing facility, except for chickens and turkeys, in the province. It’s a very expensive proposition. Indeed, that has opened up whole new markets for our lamb and our goats in the province. That’s a great starter crop for young farmers and a great way to get into agriculture, into sheep, both for the meat and the wool, depending upon what the individual wants to do. It took us quite a while to get that done with the company. The company is now very successful. They’re shipping to Sobeys - Sobeys will buy pretty well everything they have - and other markets. Sobeys goes through a distribution centre in Moncton, so some of our exports actually come back as imports, once they go out of the province.

We are working with that industry. We met with them this year, and I was very pleased to see a change in attitude. They came in, and they want to do a lot of things. I talked earlier about applying the processes we do when we export. We hire and train chefs wherever we go to make dishes with products, and that’s the way it starts.

You get a chef in a high-end restaurant, a medium restaurant or even a small family restaurant here in Halifax to put lamb on the menu and have the chef show another chef how to do this, and all of a sudden, you develop a demand. Maybe a family with a modest income only goes out to dinner once or twice a year, but they try lamb, and then hopefully, they’ll go to the grocery store and buy lamb and find out how to cook it, which is not typical in Nova Scotia. That’s one example of things we have done.

They have come this year, and they want to put a marketing plan together. They never talked like this before. They want to talk about high-end products that they can put out so they can make more money on their farm and expand their farm, and still have products available at a reasonable price for the local market. I think both are very important. It also doesn’t hurt to have some high-end market products here in Nova Scotia, so that they can make money on those products here as well as products that are very affordable.

That’s one example. There’s example after example after example. The problem is the industry has to be ready. They have to see themselves that they can make an income off of this, and a reasonable income. We have done a lot of things with pilot projects. We meet each year, which never happened before I came to the department.

I’ll use the sheep industry for an example. They sat down, and we had a certain amount of money we had in the budget before I came there. They said it’s not being spent properly. I asked, what do you want to spend it on? Their answer was, we were never asked that - never asked that before, ever in history. I said, you know what you need, and if it makes sense for Nova Scotia, that’s what we’ll do. I told the same thing to the beef producers. They came back, and they wanted some safe handling equipment. We developed the program for safe handling equipment, basically what they wanted and put it in place for a couple of years, and it really did make a change on the farms. The sheep farmers said, we need a fencing system, so we put the fencing system in place, exactly what they requested.

Those are things that are helping to grow the local economy. We have to put the tools in their hands that will help them grow their business. We can’t force them to grow their business. We have to make it environmentally sound, and they have to make money at it. If they can’t make money at it, they are just wasting our time and their time, and we will never get anything to market. It will last for a little while, and then away it would go.

In Nova Scotia we have the most farmers’ markets per capita in Canada. A lot of small farms are making a living off of farmers’ markets, which we are very, very happy about, and we support them. There’s a lot of things we’re doing that we don’t talk about much because we typically negotiate this with the industry involved. I have set up the minister’s advisory board with most of the commodity groups. We meet on a regular basis to discuss their issues.

One of the reasons we can’t supply food in our province is we don’t have year-round crops. That’s a major problem for us, a major problem. If you look at a dairy farm in the U.S., they have four crops a year to feed their dairy herd. We have one. If we’re really lucky, in a really top year, we would have two crops. It makes it very, very difficult to compete outside the province.

[4:45 p.m.]

We’re taking all those things into consideration. We’re going to make serious changes to Select Nova Scotia. I want to commend my staff for the work they have done up until now. They’ve done exactly what they were asked to do, did a great job but we’re going to change the program completely. We going to go at this as a marketing project, a development project in conjunction with each commodity group to see how we can get that commodity group on the shelves more.

I’ll give you a real success story. We have one farmer in the province, and it’s not just limited to one, but one I’ll use as an example. In strawberries, they’ve got a deal with Sobeys. Every box of strawberries they can drop off at the warehouse, Sobeys buys, standing order. I met with the warehouse manager a few years ago and he said, first when they came in there were so many of them, there were three or four tractor trailer loads, a day, they didn’t know what to do with them. There were that many. They went to the manager and said you’ve got to sell them and that set a huge success story up. You’ll see earlier they’ve got a day-neutral strawberry now, which is something, new development, and things to do and it really makes a big difference in the industry. That business, that particular farm, sells every strawberry they can possibly produce to Sobeys. They ship them to the stores and we’re going to do more and more marketing like that.

That’s one example and there are all kinds of them like that and, just slowly, we’re getting there. We’re getting there but we’ve got to have product at a price that makes sense and it’s got to be top quality, and it’s got to be traceable too. Becoming more traceability on the farm products and to make sure we have the safest, best-quality foods we can get on the shelf. That’s sort of a roundabout answer to our question but we’re working on it.

ALANA PAON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, minister, for your answers. I’ll go back again to your opening remarks where I did take note of you saying we need to get out of commodities because we cannot make money that way. We need to get into more specialized products. Then, again, just now, you just stated if they can’t make money at it, they’re wasting our time and then you change it to their time. I don’t think growing food is a waste of anybody’s time, especially when our percentages are so low in this province. Perhaps the minister meant something else by his commentaries but, you know, again, I will go back to these commodities are the staple food, the meat and potatoes if you will of what feeds everyday people in this province. When I hear remarks like that it’s very concerning to me. It’s also very concerning to go out and speak to all of these other sectors that are never really quite mentioned within opening remarks and not mentioned anywhere that I can really read of other than these really great success stories. It’s wonderful to really focus in on success stories. It’s a lot more difficult to focus in on those areas that are not working.

I ask the minister - and I would ask that maybe we could try to keep our answers really focused on the question that’s being answered - does the minister feel these staple crops and animals produced as staple food for everyday Nova Scotians, especially when we see that we have the highest percentages of child poverty in this province, I mean, these are staggering numbers? What that tells me is that, when children are impoverished, their mother and father or single-parent households, whomever guardian, whoever is taking care of them those families are also impoverished. People have to have access to good, healthy food. It’s part as well of what’s wrong with our health care overall. We need to have access to healthy food, food that’s reasonably priced. It’s part of the determinants of health that everyone is talking about. I think there are 12 of them right now and one of them is to have access to healthy food. A lot of the time, children go to school hungry. They don’t have access to food.

In my constituency, there’s an actual food program within the school system where children are being sent home with backpacks of food for the weekend because their families cannot afford to feed them. They come to school hungry because their families cannot afford to feed them.

I’m not sure if the situation is as prevalent in urban Nova Scotia as it is in rural Nova Scotia but in my particular constituency, children are hungry, and it is astounding to me. I get very emotional in speaking about this. I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth, but we always had a garden in the backyard and my father always made certain and my mother made certain that we had food in our bellies, so we were healthy and we could grow up strong and that when we went to school we’d be able to focus.

I would like to ask the minister again because, I know the department has set a goal of 20 per cent of money spent on food by Nova Scotians to be spent on locally produced food by 2020. Are we going to hit those targets? Are we on track to hit those targets? What is being done for us to hit those targets? Do those targets really include the basics of the most staple crops, the most staple crops of animals produced, and vegetables produced, which are the meat and potatoes of the commodity groups in this province?

THE CHAIR: I’ll just remind everybody involved there is no time limit on questions or answers. The only time limit is an hour per Party.

KEITH COLWELL: I agree with you. We need food that people can afford to buy and an easy availability of food for families. One of the things we’ve done since we’ve come to government is put a tax credit into the food banks for farmers. That has made a huge difference in the fresh food that food banks get. That was never there before. I know every time I run into the CEO for the food bank, Feed Nova Scotia, he thanks me again and thanks the government for doing that. It has made a big difference.

The problem is you can’t ask a farm to go broke to grow a commodity that doesn’t make any sense in Nova Scotia. You can’t ask a farmer to do that, honestly, because then you won’t have any farmers and you won’t be feeding anybody.

The truth of the matter as well is if you go to the prairies where they grow wheat, one farm will produce more wheat than we can do in the whole province. That’s a commodity. We can’t make money on a commodity. It’s better for us to buy that wheat and sell something else that we can make money at.

It’s very important to feed people and there’s a lot of people in need in my riding. They have breakfast programs in the school and I probably represent some of the community that is probably as disadvantaged as any community in Nova Scotia by far. It’s sad. I see young people in a situation where they don’t have enough food to eat. I see them come through my constituency office and it’s very hard for the families to make ends meet. It’s very difficult.

We’re doing projects in the schools, we’ve got a salad bar project in the schools right now. We have producers in the schools. Anything we can do to help that problem. The reality of the fact is, I’ll ask you a question: you’ve got a farm? If you don’t make money in your farm are you going to be in business?

ALANA PAON: Would you like me to answer that? First of all, with all due respect to you, Mr. Minister, I’m not here to discuss my farm today and I actually don’t think it’s really appropriate for me to even talk about anything to do with my farm. I find that to be a conflict of interest with anything that we’re discussing.

However, overall, I will say farming is extremely challenging. Producing any type of livestock is extremely challenging, so if I want to speak about it in broader terms like that, very challenging. We’ve had a huge parasite load on pastures, increasingly so in the last several years, and that’s across all sectors. So, livestock, the old saying goes that if you have livestock you have dead stock. I don’t find anything too funny about that because unfortunately, trying to grow another living creature to adulthood or to the point of where it goes off to the CFIA-approved abattoir or wherever it will go next, is extremely challenging.

This year alone, as the minister knows, we had a terrible year when it comes to drought, the frost loss of course last year, but also, we’re in a situation where many farmers are in the middle of a massive amount of hay shortages across this province.

I spoke with several of the sectors, several producers, some I just was at the beef conference AGM and, you know, speaking about and asking the question there, what is being done to be able to assist across the province. We know we have this problem that’s happening right now. What are we doing to assist these farmers to make certain that they have access to quality forage so that they can actually bridge that gap?

For no fault of their own, simply because we had a horrible growing season last year, there are people having to sell off their livestock. It’s difficult to have good stock. If you have breeding programs like the bull bonus - and I’m going to get to that in a minute - or if you’ve gone through any kind of genetically-enhanced programming for your livestock, and perhaps you have a closed flock; you don’t want to be selling off your livestock. It’s the last thing you want to do in order to be able to make ends meet.

But that’s what’s happening right now. So, of course, when you’re having a fire sale, basically is what it is, and you’re sending your animals off to be sold because you simply don’t have enough to feed them, you don’t have enough to feed them, you’re selling your animals at a loss. So, it’s kind of a double whammy.

Perhaps the minister could tell me what the province is doing? I know that Perennia Innovation Centre stood up at this meeting and said, well, we have kind of a self-help line. If anybody has hay for sale, they can call us. It’s not good enough.

There are farmers out there that everybody is calling, everybody else trying to find hay this time of the year. What is being done by the department, what can be done by the department, to try and help to orchestrate or organize, not only now, but in the future; so that when these types of crises occur that there is someone to coordinate, to be able to assist in knowing that that’s the central line to call, where we know that there’s a guy in Quebec that can ship us 40 or 60 bales. There’s no help like that right now and it’s not working with whatever they have through Perennia. It’s not working.

So perhaps the minister can tell me what can be done. What should be done moving forward to be able to help farmers like this when they’re in a crisis that happens, if not every year, every three or four years? It’s inevitable. It’s going to happen again and, with the amount of snow that we’ve had this year, which is minimal, and probably not having a lot of rain in the Spring, we’re probably going to have another really poor growing season when it comes to forage. What is the department doing to be able to assist moving forward as far as having a plan of action?

KEITH COLWELL: Well, to start with, you’ve really touched on and answered my question that I asked you. We have a whole bunch of federal-provincial programs identified to help farmers in that situation; they’ve been there, we’re fine-tuning them; they’re being revised as we talk.

We have AgriInsurance, we have AgriStability, we have AgriInvest, all kinds of programs there to help farmers. It’s the only industry in Nova Scotia that has that kind of blanket. Farming is a very difficult business, extremely difficult business and it’s important the farmers are successful.

It’s important they make money, so they can reinvest and spread the risk over many more things. So, as we talk about growing the industry, developing the industry and it’s a great industry to be in; it’s very tough to deal with weather. You’ve got to learn how to run a business; keep cost controls in place, deal with disease, deal with droughts, frosts, all those things. I’m fully aware of all those things and we deal with the industry all the time on a regular basis about this.

I’ve set up more advisory boards - that I directly participate in with the commodity groups - ever in the history of this province and I listen to them, I work with them. If you talk to the farming industry, they will tell you that’s what’s happening. Because I don’t know on the farm what they need but I can help them when I find out.

[5:00 p.m.]

So, those things are in place. They’re already working, and when I talk about commodities, it’s better to grow wheat in Alberta and sometimes maybe beef in Alberta where they can grass graze at low cost. Even those farmers - I talked to one of, I think, the biggest beef farmers at a function I was at in Alberta, and they grow high end beef and good quality beef - they are razor thin margins, to make money.

It’s very difficult because once you get into the commodity crops, you’re dealing in international markets. You’re not dealing anymore just in Nova Scotia and Canada. You should understand that as a farmer.

You’ve got to be very careful with how you address these questions because it’s not something that I can fix as minister; it’s not something we can fix in this country. It’s a long, difficult road to get a group of farmers in the province that indeed can turn a profit every year. Some of them won’t get very rich - and that’s fine - but just break even every year and make a little bit of a profit, based on some of the problems you’ve identified and a whole lot more. Those programs are in place.

Actually, the federal and provincial governments are now looking at the business management programs to see how they can be improved to help the farmers further. It does work. Last year, I think we had to put another $8 million provincially in to a 60/40 split on the BRM programs to cover some of these costs. So those programs are in place for the farmers and the province.

If they don’t know how to apply for them, we help them. We will actually send people out, show them how to do all the application forms and do all those things. Our hope is we don’t need those programs. Our hope is that they’ll have good years, bad years, but overall do well.

That’s what I was talking about earlier. You’ve got to get into crops that we can grow very well in Nova Scotia and supply the whole market. Again, apples have done a very good job. They can store apples for a year and you could get an apple out of storage and you would have an apple that’s actually, in a Honeycrisp’s case, better than when it came off the tree.

So those things are done. We’re doing all kinds of these things. We’ve got agrologists that help with all kinds of things; they’ll go to the farm, they’ll help the farmers. We have soil labs that test the soils. We have all these tools in place and the industries utilize these. The companies and businesses that are doing well, really use these services.

The services are there. We can always fine-tune them, and we are fine-tuning them all the time. But it’s not fair to say that we’re not there for the farmers because we are; we’ve got people out in the field.

When your government was in power at one time, they wiped out the Department of Agriculture - all the outreach workers, every one of them in this province - and we’ve been struggling ever since to get them back in the fields. We’re doing that. That’s why Perennia is so important; they do a lot of that work. We do a lot of that work ourselves.

We want farmers to succeed in this province. They can’t succeed unless they can make money. That is critical.

ALANA PAON: I would agree with you that any business - and a farm at the end of the day, as much as many people like to see that it’s a lifestyle or say it must be awfully nice to live on a farm, it must be a lovely lifestyle choice - a farm in the end, and I’ve always looked at it this way, is a business. And it should be seen as a business.

So, unless you’re just producing food for yourself, if you’re producing food with the hope that you’re going to have a sustainable business, the only way to have a sustainable business is not to have to continuously be looking for new programming funds or bailouts or anything like that. I will say this though, that as much as we like to, in this country, bail out large companies like our auto manufacturers, food production is something in a complete category on its own.

We all have to eat. Every single one of us has to eat. I think that there is a saying, if I remember it correctly, growing food is hard but not as hard as going hungry. So, to me, the way that we look at a farm business, especially the smaller scale farms, we need to look at it differently than just a regular business. As much as, again, I agree that we need to look at ways to make these farms sustainable.

Traditionally farms for years now - I’ll use dairy farmers as an example - most that I know oftentimes have one person, one of the spouses, working off-farm so that they can have that extra income. It’s like that in a lot of cases on farms. A lot of the time, and perhaps dairy is one thing, the dairy farmers that I know, a lot of them work off-farm to have an extra income and traditionally it has been the case that a lot of people have one person working off-farm and one person working on-farm. Sometimes both work off-farm and work the farm as well. That to me is very difficult to sustain a farm in that way because people are burning the candle at both ends.

I’m familiar with the AgriStability, AgriInvest, AgriInsurance, crop and livestock insurance programs that we have here in this province; it’s wonderful that farmers have access to that. We all hope, obviously, that we never have to access that program.

I commend the minister for being able to facilitate the $16.7 million that was put forward to be able to help those sectors that had tremendous losses this year because of the frost that happened last year, in 2018. I would like to ask the minister, however, and I know I asked you this during Question Period, but I will ask again: Why was government so late in creating that program?

I know that the government would have had to go to the Treasury Board to make that request. Why were we so late in creating that program? Perennia really had started in June to brief you on the losses. I do know, and I can appreciate it takes time to evaluate how much loss has occurred across the province, but eight months seems to be an awfully long time when people have obviously had tremendous loss and huge hits to their bottom lines.

I’m just extremely concerned that those eight months, almost really a year, to have waited for any kind of assistance is going to strike a really strong blow to many producers.

If the minister could answer my questions: Why was he so late, or why was the department so late, in creating the program; and, what was the estimated damage that Perennia determined back in June and, was he given an estimated amount at that time?

KEITH COLWELL: The answer isn’t that simple, but I’ll give you the basis of it.

Number one, there was a frost and freeze program, as we’re well aware. Some of the damage was obvious and some of it wasn’t. Some of it may go into next year. We won’t know until this year is over. We had to wait until the crops were harvested to see what the actual loss was in comparison to what they were before. Programs have come out before that weren’t utilized properly and the people that needed the money didn’t necessarily get it; some people that didn’t need the money, got it.

So, we had to verify that we had a program in place. It took us a while after we did the evaluation on the different industries - some of the industries are a little bit different than other industries - to evaluate exactly what the damage is. To this day, we’re still not sure what all the damages are.

This Summer, this Spring, may see some plants coming back that didn’t look too well last year and some of them may not; that will impact the overall profitability of the farm and, indeed, will hinder them. This program we put together is for input costs, it’s not compensation for lost crops. We had to take that into consideration to see how we could fairly put a program together to work. I think we’ve achieved that.

Once we evaluated, which took us several months to verify that, we went out in the fields, immediately. We worked with them, we worked with crop insurance, we worked with Perennia, our own staff, we did an elaborate evaluation at that point. We’ve since, in most cases, gone back again and have seen what the losses were. Then we asked them for their sales and proved that they had the sales that they had, compared to the last three years.

We had to take those into consideration before we came up with a plan that made sense. Really, to get the support in place to help them start this year off in a lot better situation than they were the year before.

Now blueberries are a little bit different. They had a couple of years of really bad pricing; nothing to do with weather. The problem was that production got way ahead of marketing. That’s what happened.

Science was fantastic, I told the scientists at the Agricultural College to keep up the great work. They got five times production off the fields, typically, than they ever had before and if you go to a blueberry field, you would know. In farming, a blueberry field that’s properly looked after is blue now, it’s not green and blue, it’s blue. Just loaded with blueberries. So, the science on that part got ahead of the marketing; those products were marketed as bulk. They were shipped to other parts of the world and they were turned into products. So, we lost value on them.

There was a huge amount of blueberries in inventory. If the companies in Nova Scotia were a little bit ruthless, they could have just said, we’re not buying any blueberries at all. That could have happened, it didn’t. At least they gave some money. Some of the blueberries they’ve sold, I know they sold at a loss because of the cost of storing them; for the time they had to store them and then transporting them and all of this kind of stuff. So that industry is a little bit different. This year the price came up to 40 cents per pound from 20, and we’ve been doing really aggressive marketing.

We’ve spent a lot of money with industry, a lot of money, I think to the tune of a $1 million a year looking at new products, new added value products in the blueberry industry; to get that price up at the farm, the farm gate prices I’m after.

I know we have to feed Nova Scotians, I’m very conscious of that. But this is a prime example, if the producers can’t at least break even, we can’t compete. If we can’t compete, we can’t supply the food, it’s that simple. Unfortunately, it’s just a matter of the way it works.

So, we have other programs in place to help with the problems and I am fully aware of these problems. I have got a lot of issues in my riding with families that have, even though they are in HRM, don’t have employment, all kinds of other issues and their children do go to school often days hungry; it’s very sad.

On the other side of it, we have to feed Nova Scotia and the more successful a farmer is, the more likely he is to donate some of his product to Feed Nova Scotia, or maybe to families he knows. I know there are a lot of generous farmers out there who are doing that now, which helps a lot.

So, it’s a complex process, this whole thing is very complex. I think we’ve come up with a program that works well, or hopefully it will. I would have liked to see more money in it, but again, we had to get the money out of the department. There was no program for this, no program at all and I want to thank my colleagues in Cabinet and the Premier for making this money available.

There are a lot of other needs in health care, education and highways and a whole lot of other things they could have spend the money on, but they saw the wisdom to give us this money to help the farmers that need it very badly.

ALANA PAON: I’d like to go back to the Frost Loss Program for a moment. I think, before that, if I may just say that I understand the complexities of the agricultural industry and what we are up against here.

[5:15 p.m.]

I will disagree with you, though, in that I don’t agree that it’s just the way that it is. I think that it takes people, it takes leadership that has out-of-the-box thinking when it comes to agriculture in this province. We are doing well again in certain sectors. You have told us success stories around that but I still believe that there is room for us to have to look at different models of business, or a different way that we are farming just the basic commodities.

I do not believe that Nova Scotia and Nova Scotia farmers are not able to find ways to be able to produce the most basic food for which we need to be able to feed ourselves, and not make it so that we can make some sort of a profit, indeed, just make it sustainable.

I think it is a very dangerous notion, it is a dangerous notion, to say that it’s impossible for us to get to a place where we are producing more of what is the most basic of our needs as far as food source every single day.

Going into what I kind of call niche markets or boutique farming, as you know, I’ve said that before, is all fine and well. But we need to find ways, and we need leadership on this, in ways that we can actually be producing just regular meat and potatoes.

They produce potatoes in Prince Edward Island and they do extremely well, right? They produce other things in Prince Edward Island right now, too; their agricultural industry is doing extremely well in a lot of different sectors.

I just hope that the minister doesn’t lose sight of trying to find new and innovative ways of being able to assist all those other sectors that have been the staple of Nova Scotia - the backbone of rural Nova Scotia for many years - and is now only focusing on more niche markets and, really, exports.

Yes, it is extremely important, and we are doing well in certain areas as far as our exports, but we also need to be looking at feeding ourselves here. I don’t think that the bulk of that should be looking at buying beef solely from Alberta or anything else, for that matter. I think that is a very dangerous notion.

With that said, I would like to go back to the Frost Loss Program and the frost damage . . .

KEITH COLWELL: Before you do that, I’d like to comment on what you just commented on.

ALANA PAON: Well, if I could just finish my point, please. Thank you. I’m happy to hear your commentary on that afterwards, but if I may, I would like to know what the breakdown per sector is as far as losses that were incurred from frost damage last year; the damage per sector, because I haven’t seen any numbers about that?

I would like to ask the minister: How much percentage is blueberries; how much percentage is for the Christmas tree growers, et cetera? I would like to know that.

I would also like to ask the minister: What is the department doing with regard to looking at mitigating damage that possibly is going to be incurred in years to come, because this is going to inevitably happen again? What is being done to mitigate and change what will happen in years to come?

Because this year we don’t really quite know yet what will happen with some of these sectors. As the minister knows, we are still in the first cycle after the damage. We are not really quite sure how some of that damage will carry forward into this year as well, as far as how these plants react.

Perhaps if those two things, a breakdown per sector as far as frost damage; and also, what is being done moving forward to help mitigate these issues.

KEITH COLWELL: First of all, I want to comment on the first comment you made. I didn’t say it was impossible to grow commodity crops here in Nova Scotia, I did not say that. What I did say was that we had to have farmers, that they could be profitable, so they could grow those crops. That’s a different thing.

So, when you look at the BRM programs, the business risk management programs we have; a lot of the farmers didn’t take insurance out that was available to them. That, we took into consideration. There’re other programs that, federal income loss programs, that they could have availed themselves to this year, next year and into the following year; we’ve seen that happen in some of the industries, where it was an overall industry loss. Of course, as you would be well aware, there are a lot of micro climates in Nova Scotia in a very, very short distance. So, all those things have to be taken into consideration.

You talk about commodity crops, actually it was, for a while, an innovation. I’m all about innovation; I’m all about efficiencies. We have one of our farmers in Nova Scotia that’s the biggest producer of sweet potatoes in Eastern Canada and he was told years ago that he couldn’t grow sweet potatoes in Nova Scotia. That’s a commodity crop that is very successful and indeed, you’ll see Nova Scotia sweet potatoes come all from one farm.

We would like to see more farms get involved in that, to the point that we can supply the market. But it’s not just growing the crop; you have to store it, you have to make it available year-round. We took a group of the horticultural crop people to the Netherlands and several have been back many times, looking at their technology. Their technology and greenhouses are way ahead of ours. A small little country and they produce more in greenhouses, I think, than probably anywhere else in the world. There’s millions and millions and millions of dollars they produce every year. They produce year-round, and indeed, have a process.

We have some of our greenhouses, larger greenhouses, now looking at that technology. We’re going to offer, eventually, programs for them to see if we can get them to adopt some of that technology on a pilot project. We’re going to do a lot of different things that help with our climate change part. We’ve got some funding into that, that we can help with that.

So, all those things we’re working on; that’s our innovation. We’ve got to get the labour costs down or we can’t get labour. We’ve got to get productivity up in the fields. There’re a lot of things we need to do and as you admitted, and I admit the same, I agree with you 100 per cent, that farming is a very complex business, an extremely complex business.

We are dedicated to helping the farmers in this province and the people of Nova Scotia to make sure they get a safe, secure food supply in this province. It’s coming, and the more efficient we get, the more efficient the farmers get, the better business people they are, the more likely we are to achieve that. We’re concentrating on that now.

We want to get young people involved in the farming industry, so we have succession, and we’re starting to see that now. There was no hope before; there is now. I’ve seen more and more young people coming forward and seeing that they have an opportunity to come back and work on the farm.

Two or three years ago it was a big, big topic and it still is today. A lot of the farms have their young people coming back; they’ve gone away somewhere and worked at different jobs and they’re coming back to run the farms now and take them over. Some of them stayed here from the start and are taking it over. I’m seeing younger and younger people at the meetings, which is absolutely what we need. So, as we see that change take place over time, I think we’re going to be in really good shape in Nova Scotia.

As I indicated, we’re going to change our approach that we have with Select Nova Scotia; it may not even be called Select Nova Scotia anymore when we’re done looking at it. But that’s going to be in conjunction with the farmers, the industry in the province, and with the retailers in the province.

We have a tremendous relationship with Sobeys and we’re developing relationships with Walmart, with Atlantic Superstore and a lot of other companies that will help the farmers, so they can make profits on those items.

Again, I stress, take advantage of the tax credits we put in place at the food banks, and that’s not secure, and help make other products they put in the marketplace at a lower cost and fresh, so people can afford to buy them. It’s all part of the very integrated and very complex system we need to do. We’ve got to use science and technology to get where we need to be, and we’re doing that. We’re doing that everyday as we move forward.

The numbers on the commodities that we have, to answer your other question here, the hardest hit was blueberries and the blueberry fields; apples are number two, and then we go down to all different other ones. These are all in millions of dollars: Vegetables were $2.5 million; field crops were $1.1 million; apples were $10 million. Apples themselves were pretty well insured - I think we had 90-some per cent insured - so their losses were covered by crop insurance.

We’re encouraging everybody to get the crop insurance and we’re going to try to broaden it as some of the crops aren’t covered by crop insurance. So, we’re going to try to get those in place, so we have some protection and at the same time keep the costs down for the farmers, so they can afford to do it. We’re making some changes there as well to encourage people to get an AgriInvest so they can have some cash reserve; if they do have a bad year, they can use that money to help to get them through.

All kinds of programs but people have to utilize them; they have to know about them. We’re working all the time with them. We talk about it every chance we get and we’re working more and more with the industry. We’re listening to the industry and we’re working with the industry and that has not happened before. It has not happened before.

ALANA PAON: I would ask, because that list that you just spoke about, there were some sectors that I didn’t hear a dollar amount next to. Perhaps it would be easier, and if I could ask the minister’s department to provide me with a list of the different sectors and the amount of loss associated with each sector; so that I’m aware, as well, of what that is so that we know where the worst losses were incurred. If that would be okay, minister.

KEITH COLWELL: Yes. We’ll endeavour to get that, but it won’t be right away because we’re still working on what the long-term loss is going to be, too. We’ll get some preliminary numbers.

ALANA PAON: Just to be clear, I’m looking for the current numbers from last year so I’m not asking for projections moving forward. Surely the department would know what the current projections are because you would have asked the Treasury Board for the amount of money for the Frost Loss Program associated with what was deemed the losses for last year. So surely the department has those numbers currently.

KEITH COLWELL: Those are the numbers we just gave you.

ALANA PAON: Again, I would just state that not all areas were listed and for those areas that you listed, like blueberries, there was not a number attached. I would just, in a more formal way, appreciate having that information perhaps on paper so that we’re all literally on the same page, and if that could be provided to me sooner than later.

It has nothing to do the projection of loss for this fiscal year that’s coming; it has to do with the loss associated with the program that’s currently going to come to an end at the end of this fiscal year. Surely, the department has those numbers, you’ve just mentioned some of them. I would appreciate them on paper, please.

KEITH COLWELL: We will endeavour to do that.

ALANA PAON: Well, with only three minutes left, there’s not much time to ask too many more questions, although I didn’t hear in the minister’s comments an answer to my question with regard to the projection of loss that the department is anticipating looking forward to this year.

Surely there must be some anticipation of loss that the department, through its Crop and Livestock Insurance program, but particularly crop - will have to look at. Are there any projected amounts for this coming fiscal year based on the frost that happened last year and with the way that we know that the cycle works within the agricultural industry? So, projection of loss for this year is what I’m looking for.

[5:30 p.m.]

KEITH COLWELL: Under crop insurance, we always do a projection and hopefully we’re close. Last year, we weren’t because of the major crop loss and it cost us another $8 million, in addition to the $16.7 million that we had to put in crop insurance this year, on top of that. But that was 40 cent dollars instead of 100 per cent dollars.

So, we do an estimate each year. We’d be only too glad to give you the estimate that we have for crop insurance this year. All the rest of it, I can’t give you anything anywhere near accurate until we see what comes back this Spring, how it works through the Spring and summer and what the results are at the end of the year. In reality, there is no way I can give you that because we don’t have any idea.

We can give you the number we’re setting up, where we set a number up every year, for potential losses. But it doesn’t mean a whole lot. We have it in the budget and it’ll be in the Budget Book anyway. We do that each year and we hope that we build enough reserves, so we don’t have to go back to Treasury Board for more money.

ALANA PAON: Thank you, minister, for that answer as well as for offering to provide me with some of that information. Again, since we only have a very short, limited amount of time left and I know that I’m back again in about an hour’s time, I would like to come back and speak about the Nova Scotia Crop and Livestock Insurance Commission.

I think moving forward we obviously have both advantages and disadvantages of what is occurring with climate change. It’s on the minds of most people across the world but, you know, also just here locally in this province. It’s one of the reasons why I think our grapes are doing so well.

Obviously, our climate is changing. Our winters are not quite so difficult as they were in the past. Certainly, they’re not the winters of my youth on Cape Breton Island, but with that comes a great deal of challenges as well, as far as change with regard to the agricultural sector. So, I’d like to talk about that a little bit more when we come back in about an hour’s time.

THE CHAIR: Probably 20 seconds if you want to throw something else out there.

ALANA PAON: Throw something else out in 20 seconds? Oh, the challenge, the challenge. I’ll just say again that I’m not a believer in the “it’s just the way that it is.”

THE CHAIR: Okay, thank you, and that is the hour for the Progressive Conservative Party. I will now move on to the NDP and Ms. Zann.

LENORE ZANN: Thank you. Hi, minister. How are you doing?

Before I get into some of my budget questions, I wanted to read you an email that I got from somebody yesterday; I figured that rather than guessing I might as well just ask you directly since you’re here and that would help us also have a message for other people who care about this particular issue.

Hello, Ms. Zann. My name is Wallace Cameron and I live in Lower Sackville. The reason I’m writing to you is because I’m a long-time horseman and I think it is time to push the McNeil government for more help for our industry.

In the last two weeks, P.E.I., Quebec, and Ontario have all announced major funding for the harness racing industry. As horse owners who were forced, last year, to take over our own track, our group led by Anthony Stymest proved that we could successfully manage ourselves.

With the Liberals giving $22 million to ferry services to employ 25 per cent of what the harness racing does, it would only be fair for them to help us the same as other provinces have done stepping up.

Truro is a place that needs racing, and stories like Somebeachsomewhere helps give Nova Scotia and Truro a great name. Please, on our behalf, push the McNeil government to look at what other provinces have done and attempt to get more funding for a great industry in your riding. Thank you for listening, Wallace.

I would like to ask the minister: What would he say to this gentleman?

KEITH COLWELL: Well, first of all, I can’t comment on an individual at any time as minister, I can’t do that. But an overall view of the industry, I can talk about the overall industry. I can tell you that we inherited a huge, humongous, horrible mess in Truro, and you are well aware of that.

I want to say up front that I am so impressed with the harness racing industry that has stepped up to the plate when we very clearly said to them that we are not going to bail you out again. They got bailed out every year for years and years and years and it ended up costing us a lot of money to pay off debts that they had generated, a lot of money.

They helped resolve those problems and they have come a long way. We are dedicated to make sure that harness racing has to be profitable. When I say profitable, it has to break even, at least.

There was a study done on harness racing by a gentleman out of Ontario who wouldn’t be biased on harness racing in Nova Scotia; he reviewed the harness racing in Ontario. We didn’t know how Inverness Raceway was doing or how the Sydney racetrack was doing, but come to find out that they were, indeed, making money. They both were.

At the same time, Truro was racking up humongous debts, I mean, humongous debts. Absolutely disgraceful. But since then, since we got the industry to understand that this can’t happen anymore, we worked very closely with some individuals in harness racing and I cannot speak highly enough about those individuals.

They have stepped up to the plate. We’ve basically insisted that they have to get their house in order, which they have done. We have worked with them and we are going to continue to work with them. I want to see harness racing in this province flourish. I really do; it’s a great sport.

It’s a family sport and indeed, it has to be a lot of fun to own a horse, see it win; There are other horses from Nova Scotia that haven’t got the notoriety that Somebeachsomewhere has, but other ones have done extremely well, too. Most importantly, it’s a family sport. You see the whole family out at the track getting the horse ready, looking after the horse, and doing all those things, so it’s very, very important.

As you are probably aware, there is $1 million a year that we have to fund harness racing in the province and that goes to purses. I’m not too sure if the general public knows about that, and if they did, they might not be too happy, but we do have that fund.

We are working with them, and we’ve already made some arrangements, to help them improve some of the buildings. We are going to do more of those things but, again, it is going to be awhile before we can get this in place but it’s coming.

We’ve made major progress in the last year and I’m going to say it again - I’ve already said it two or three times - the people who have stepped up to the plate and started working on this have my deep respect for the work they are doing. They are going to be the change in the industry.

The industry, I feel, has a tremendous opportunity to grow in the province and when we look at all the spinoffs from the industry, they are significant. You’ve seen it in your riding, the Nova Scotia Provincial Exhibition grounds and how the improvements have gone. We’ve taken derelict buildings down - we tore some buildings down that people were occupying that should not have been in them, they were not safe to be in - that’s happened. We are trying to get efficiencies in place.

We have Efficiency Nova Scotia on site now, trying to find out how we can cut the costs of operating the facility, and at the same time make improvements in the infrastructure over time.

We are setting up a study right now to go through the buildings on the property - an engineering company - that will hopefully, in the next month or so, give us back a detailed record of what needs to be done on the whole facility, on each building. We’re not doing all the buildings to start with because we can’t afford to fix them all, but the ones that need the repairs, or we think need the repairs. Most are being reviewed.

I think we’re finally on track now, both on the exhibition and harness racing sides, that they’re going to be self-sufficient. That’s our goal. I would like to see them become very profitable, so they can reinvest in things they want to do and their structure and all this stuff.

It’s coming very well. It has been a long, hard road, as you are well aware. You have been aware of it as much as I had been. I think we’ve got the right people in place now. We’ve got a lot of really positive feedback; I’m sure you’re getting some of it yourself - I hope you are - in the community. We’re not in the press anymore. It’s a really positive turnaround.

I’ve been in politics a long time, and I remember every year there would be a big cheque announcement in Truro - $100,000, $200,000, $250,000 - and I didn’t realize until I became the minister what that was for. That was to bail out the debts that they had generated by not managing it properly. That’s the truth. If it had been fixed years ago, we would be on real solid ground today, but it wasn’t; successive people didn’t look after the funds appropriately. I’ll just leave it at that.

Now we’ve put accountability in place, we’ve done a lot of things and we’re eliminating some problems on the site. When you go in there now, unbeknownst to a lot of people, I go there, not on a regular basis but quite often; any time I get a chance to go by Truro, I usually drop in and just drive around to see what’s going on. It’s a whole different feeling in the place now, because the building has been cleaned up and there is a whole different feeling. It’s a sort of relaxed feeling. You go in there and it’s a nice place to visit. We’ve made some investments in the 4-H barn - which is a fantastic organization - and we will keep working with them.

We’re really starting to see some partnership with the 4-H barn, the Farm Equipment Museum, which is a real fantastic success story. That’s because of the people who operated it - not us - that’s them. I gave funding this year, so they could get washrooms with showers in the 4-H barn, so the young people can go in there and they don’t have to try to run around and find a place to go to the bathroom, which was not acceptable. The stalls - they came up with the design and put a lot of their own work into it - they’ve got a state-of-the-art building there now. That’s what we hope to have in the whole facility, including the harness racing side.

There has to be some work done on the grandstands where you watch the races. Over the past year, we’ve worked with the horsemen to accommodate some of the requests they had that would help them more; we’re going to do more of that. We’re going to give them another one-year lease, so they can get in operation this year quickly. We’ll have that signed very shortly, within the next day or two.

We’ll get that in place and get that rolling, but then what I hope to do is get everything organized and in place and a good working relationship going between the exhibition and the horsemen, so we can give them a five-year lease. Then they’ve got security - they know what they can do - and then work with them to improve the grounds overall, and a really good working relationship with the two.

LENORE ZANN: Can I just ask a question? The five-year plan, are you going to sign a deal over about five years or is it still each year?

KEITH COLWELL: They don’t know this yet.

LENORE ZANN: How are you going to do it?

KEITH COLWELL: We’re going to drive the Chair crazy here. I don’t want anyone making any comments on that comment.

[5:45 p.m.]

LENORE ZANN: I mean so, will there be a contract like, for five years? I know we don’t have to say it, but . . .

KEITH COLWELL: Yes, it is my hope - say we’re going to do another one-year lease. The lease last year we did with them was very good. We helped them through the lease, they came with some things they wanted to change on it, we did that as the year went on and we sort of both felt our way along with this. I think that was a very good way to do it.

Again, they’re going to have a one-year lease very shortly. I reviewed the lease today and it’s going to be offered to them. I’m hoping to put a long-term, let’s say a five-year lease in place, so they’ve got security, they know that the place is going to be there. And, put an operating structure in the place that makes the whole facility a real centre for agriculture. That’s what our goal is, it has always been our goal and I think it’s the first time that we’re approaching that goal.

Now we’re still going to have to do a lot of work, but I’m putting some strong financial accountability in place in the exhibition and we’re going to make strong financial accountability for the harness racing as well. That’s good for us, that’s good for them and it’s good for the people of Truro.

LENORE ZANN: Thank you, very much. So, I will just leave that for now and ask a few other questions. So, agriculture is one of only three departments in this budget that isn’t getting a below inflation increase. In fact, it’s actually getting a funding cut of over $3 million compared to the last budget. Why did government choose to cut agriculture funding?

KEITH COLWELL: We actually haven’t had a cut in our base budget. What that was, we had a one-time $3 million injection in our department for the Wine Industry Board; we had some money, the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, we had some other money, one-time money, that came in last year that put us above the budget we normally have. But this is our regular budget again, we have not had a cut.

LENORE ZANN: Last year’s budget was $15 million off from the current forecast. So, why was that?

KEITH COLWELL: If I remember right, that was our Frost Loss Program, $16.7 million.

LENORE ZANN: Programs in risk management is being cut by almost $4 million this time. What impact will that have?

KEITH COLWELL: Yes, that was one-time money we had last year for blueberries and mink that was mandatory under AgriStability; our contribution to the federal program, AgriStability, that was one time.

LENORE ZANN: Blueberries and mink did you say?

KEITH COLWELL: Yes.

LENORE ZANN: And that was from a loss, right? The blueberries were a loss and the mink were also a loss? When you mentioned earlier in your first speech, you said the fur industry is picking up now. Does that mean the mink industry?

KEITH COLWELL: Well, the mink industry had increased sales last year but they’re still not in recovery. They’re still a long way away from that. A lot of the mink farms have closed down because of international markets.

Again, I talked earlier about commodities; mink is basically a commodity and the market has dropped all over the world. Until that market comes back, we won’t see any growth in the mink industry. There’re a lot of people who put their barns in, sort of moth balls; some of them decided to get out of it altogether. A lot of the sales last year were sales of breeders, so that’s really a step backwards, but they had no choice.

LENORE ZANN: So, we know that climate change will only make weather less predictable, how do we know there won’t be more unplanned costs for this year?

KEITH COLWELL: We don’t know that. There’s no way we could tell that. We’ve budgeted for some of those unforeseen difficulties and hopefully our budget is sufficient to do it.

LENORE ZANN: So, you feel that in this budget there will be enough, and if not, then you’ll ask for more next year, then?

KEITH COLWELL: That’s traditionally what we do.

LENORE ZANN: So, this past year, did the numbers of farms in Nova Scotia increase or decrease?

KEITH COLWELL: It’ll just be one second to find that out, but before we find that out, we have, according to the stats here which don’t mean an awful lot, we’re down by 34 farms overall. I want to clarify that, because we’re not down on our full-time farms. And that’s one thing, we’ve got to stop talking about the number of farms.

A lot of people register as a farm and they may not even be farmers. Under the old system we had, you can produce $10,000 of income pretty easy and once you get the $10,000 of income, you get a licence plate that doesn’t cost you much; you get your tax back on your fuel, you get your property taxes paid on your farmland. The math doesn’t work.

One thing, this number is really important - we’ve had an increase of the number of farms with over $1 million in sales. That’s very positive and that’s why we put that Small Farm Acceleration Program to get the small farms to a larger size - to the size they want to go to - whatever that is. It’s not for us to decide what size they want to go to, but we want to try to make sure that we have farms that are actually farms, and indeed, people have the opportunity to grow a farm, so they can make a living from it; or at least one partner can do that if there are two partners on a farm, until they get to a point that they can make a full-time living.

LENORE ZANN: So which agricultural sectors were the decreases in that weren’t just people who were pretending to have farms?

KEITH COLWELL: That’s not information we would have.

LENORE ZANN: So, you don’t have what agricultural sectors there’s a decrease of farms in?

KEITH COLWELL: Not readily available. It’s something we might be able to get. We track the number of farms, we don’t necessarily track what all those particular farms do. We look at the dollar value on the farms, both export and domestic sales, that we get reported to us. We use the data, basically from Statistics Canada, which isn’t very accurate right now because it’s always lagging a year or two years, three years behind before we get it.

So over time, ourselves we’ve seen a lot of interest in farming and a lot of interest in starting a farm. A lot of young people are very interested. When I became minister five years ago, there wasn’t the same young people around. You’d go, and you’d see mostly people that have been in the business for a long time. So, we have seen the change and I spoke a little bit about it earlier.

I know the first federation meeting I went to, the annual general meeting of the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture, the room had some young people but they were a low proportion of the number of people there. Now, I’m going to the meetings in the commodity groups and the federation and the percentage is getting closer to 50-50. We’re still not 50 per cent of the young people, but a lot of young people.

Because our economy is growing, because the demand is growing, and because our population is growing, of course, there is more need for food. There are more opportunities. Exports are critical, absolutely critical, to our industry because they’ve got to make money; that’s where they can really make some really good money, so they can do the other things that our colleague from Progressive Conservative Party was talking about. It’s important we do those things for people, and for the province and ourselves, but they’ve got to make money. We’re seeing more farms really getting more automated, getting more business sense.

We’re working on some programs which I haven’t announced yet, that are going to revolutionize the industry as far as management programs are concerned. They’re not available anywhere so we’re developing them now. It’s a project that I’ve wanted to do for a long time and those are the things we’re looking at. You know, they’re very innovative approaches that as our colleague from the Progressive Conservative Party says, we have to be innovative and we’re being innovative.

We’re listening to industry and we’re working with them. So, we’ve got to stop counting farms because farms are a false and misleading number. We’ve got to look at farm gate sales and we’ve got to get our sales up; and, hopefully, those are a lot of small farms included with the bigger farms.

LENORE ZANN: Okay, thank you. This past year then, did the amount of land that was used for food production increase or decrease?

KEITH COLWELL: The actual land in production we’re not sure. We don’t have it right here. I don’t know if we even have it.

But one thing I will tell you we’ve been working a lot with agricultural land preservation. You’ll see some of these farms that we talk about and I’m going to go back to that for a minute and I’ll try to give you better clarity on the amount of land, but a lot of these farms are 25-acre lots with a $500,000 house on it. The house is subdivided off onto an acre and then the residents claim the rest of it as farmland and it probably is in grass as a lawn. So, those things aren’t acceptable. It doesn’t help our farmers or our farming industry at all and it’s taking up very valuable farmland. We know that; the municipalities are aware of that, but they still allow that to happen.

The farmers, on the other hand, that sell this property are maybe retiring and they look at it as a retirement fund and that’s fine; I mean, it’s their land. But we are really looking at ways we can protect that land and make sure that it goes into agriculture. Agriculture products, food products, and water are the next gold and the next oil. They’re coming.

It’s coming and, as the population grows, I believe there’s going to be, by 2038, an estimated 8.3 billion people in the world, and we’re going to have to have huge increases in agricultural land to put in production. We’re going to have to produce more fish products. Anything that’s food, we’re going to have to really produce or we’re not going to be able to feed the middle class. That’s what the UN is telling us.

We are working with Municipal Affairs to see if we can’t have mandatory planning bylaws; they’re not in place in most of the municipalities. They don’t see the importance of agricultural land and, by the time a house or a factory or an industrial park is put on it, it’s too late. It doesn’t come back. It can’t be recovered.

[6:00 p.m.]

The countries that have land that we can put into farm products, and other products that we can grow, help feed not only our own people but the world - it’ll be too late. We’re well aware of that. We’ve been working at this for the last five years, and we’re making progress. We have a designated group of people working on that. We have our staff on it, and we’re working with Municipal Affairs and other departments as well, and the Federation of Agriculture. We’ve got our joint committee working on this. We’re all very concerned about it.

It’s a complex issue, like everything is, not just to get it to happen but the awareness and raising the awareness. The more we raise awareness, the more we can do to correct these things.

LENORE ZANN: I agree. Is any of the budget allocated to protecting high-quality agricultural land from non-agricultural use?

KEITH COLWELL: We’re doing a lot on the dike systems in the province. A lot of that is very valuable agricultural land, but again, in some of the municipalities, they’ve built sewer systems on them and all kinds of things and taken those very productive lands away and put a liability on the province and the taxpayers of having to protect this property. For one project we’re working on, we’ve put $50 million in our budget to work on the dikes, and we’re working with the federal government to get another $50 million to do some of the serious work we need to do.

LENORE ZANN: Is there actually any part of this budget, though, that is specifically to protect the agricultural land for agricultural use? For instance, since 2014, how much agricultural land has the department helped protect for agricultural use?

KEITH COLWELL: At the present time, we have 17,000 hectares of protected land behind dikes, that is agricultural land. We’re working with the industry and the Federation of Agriculture to protect more of it - and put systems in place, because every municipality is different to deal with. Some of them don’t have any kind of municipal planning strategy, which makes it very, very hard to do that.

When you look at all the value of this land - and as we move forward, the land gets more and more valuable - it’s going to be harder and harder to protect. That’s one reason that some of the farming we do is on high-valued land. For instance, some of the vineyard land in Nova Scotia is now selling between $30,000 and $50,000 an acre with nothing on it. That will protect it for that type of crop, but unfortunately, vineyard land doesn’t feed people.

LENORE ZANN: Since 2014, how much agricultural land has been lost to non-agricultural development, and has the trend been upward or downward year over year?

KEITH COLWELL: That’s a question I can’t really answer at the moment, but we’ll endeavour to get that information. We’re presently revising the statement of provincial interests in agricultural land. We’ve been working on that for five years. It’s a serious problem. We’re trying to get Crown land that we have now into maple syrup production, which would help get it more into farmland.

We’re working on that with natural resources - I can’t remember the proper name for the new department, but the equivalent to natural resources - and trying to get that in.

We’re trying to get some provincially owned lands, probably on a lease basis at a reasonable rate. The province will still own it and be able to protect the land long term. We’re trying to get more of it into agriculture. There are some really good Crown lands that are agriculture, but again, we’re the smallest landowner in the province compared to the private landowners.

It’s difficult. It’s something that has not gone unnoticed and something we’ve spent a lot of time on. We intend to spend a lot more effort and resources on it, because it’s so important long term.

LENORE ZANN: I would definitely agree with that. Does it ever bother or concern you that when you hear stories about all the clear-cuts that are happening, there are sugar maples that are also being clear-cut?

KEITH COLWELL: I didn’t quite hear that, sorry.

LENORE ZANN: Does it ever bother you, when you hear of stories about all these big clear-cuts happening, that there are also sugar maples being cut and clear-cut?

KEITH COLWELL: Unfortunately, I have no control over that. If it’s on Crown land, typically the maples aren’t cut - they are not supposed to be cut - but again, that’s something that you would have to talk about with the new department of . . .

LENORE ZANN: Lands and Forestry.

KEITH COLWELL: Yes.

LENORE ZANN: How much did agricultural production increase in the last year, and in what sectors were there significant increases or decreases? Where production did increase, was most of that for export or consumption within Nova Scotia?

KEITH COLWELL: Our exports are up some and we have increases. Going by the numbers we have - again, some of these are a little bit slanted. For mink, for instance, that went up, as we talked about already, but that was because they sold some of the breeders off. Wild blueberries went up in sales because we were very actively marketing, but again, we had a loss in crop. That was selling off inventory. Vegetables have gone up about 12 per cent. Some of the information we have here is sort of a mixture of stuff. Apples have gone up substantially. Basically with apples, we can sell everything we can get and then some.

With the information I have right now, it’s difficult to tell you exactly what it is. Overall, it’s a hard year to tell, because the frost damage was so extensive in so many industries. It sort of skewed everything. Barring any more frost or drought or whatever could happen to us, I think the numbers will be more reflective this year.

LENORE ZANN: Where production did increase, was most of that for export, then, rather than consumption within Nova Scotia? Like apples, for instance, and the blueberries, et cetera?

KEITH COLWELL: I think some of it is both. I believe some of it is both. Because of the tax credit stuff, there is a lot of produce going into the food banks now that might have been left in the fields or stuff that would have been sold. Maybe the market is low or whatever and they get the tax credit.

I don’t believe we count that as produce that’s going into the system, which we probably should, for many reasons. For one, we know how much the food banks are contributing to Nova Scotians in need, which is very, very important to us.

Our new cash receipt sales are still not ready for this year. We don’t have them yet from 2018.

LENORE ZANN: The Minister of Environment has said that consultations on updating EGSPA will finally happen this year. What goals for 2030 would you like to see for a sustainable and prosperous agriculture sector? What would you like to see included in EGSPA this next go-round?

KEITH COLWELL: Well, there are several things I would like to see, personally. One, I would like to see our farmers be profitable, because if they are profitable, they can grow and they can add to the economy in the province and also help the family farms. It also makes good products available to the consumers of Nova Scotia, that maybe we are importing from someplace else, and that helps us as well.

When we have to do all those things while we struggle with weather conditions, trade issues, and all kinds of things that would put the cost of food up in a province, there are several tools we have to put in place. We are working on and have been working on them for some time. Number one, we work with the industry sector by sector to see what they need to help them grow. We put some things in place. I’ll use sheep farming as an instance.

I met with the group of the executive of sheep farmers a while ago, and one gentleman, because of programs we put in place the last couple of years, is now a full-time sheep farmer. Those were programs that weren’t our suggestion. It was the industry’s suggestion.

That’s how we work hand-in-hand with the industry, and I think the more we do that, the better off we will be. We have to put some more tools in their hands to make it more profitable. We have now the apprenticeship for machinery equipment repair. Now, that doesn’t sound like much, but it is very, very, very important, because that means we have skilled technicians who we don’t have to bring in from outside the province. That means farm equipment could be fixed faster and more economically, and they have someone to call if they can’t get a problem fixed themselves. I know farmers are very resourceful and can fix almost anything, but it is still good to have that resource.

We need to look at educational systems for farms in the schools so we get an opportunity to learn more about farming. Maybe the community college - we have to look at the community college and see if there are some training programs that the farms need for when they get someone to come to work with them, in addition to what the Agricultural College does.

We are working on those things. They are coming. It’s coming, and we are doing it sector by sector.

LENORE ZANN: Would you support, or do you support, a broad public consultation to establish the new EGSPA goals?

KEITH COLWELL: We consult with the industry daily.

LENORE ZANN: This is Environment, though, right? For the Department of Environment - EGSPA.

KEITH COLWELL: We consult with the industry on an ongoing basis. We understand and we know that we can do a lot more in agriculture. We’ve made huge strides in the last five years. Huge strides. I said in one of my opening remarks that the Honeycrisp apple is worth so much in Florida. That’s just one market. We have more apple trees in the ground than we have ever had in the history of the province. That’s in reaction to and co-operation with the fruit growers. We are doing that over and over again in all the different commodity groups, and it is exciting to see what’s happening. Our biggest problem is that we don’t have a year-round supply. That’s our problem.

They have the technology in the apple industry to hold the apples and hold a top-quality apple. We have the technology in blueberries - of course, they are frozen blueberries - and that has been there for a long time. We have technology available now for sweet potatoes, so we can keep those for a whole year and can supply year-round.

Some of the other products that we are moving forward on are like lettuce, which you would buy that grows every day. That has been on the shelves of the grocery stores, in the hands of the farmers’ markets, and all those places all the time.

We have a stable supply of chickens and eggs. That is supply management. Same as milk. Those three industries, as long as they can maintain supply management, will be very profitable. Typically, those supply-managed industries are investing in new technology and more processes.

I talked earlier about some of the research done in the chicken industry. There is a lot of work going on in the dairy industry. As long as we can keep supply management in the province, we will be in good shape. We are big supporters of that. We’ve indicated that in writing many times. If supply management, for instance, disappears in the dairy industry, the dairy industry will close down in Nova Scotia. It’s that simple.

[6:15 p.m.]

LENORE ZANN: I know we were at the dairy farmers dinner together and that was under great discussion at that time. In the 2015-16 Accountability Report, the Department of Agriculture reported on its progress towards the related EGSPA goal of increasing the number of farms producing food for local consumption, but I haven’t seen any report on that since. Last year, minister, you said Nova Scotians spent around 17 per cent on locally-produced food and that we were on track to reach the EGSPA goal of having Nova Scotians spending 20 per cent of food money on local food by 2020. Can you please tell us what percentage Nova Scotians currently spend on local food, and can you provide some updated numbers?

KEITH COLWELL: We said 17 per cent last year. Our problem is a lot of food is bought at farmers’ markets and we have no way of tracking it. I think we’re at least at the 17 per cent and probably a little bit above that now. That’s why we’re going to change our Select Nova Scotia program to more aggressive marketing in Nova Scotia to make sure we increase this number every year. I’m very concerned about it for two reasons. Number one, we want the farms to be successful in Nova Scotia and supply local market, and for food security.

People don’t realize we don’t have a stable food supply in the province. There may be a time in history, down the road sometime, that we may not have enough food to feed the people, never mind not being able to feed everybody in the province, not because of cost but because there’s no food. We’re looking at new tracking methods to track this better and we’ve got to start tracking it differently, I think. We’ve got to start tracking on, well of course what the cost is, but we’ve got to correct that for the cost increases and the cost of living and all those sorts of things. We were counting farms for a long time, but that doesn’t work very well to give us a real good handle on this. We’re going to change how we monitor that. I think it’s important we get a good, solid system we can rely on and then we can really set goals to achieve those goals. Guaranteed, we’re going to put a real major effort into buy local.

LENORE ZANN: So, on that note then, is the department doing anything beyond marketing to increase Nova Scotia’s food self-sufficiency? For instance, is the department investing in infrastructure that will help small-scale farmers produce and reach a local market?

KEITH COLWELL: Yes, we have a whole fleet of programs. There’s a Small Farm Acceleration Program that’s aimed directly at that, directly at trying to get the small farmers to produce more at the pace they want to produce it. It’s a really adaptable program. We’ve looked at it. It’s self-driven. If you need a particular thing to make your farm grow, we’re going to make it available.

LENORE ZANN: Can I get you to repeat that again? What’s the name of the program?

KEITH COLWELL: It’s the Small Farm Acceleration Program. We’re the only one like it in the country. We also have our loan board as we restructured our loan board and it now has a new loans program in progress for this as well. So, there’d be some benefits for the small farmers. They’d get small loans that weren’t available before and we’re talking about industry growth here. Just one second, I’ll get you the number of people enrolled in it.

Yes, we’ve got 47 small farms right now that are interested and actually doing this program. We’ve got a lot of interest from another probably, 20 or 30 farms that are starting to realize what this program is like. It’s broken out about 57 per cent of people are talking about crop improvements. The other percentage is livestock. It’s a good combination.

I’ll go back to the gentleman I was talking about earlier that was making $8,000 a year. You can see when we mentioned - this was before the program started - we talked about it and we had quite an interesting chat. One of the meetings we were having in my office, it was one of the commodity organizations, and a light just sort of went on for him. He said, now is my opportunity. He said, this is an opportunity for me now to be able to do something I simply couldn’t possibly do without this program. We’re being watched across the country . . .

LENORE ZANN: And how much is going into the Small Farm Acceleration Program?

KEITH COLWELL: We’ve budgeted a minimum of $0.5 million and we will adjust the program as need be as we move forward, as long as it fits in our budget. I just want to make a note here, too, that there has already been 15 micro loans for start up and expansion under this program, under the loan board.

It’s quite a novel idea and, again, I want to give my staff credit because we were trying to break that cycle. It’s almost like a poverty cycle. If you don’t have the resources at your disposal and can’t get them, and don’t know how to put it all together, then it doesn’t work. With this, it’s very flexible. For instance, if you came and you were a small farmer and you said okay, I want to increase my sales by $1,000 next year maybe, or $10,000, you want to make a 10 per cent increase. And you said, well, I need a tractor, but I can’t afford a new tractor, but I can buy a used tractor. That’s something we’d probably help with a micro loan or some other thing. Then you may need a plow for that or a harrow, whatever you need.

Those things are looked at individually and then to help them make their goal, that’s the idea of this program. Their plan, their approach, and what they know, we’ll go over it realistically with them, too. We have staff that will sit down with them. If someone says I’m going to double my sales from $10,000 to $20,000, well we want to make sure that they’ve got a realistic goal. They’d rather come and say we can go to $12,000 from $10,000, instead of $20,000, and hope they get to the $20,000 and help them move towards the $20,000. Then next year in the program again, they come along, and we would do the same re-evaluation and they’ve learned from the year before, and they get more business oriented and a little bit more equipment, and they can set the goals where they need to go.

This program, I think, in the long term is going to help a lot of young people. Not just young people who maybe have been struggling for years to get to a point they can make a living at it, of the standard they want to live at. I think that’s the key to this. The key is to make sure it’s the individual deciding where they want to go. We can’t dictate to them where that should be. I would like to see a minimum set in Nova Scotia for $0.25 million or $0.5 million in sales for farms, so they can make a living at it, but that’s not practical. Practical is they’ve got to set their own goals.

LENORE ZANN: For instance, did major grocery store chains stock more locally-produced products this year, or less?

KEITH COLWELL: We’d have to verify this. That’s not information we typically keep in our department, but we can view it. It appears that it’s increasing each year. I know the processing and manufacturing industries use the raw materials.

I know we’ve been working with Sobeys. I’m just using Sobeys as an example; it’s not just Sobeys. If I remember the number right - and we don’t have it here - I think Sobeys bought last year about $45 million of Nova Scotia produce. That produce isn’t all sold in Nova Scotia because they move some of that produce to the warehouse in Moncton. Some of it may not go there.

They’ve been really knocking on farmers’ doors, working with us. If the farmer needs something they don’t have, we can be partners with the farmer to get that to happen. It’s a really good three-way partnership, and we’re hoping to develop the same thing with the other food chains and get that in place, and we get more and more. The big problem, as you would be aware, is that you’ve got to have a market for your product. If you’ve got your market tied up - I know this one farm in the province that has a major contract - I talked about it earlier with strawberries, the major contract for strawberries, Sobeys will take every strawberry they can produce, fixed price for the whole year, that’s it.

There’s another big farm that’s doing the same thing. It’s not just going to be big farms; it’s also small farms. If a small farm can produce some special product, they want to produce themselves, and they can provide a steady market or a steady supply of that to so many stores like Sobeys, in particular - I keep using that as an example as a good Nova Scotia company - they will buy that product and put it in their stores. They want to increase that every year.

I was to the horticultural meeting and the gentleman was there giving a presentation from Sobeys. He was challenging the farmers to bring forward more produce, because they would buy it. It’s that simple. It has to be good quality, delivered on time, and consistently delivered.

LENORE ZANN: I’m also concerned about another place that does important work in my community, which is Perennia. Their budget hasn’t really increased in about 18 years. Will it increase this year? Their Perennia Agricultural Production Extension Program is also smaller than it used to be. That extension program and the extension officers are really crucial to allow Perennia to provide specialized production services that help farmers acquire the information and develop the skills they need in order to be successful. I know many of the people who work there.

Research has shown that strong extension programs are really fundamental to farmers being able to adapt to change, and especially to climate change. Is the department doing anything to strengthen and grow the extension program at Perennia to support farmers?

KEITH COLWELL: The budget from government hasn’t changed much for Perennia over time.

LENORE ZANN: Yes, it hasn’t increased at all.

KEITH COLWELL: But it has increased because of the work they do. They have more money going through the system now than they’ve ever had. They’ve taken on fisheries as well. Also, we have a co-operative program with our department for extension services. Perennia’s experts in some areas, our department’s experts in other areas, and we work jointly together to provide the service to the farmers.

So Perennia financially is better off today than it was last year, the year before that, the year before that, and the year before that. Even though it shows in our budget, and ours hasn’t changed, but Perennia is now, indeed, in the Valley, they’re in Truro, and they’re working on some major projects. They are working on . . .

LENORE ZANN: Oh, I know. I mean I’ve done tours of it.

[6:30 p.m.]

THE CHAIR: We are going to prevent the cross-talk, so answer-question, question-answer.

LENORE ZANN: So, its budget is not going to be increased this year, correct?

KEITH COLWELL: No, their budget has been held constant this year and through the year we will work with them on specific projects the industry wants. Over the past few years they have done some very substantial projects and long-term projects. We are working with them now to deliver some more projects that will hopefully get some stable funding for, in particular, Atlantic projects they are working on. They are doing a fantastic job.

Some of the projects we already have now. We are doing some four-year programs they are getting in place. They are doing stuff on a project with the federal Environment and Climate Change, with our department, with Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture, and businesses besides.

They are stronger than they ever were. I think that has a lot to do with the board we appointed which is all industry board, all successful business people. Basically, they run the facility now. That’s why we put the wine bottling line in Perennia. We funded that totally. It’s a business for them now so they can generate revenue.

Ideally, the situation, with the funds we provide them that is just showing in our budget, which is about $3.3 million every year, we use that as a base and then we hope they would get much stronger and much bigger.

We are talking about some intellectual property we will transfer to them as we develop it, then they can sell and generate revenue, and a lot of different business models around that. I think they are part of the key to really helping our agriculture industry grow in co-operation with the universities, with industry, and with the department - all of us together to make that happen.

I know they developed a product a few years ago called Pomme d’Or for one of the Domaine de Grand Pré Wines in the Valley, which is very successful. They’ve done a lot of other things like that. As we look at products we can export and add value to Nova Scotia’s economy, they are going to be a key part of that, and they already are.

THE CHAIR: Time has expired for the New Democratic Party questioning.

It is now to the Progressive Conservatives and Ms. Paon.

ALANA PAON: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Minister, I have another hour with you, so I will look forward to hearing your responses to the questions I have for you in the next little bit. I will try not to be too hard on you. I am simply here wanting to know answers, obviously, and I think most people in the agricultural industry are the same way.

I’m going to go back to the Frost Loss Program. I just have a few extra questions left on that one.

Very straightforward, can the minister please let us know how many applications were received for the 2018-19 season? Obviously the application process is now closed. We’ve passed the deadline period, so I would assume that the department now knows how many applicants they have received.

I would like to ask the minister how many applications have been received and what is the estimated cost to the applicants that the department will be paying out? As well as when can the applicants expect their cheques to be received?

KEITH COLWELL: I can’t give you the complete answer because we don’t have all the information in yet. We are still working on the applications that did come in.

The reason we put the application date the way it was. We didn’t turn anyone away after the application date, either, because we wanted to make sure everyone was the same.

We had 317 farms apply, but some of the farms had more than one crop, and each crop is handled differently and separately. The actual number of claims that have gone in, I’m not sure at this point because we’re still tabulating this. We’re still trying to get information from some of the farms on some of the crops because information they didn’t necessarily have complete in their application forms, and that was fine. We accepted the application form anyway and our staff is working steadily on this information to make sure we get the application and get it complete, so we can get the funds in the hands of the people who need it. Just because they didn’t get everything on the application doesn’t mean we’re not going to work with them to make that happen.

We’re going to be still a little while before we get it all finalized. I know we’re several million into the program already, but I can’t give you an accurate number probably for another week, maybe longer, before we get the accurate number of exactly how much. When we get that number, we’ll share it. We’ll make it public. That’s not an issue at all. We won’t necessarily make it public what farms got the money because that would be an invasion of their privacy. We will do that.

We’re hoping we spent all the money and we’re hoping we don’t leave anybody out of the process because of not having enough money. We’ve got that balance we want to achieve, and we want to make sure we get the money in the hands of the people who need it. Very shortly, the money will start to flow and that’s going to be very, very important, but I believe the way it’s structured, that we have to flow all the money at the same time.

So, it’s all the applications in, everything complete, and that has taken us a while to get to some. We’ve put extra staff working on this right from day one. If someone sends an application in, it’s my understanding that if it’s not complete, they’re called right away. They’re advised of what they need for information. If they need help deciding that information, our staff’s there to help them. We want this money out and we want the money, so we can account for it properly, so we don’t have any issues with accountability. Make sure that the information we provided is accurate from the farms. Make sure that’s accountability, too. As it’s taxpayers’ money, we want to make sure this is done right. That has made us a little bit slower, too.

It’s not because we haven’t been working on it. We have at least 18 extra staff working on this project alone in addition to our regular program staff and we put a stop on all the other programs. We’ll still intake them, but we won’t follow up on them until we get this one finished. This is so important to get done. So, we’ve put a lot of extra resources into it. We’ve taken away staff from our operations side, as well, to do this because we wanted to make sure it was done in a manner that we can get the money out the door. Again, I stress, properly accounted for, properly in the hands of the people that need it, and I have the documentation to prove it.

ALANA PAON: I can appreciate the vast amount of work that would have to go into receiving and processing all those claims. It’s an extraordinary amount to be receiving all within a very short period of time. We do want to make certain we’re accountable with taxpayers’ money, so it’s very good to hear those words coming from the minister, as well.

I would again ask when the minister has the information available, perhaps even before it goes out for public viewing, I would very much appreciate having information forwarded regarding how many applicants were received, as well as what percentage of sectors, I guess, received how much money. It’s simply to speak to what percentage of loss is allocated to each particular agricultural sector.

As much as I know that 317 producers have come forward, and some of them have more than one claim, I would like to know within a certain window - you don’t have to give me a specific date - but I’m sure that producers would appreciate knowing some sort of a window of when they would expect to receive some money. I’m just a bit concerned that obviously we’re nine months in it now. It might be several more months before people see any kind of money to be able to help them to recover. We’re well into spring. We’re well into the next planting season. People need money to be able to put, you know, seed back into the ground and do any kind of mitigation they need to do for the season moving forward. Can the minister at least give me some sort of a window as far as when applicants should expect to receive their cheques, and can he let me know if he can make that information available to me that I requested previously?

KEITH COLWELL: We’re hoping to have the cheques in two weeks. We understand the urgency of the farms. They have to make some decisions what they’re going to plant this year, what inputs they’re going to have. We want to get it in their hands as soon as possible because we want them to have the best possible crop they’ll have this year.

As far as the numbers are concerned, once we have the numbers and a general format, again, by commodity group or however we’re recording it, there are several ways we’re looking at it, that information will be made public, and it will be provided to you.

ALANA PAON: Thank you so much, minister, and I just want to say as well that my hat is off to all staff who are obviously working diligently to make certain these producers are receiving compensation so they’re able to move forward in this new growing season. Thank you so much for your efforts and for your staff’s efforts as well.

Before I forget, I’m going to go a little bit into a different trajectory here. I have to ask this question. I would like to know if a bull bonus is going to be re-introduced this year to the industry as has been requested.

KEITH COLWELL: No.

ALANA PAON: Well, that was a quick response. May I ask the minister why the department and why he, as minister, has made that decision?

KEITH COLWELL: Well, I’m glad you asked that question. I was going to answer that anyway. Bull bonuses don’t work. They don’t work. All it does is puts the price of the bull up. If someone was unscrupulous, it would be possible to sell the same bull several times to get the bonus several times. I’m not saying that ever happened. I assume it didn’t, but it doesn’t work. The bottom line, it doesn’t work.

So, we’ve talked to the industry about this and we’re going to do more in genetics and the genetics will prove which bull is the best genetics to buy and it will be proven. It will be scientific. We’re going to a scientific approach on it. That will put the price of the bull up, the good bulls. It will identify to someone who is buying a bull what they can expect scientifically, not just because someone gets a bonus from the government that just simply puts the price up. We don’t accomplish anything. The better stock we have in the province, of course, as you’d be well aware being in the agriculture industry, the better product to have the higher price you can get, the more profitable you can get, and the more that animal is worth, even if you just sell it the way it is, as a bull or as a calf or whatever the case may be. That’s what we’re working on. In the process as we’re going through this, we met with the industry several times about this issue and we told them the same answer.

The answer was no but they’ve been completely engaged in this. It’s going to be a co-operative effort between ourselves and the industry to make sure we have a system in place that works for the industry, not for us, but for the industry. We’ll put the resources in that are needed to do that and the testing or whatever has to be done. That’s still in development. The amount of money we had in the bull bonus program is not going to vanish. It’s going to stay in that program to go to a scientific approach and that’s really what needs to happen. That will give us evidence that if a certain breeding program is going on, if it’s working effectively - and we’ll know on an ongoing basis - it will give the farmers a lot more science to back it up with.

[6:45 p.m.]

We’re moving away from, you know, this is a program we used to have and always wanted, to science, and to innovation, and the things that you talked about so rightfully so about how we can make our industry more cost effective and how we can help them grow their businesses, and indeed, get the supply of food we need for the province, and for export if we have a surplus.

ALANA PAON: I would like to know, because I remember years back under the Growing Forward 2 program, there had been some money allocated for a genetic enhancement program for the sheep industry. It was the GenOvis program. Perhaps if the minister could explain: Number one, is this new genetic enhancement program for the beef industry going to be enacted this fiscal year, and will it be structured in a very similar way as the old GenOvis program - genetic enhancement program - that was available within the sheep industry?

KEITH COLWELL: Yes, we’re still working with the sheep industry, to answer that question, the beef industry and the sheep industry - we hope to do the same sort of thing - a scientific approach; but again, we’re working with the industry right now and it will be a while before we get something in place.

We’re hoping to get something in place that we can prove scientifically what needs to be done and get the results, so we can measure them, and put that in place for long term. Then maybe we might want to tweak how we do the testing or something as time goes on to give us better results. That’s the goal.

The reality of it is, we want to move the industry forward with a better product for the marketplace. Enhancements may help with a system that may be less expensive to produce a product over time and still very healthy for the animals, maybe to the feed, all kinds of things we have to view.

I’ve changed how we’re doing business in the department a bit, all related to this. I’ve appointed project managers: I’ve got one for beef, one for pork, one for sheep, and I think I’ve got eight or nine other ones. Their job is to work with the industry, look at new approaches, new ideas and that’s what they work on, that project. It’s starting to work very well.

The people that have come up with some incredible stuff in our staff. They’ve really been empowered to move forward, come up with ideas, and I stress, it’s with the industry. Every step of the way, their job is to talk to the industry every day, talk about ideas, and if something isn’t working right, it’s their responsibility to come back to me and say, this isn’t working right, we have to change it; and we will change it. So, it’s a whole different approach to the way we work.

It still doesn’t replace any of the outreach work we do. It doesn’t replace any of the programs we’re doing, but it just gets a better impact on the programs. Several of these programs they’re doing like that, we’ve made major strides in a very short time. Typically, what I’ve found, we have a great staff and they’re doing great work, but if you have someone that’s dedicated to move that file forward, the file moves forward a lot faster. They also get better information back, so we can make management decisions on programs and other things that we need to do to make sure that the industry gets stronger. That’s our goal.

ALANA PAON: Just to go back to that subject again, I believe the minister just stated that there won’t be a bull bonus moving forward. Thank you for explaining the rationale behind that. Certainly, part of reducing your cost of production on the farm is directly correlated to be able to try to get the best genetics possible.

I can appreciate that the department would want to move in that direction. Certainly, I would want to ask though, because the minister mentioned that that money for the bull bonus is not disappearing, however, if my ears heard correctly, it doesn’t sound like we’re going to have a genetic enhancement program available for the beef industry this fiscal year.

So if there is no genetic enhancement program for the beef industry this year and if there is no bull bonus in place moving forward as well, what will be available to the beef industry this year? Where is that money that would have gone to the bull bonus going to go, if there’s not going to be a genetic enhancement program available to the beef industry this year?

KEITH COLWELL: Yes, the money is not going to disappear, number one, for this program. It’s not going to disappear this year and we will have a program this year. We just have to get working with the beef industry, and I stress working with the beef industry, because it’s really important we get this right, or the best we can to at least start until we prove that we can find something better.

So, it will be there in place. The budget will not be reduced for this program whatsoever. We want to get that, exactly what you said, get the genetics right from the top producers to make it more valuable to the farm and the farmers and the province. So, that’s what we’re aiming at.

Science is the way to go on all this stuff and it’s available now. There are monitoring systems we can put in place and we’re looking at different systems we can use and different ways to do this. We have to have something that can - how can I put this - if you have a quality assurance system there is a standard and you measure the standard by these different steps, or these different evaluations that you do on them. This would be sort of a bull quality assurance system but beyond that, we’re looking for the ones that perform the best and can be used to enhance the herd.

A lot of the farmers, the really advanced industry members, are already doing some of this. So, it’s going to really complement what they’re doing and we’re consulting with them to make sure we get a standard that we can use in the province. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but we want to make sure that we get a standard that really is getting the result we need.

ALANA PAON: Thank you, minister for clarifying that. May I ask then, moving forward, if there will be a genetic enhancement program for the beef industry this fiscal year? What is the amount anticipated to be allocated to that program?

KEITH COLWELL: We typically put around $60,000 a year in the program. We would do at least that, we may need to do more depending on what testing programs we go into, how we do the testing, and all those sorts of things. The industry themselves, of course, even at the bull bonus program, they didn’t put anything into it, but now the farmers will have to put a percentage of that in under our CAP program.

We will make sure that it’s at least $60,000 a year, that that’s not changed, and we’ll go from there. If we need more money in the program, we’ll put it in. Some of the investments we may make in the first year or couple of years - until we make sure we get all the testing facilities in place and we’ve got to put those in place - it may be higher than going down the road as the same, as you’re setting up criteria for something else.

So, it will be at least $60,000 this year, maybe a bit higher. We’ll have to see exactly where we settle with the industry to make sure we get everything in place. We really need to do this accurately.

ALANA PAON: I’d like to move now to speak about more environmental issues. Again, we were speaking earlier with regard to both the advantages and disadvantages that come with climate change, globally and within this province; we’re feeling the effects of that as well. It is opening new possibilities in our agriculture sector but it’s also posing us some real challenges, some very costly challenges as we saw with the frost that happened last year.

With climate change comes the possibility of more issues with flooding. So, flood mitigation moving forward needs to be more of a high-priority item and something that we speak about; more thought processes being put forward and money being put forward in how to be able to mitigate that and all climatic changes that are occurring. I’m just thinking about coastal erosion for example.

Many of our farmers are obviously located on the coastline. There has to be some thought put forward into that as well. But, with flooding, flood mitigations specifically and wanting to speak about the spending around flood mitigation and, with the rise of tides and storm threats along our vulnerable coastlines, dikes and aboiteaux restoration is of great concern. We’ve spoken about that in the House during Question Period.

Can you tell me the total amount you expect to have spent in this year’s fiscal budget 2018-19, the one that’s just ending, and how much is allocated for 2019-20 and, again, this is just on flood mitigation, is what I’m wanting to know?

KEITH COLWELL: Last year, we spent approximately $1 million on the work that we do. This year, we’re budgeting $3.3 million to $3.35 million in rough numbers to do it and it’s a nine-year program. It’s $50 million we put in the budget for that over nine years. I will also stress the numbers aren’t really reflective of the work we do.

This gentleman that’s sitting beside me and his team typically manage to get free soil - if there’s something going on in an area that if someone wants to get rid of some soil or doing some road work, or some contractor is doing excavating and they’ll want to get rid of the soil - so they’ll gather the soil up. They may change where they actually work because they get free material. Believe it or not, they go to the junkyard and they buy steel at a very low price and they’ll fabricate aboiteaux and do a lot of work like that. They have really, for the money they get, done an exceptional job and protect a lot more dike area than if they just went out and hired everybody to do everything and paid for everything as they went.

So, they’re a very innovative group. I can say that particularly about the dike maintenance individuals and they’re always looking for free fill. If you know where there’s any, anytime, give us a call and we’ll be only too glad to take it - as long as it’s got no pollutants in it of course - and use it to reinforce a dike or raise a dike anywhere we can in the province.

If something’s free, we’ll move to that area and we’ll make sure that happens, because that starts our long-term plan of raising the dikes higher as we move forward. I just want to put that in there because that’s a fact and we do that every day. Oftentimes staff in the departments don’t get enough credit for the work they do, and this is one we take very seriously and of course, we put more money in the budget and we will continue to do that.

ALANA PAON: Thank you, minister, and may I say - now that I have my glasses on and I can actually see all of you properly, I take them off when I’m reading anything up close - that it’s very nice to see actually the gentleman to your left whom I apologize for not selling hello to earlier while I was walking by, it’s nice to see him again. I think the last time I saw him we were trying to outbid one another over a chocolate-coloured North Country Cheviot and I apologize for that because I outbid him. Good to see you again.

[7:00 p.m.]

I wanted to continue on with that. It’s good to hear obviously that money is going into flood mitigation. Can the minister clarify for me that $3.35 million - did I hear that correctly, that that’s over a nine-year program, or is that $3.35 million that is allocated for this fiscal year coming up in 2019-20?

KEITH COLWELL: That’s for this year. That’s a $50 million project over nine years. It’s actually $3.6 million this year and it was right around $1 million last year. It’s already in our budget, $50 million over the nine years and this is the second year.

This spending this year, we still have to do some engineering and some other things but in the following years it will be around $5 million or $6 million a year, so this is going to ramp up over time and when we get to the end of the project we’ll level off and, hopefully, by that time we’ll secure more funding for doing more work.

It’s a long-term plan we have in place and we have the funding for the nine-year project. Again, in the coming years it’s going up even higher.

ALANA PAON: Thank you, minister, for clarifying that. I will move on to the Nova Scotia Farm Loan Board. Sorry that I keep jumping around here and staff need to be getting up and down from the table, so they need a moment to re-establish themselves.

With the Nova Scotia Farm Loan Board, which we all know is a Crown lending agency, by the end of June there will again be two vacancies on the Farm Loan Board. It has been quite some time since we’ve had a full complement of board members on the Farm Loan Board. Perhaps the minister could answer why there will be two vacancies at the end of June - are those two board members coming to the end of their term? Also, why has the board been without a chair for over two years?

The Farm Loan Board is an extremely important component of how financing is structured for farmers here in Nova Scotia. Many farmers obviously receive their lending through the Farm Loan Board, so it came as quite a shock to me when I did some research and saw that we actually haven’t had a chair for the Farm Loan Board in over two years - could the minister please comment on that?

KEITH COLWELL: Actually, we have the vice-chair chairing the meetings now and he is doing a great job. He is very thorough and a great gentleman to work with. We have two new appointments this year and we have two more appointments in progress right now, and one of those appointments will be a chair.

One of our problems is getting enough people to apply who have the qualifications. We have that in every one of our boards. Sometimes we’ll have five openings, we get one applicant and sometimes the applicant is not qualified. We don’t want to appoint anyone to a board who isn’t qualified. We need people who have the right experience and the right training to make sure that we make the right decisions as best we can.

I can tell you that the Farm Loan Board is very good to work with. I know I’ve had a couple of meetings with them now and they are very direct in what they want to do. They make sure that they look after the taxpayers’ money, number one, and we set up farms for success, not failure. It has been a big change. We’ve made major changes in the program - and if you just give me one second, I have to check one thing.

I met with the Farm Loan Board about a year ago I guess it was, and they were complaining about the computer system we have and the long delays in getting approvals. That’s something I’ve heard from the industry from the day I was appointed minister.

We went through the system and thank goodness to a gentleman we hired in our department for IT, he got it cleared so we could put a proper accounting system in place, a computer program, so you’ll be able to very soon, within six months, if you have a loan with the Farm Loan Board you will be able to go on a secure site, check on the status of your loan, everything. Before, it used to take several days for staff to dig out that information.

Also, a loans officer will be able to look at that information. If you just call them, if you don’t want to use a computer system, they can tell you the status of the loan and give you details immediately. That is something the Farm Loan Board requested. It took us a while to get it approved through government. We got it all properly approved and we’re going to save the province about $10.5 million in buying software, compared to what we were quoted two or three years ago, and we’re going to have a system that works very efficiently.

The system that the staff there had to deal with was, to say the least, atrocious. I don’t know how they worked the way it was. They did great work with no tools to work with. So, we’ve put the tools in their hands and that was something that was brought forward by the loan board and we totally agreed with them and we put the resources in place. It has all been approved, it’s just a matter of getting the training in place for all our staff, and the support mechanism in place.

I want to thank the CEO for our Farm Loan Board, who has been there a short time, and she has managed to get all this stuff in conjunction with ourselves and the Farm Loan Board put in place. It’s important that we see this kind of progress. We’re going to become a very modern loan board, probably for the first time since it was set up.

ALANA PAON: Thank you, minister, for your response. It’s good to hear that finally, after such a long period of time - two years - that very shortly there will be an appointment to the position of chair on the Farm Loan Board. I’m hoping that when you say that’s forthcoming very soon that it is within the next month or so.

Having the added responsibility of also being a member of the Standing Committee on Human Resources that deals with agencies, boards and commissions, it’s interesting how the process is set up because as a member of the standing committee, you never see the other applicants who apply to these positions, you only see those applicants who have been put forward to be - how can I put this diplomatically? - just approved, yes, approved.

It would be wonderful to be able to actually see the other applicants that have been put forward as well because I just find it so difficult to fathom that in two years there wouldn’t have been one applicant who came forward who would have qualified as a chairperson for the Farm Loan Board.

Granted, absolutely I agree with you, the importance of accountability of taxpayer money for an organization like this is absolutely paramount. Modernizing of the system as I am hearing that is being done right now is wonderful to hear, and hopefully will save taxpayers a great deal of money and be able to facilitate the process for the staff who are obviously working within the office and that it will increase accessibility for those who are actually coming forward to ask for the loan in the first place.

However, again, it seems astounding to me that there wouldn’t have been one applicant in two years who would have qualified to be a chair for the Farm Loan Board. I guess I would have to ask the minister, what exactly are the qualifications one would need to be in the position of a chairperson for the Farm Loan Board, that we could not find that person in the last two years?

KEITH COLWELL: Actually, it has been 14 months, not two years. We were very, very happy with the Vice-Chair who has filled in as Chair, so there was no urgency to fill the Chairperson’s position.

We have a great group of people who work on the loan board, so as far as I was concerned it wasn’t an issue that we didn’t have a “Chair appointed” but we did have a Vice-Chair and that’s a Vice-Chair’s job, to fill in for the Chair. That individual has done an outstanding job and I would like to think that you are not suggesting that that person hasn’t done an outstanding job - and I am sure you are not saying that.

Again, it’s very difficult to get people to apply for these boards who are qualified, very difficult. I sat on the Human Resources Committee and I think I was even Chair for a while, when we were in Opposition. So, it’s very difficult.

There are boards that you can’t appoint just anybody to. I’ve seen cases where some people were appointed, when I was in Opposition, who really didn’t work very well and that really stymies the work of particularly the Farm Loan Board. You’ve got to have qualified people, you’ve got to have people who: (1) care about the industry; (2) who absolutely have the knowledge of the industry. They have to have knowledge of farming and/or lending preferably; they have to make sure there’s no conflict of interest; they have to be well aware that they have to be able to judge, on a financial basis, whether it’s a good opportunity; and we have to have someone who has experience as Chair, some kind of Chair, and is used to running meetings and making decisions on people’s livelihoods and people’s lives.

Very substantial size loans go through the Farm Loan Board now. We’re seeing bigger and bigger loans all the time, in the millions of dollars. That’s going to get bigger as the farmers get bigger and of course there’s more and more costs, and as we go to more and more automation it’s going to become more important that we have the right people in the spot.

ALANA PAON: Thank you, minister, for your response. I just want to make certain that I am clear, for the record, that I absolutely in no way was making any commentaries as to the qualifications or capabilities of the Vice-Chair. I in no way alluded to that, I certainly want to make that clear for the record.

My point is simply that it’s just difficult to believe that in 14 months - and thank you, minister, for correcting me on that - that no candidate would have come forward or would have applied who would have been capable of filling that position with the qualifications that you just listed. Again, obviously it’s extremely important that we have the right person for the right position. I can understand that we would want, and you would want, to do due diligence with regard to appointing someone to such an important position.

I would like to say as well that I am certain there are probably people who have been appointed by all governments, not just when you were in Opposition but I am sure by all governments, who didn’t work out. Sometimes we don’t foresee that someone will not work out in the way we anticipated when we made the appointment, that we first thought they would.

I guess I’d like to know what the requirements are with regard to being a member, just a general member? Actually, let’s start with this - what are the requirements and the qualifications for the Vice-Chair because basically the Vice-Chair has been doing the job of the Chair in the last 14 months it sounds like, so I’m very curious to know how the Vice-Chair’s position and the Chair’s position differentiate, as far as qualifications, if any.

[7:15 p.m.]

KEITH COLWELL: They are the exact same qualifications as a Chair, they have to make sure they can do the job in the case as we’ve already experienced, we really have to have knowledge of the industry or the financial industry, free of conflict of interest - that eliminates a lot of people - they have business experience, and they have the time to go to the meetings.

As already said, they have to have experience as a Chair of some kind of an organization because this is a very, very important spot. Again, people’s livelihoods depend on this, their family life, everything depends on making sure that the board makes wise decisions on loans. Also, I know the Farm Loan Board does a lot more than just make loans, they advise people - if they see there could be a problem that they can’t pay the loan back, they sit down with the people, or staff talk to them. This is something that the board has to have a look at, too, and make suggestions to staff that maybe they get more information or help the people and look at something maybe a little bit differently if they think there’s the risk that they can’t repay the loan.

We don’t want to set anyone up for failure when we go through this process. So, it takes people who have knowledge of lending experience and anything we can get to really complement that board and make it a really solid board.

Again, our big problem is people don’t apply with the qualifications. We have lots of applications that come in from people who simply are not qualified. If you just fill the positions with someone who is not qualified, you are worse off than not having the position filled. We don’t need a full board all the time. We have the board so it can meet the quorums, and it can actually do the things that they need to do and do it very efficiently.

ALANA PAON: Madam Chair, I thank the minister for his response. Minister, I believe I heard there in the list of qualifications, moving forward, for the Chairperson’s position, or I would hope any position on the Farm Loan Board, that there is no hazard of any conflict of interest. That’s obviously extremely important, dealing with sometimes extremely large amounts of money that are being loaned out within the agricultural industry.

Again, in no way am I saying anything to the character or anything disparagingly towards any member on the Farm Loan Board but, Mr. Minister, if it’s such an important thing for members of the Farm Loan Board not to be in conflict of interest, can you please clarify if it is the case that your Vice-Chair was granted a loan in the way of $2 million last year from the Farm Loan Board? Again, to clarify, I would like the minister to comment on whether or not the Vice-Chair of the Farm Loan Board was granted a loan for $2 million last year.

KEITH COLWELL: I want to be very careful before I answer this question; I want to be very clear on what you are asking. This is very important. I want you to be very clear, very specific what you are asking.

ALANA PAON: Mr. Chair, again I’ll make it very simple and, hopefully, clear - I am asking for clarification simply because the minister has brought up the importance of not having a conflict of interest as being a member of the Farm Loan Board, and specifically obviously in positions of Chair and Vice-Chair. Can the minister please clarify for me whether the Vice-Chair of the Farm Loan Board received a loan in the way of $2 million from the Farm Loan Board last year?

KEITH COLWELL: I’m going to ask a question again before I answer this question. I want to be very clear that you are indicating by your question that the Vice- Chair of the Nova Scotia Farm Loan Board was in a conflict of interest when a loan was given to him by the loan board - and I don’t know if a loan was given to him or not because I don’t get involved in this.

I want to be very clear with your question before I answer, so I’ll reiterate the question I am asking. I want to be very clear that if you are insinuating, which it appears you are, that the Vice-Chair of the Nova Scotia Farm Loan Board was in a conflict of interest because, according to you, and I have no idea if there was a loan given to him or not because that’s not my job, that’s the Farm Loan Board to do, that there was some way he used that position to get a loan from the Farm Loan Board.

I want to get a very clear question from you before I answer this, because this is a very serious allegation.

ALANA PAON: Mr. Chair, to be clear, I am not making any allegations. I am asking for clarification on what I thought was a very simple question.

KEITH COLWELL: You are asking - how can I put to this properly? - you are potentially casting doubt on whether the Vice-Chair of the loan board is in a conflict of interest and you openly said that when you asked if he got a $2 million loan, which I have no knowledge about. I want a direct answer on that before I can answer this question because I’ve got to be very clear on your question. I don’t want to put anyone in jeopardy, anyone making allegations about somebody who you may or may not have knowledge about and in a position that makes decisions for people in the industry in Nova Scotia. I would have very serious concerns about that if there was a conflict of interest.

I have no reason to believe there was, I have no reason to believe anything of this because I am not aware of this. I don’t have anything to do with the daily operation of the Farm Loan Board, so I want you to be very clear with your question. I want you to think very carefully before you ask the question.

ALANA PAON: I believe that I am asking the question as clearly as I possibly can. Mr. Minister, I would like to remind you that you are not here today to ask me questions. We are here today so that I, as a member of the Official Opposition, can ask you questions.

As much as I can appreciate that you want clarification on this issue, because it is a potentially problematic issue, I will ask you once again and as simply as possible: Did the Vice-Chair of the Farm Loan Board receive a loan from the Farm Loan Board at any time while Vice-Chair of the Farm Loan Board? Is that clear? Did the Vice-Chair, the current Vice-Chair of the Farm Loan Board, receive at any time a loan from the Farm Loan Board while being in the position of the Vice-Chair?

KEITH COLWELL: Okay, I’m not aware if there was a loan or not, but I’ll find out in a minute. I want to be very clear that you’re not going to tell me any time whether I can ask you a question or not. This is an exchange of information here and if I need to ask a question, I will ask it. If you don’t want to answer it, that’s up to you.

I just have to check on this but just before I answer that, it appears to me that you made accusations, possible accusations that the Vice-Chair of the Farm Loan Board might have been treated in a different way, or inappropriately, if he did get a loan from the loan board. That’s my impression of your question.

I’m not going to ask you again to clarify your question any more.

Okay, the answer to your question was there was a loan given to the Vice-Chair and I’m going to investigate this further, of course. It appears that it is the individual you are talking about, and I don’t really like talking about individuals, but you are so I’ll answer your question - there was a loan given to this individual, but all the protocols and confidentiality and all the conflict of interest rules were followed.

ALANA PAON: Thank you, minister, for your response. I was in no way trying to dissuade this from being a conversation, minister. I didn’t know how else to be clearer with my question.

I agree with you that this is a very serious situation. I am not making any allegations, I am simply asking a question and it’s a very hard question to ask, even from this seat, a very hard question to ask. I certainly don’t want to put anybody in jeopardy or put anybody in a precarious position, but it is a very serious situation.

Since we are on the subject of talking about conflict of interest and qualifications for the person who would be taking on the responsibilities of a Chair on the Farm Loan Board and knowing full well that the Vice-Chair was taking on those responsibilities, I am assuming for the last 14 months, the entire time that it has been vacant, it is very concerning to me that if the information I have received is correct and the Vice-Chair, while being on the Farm Loan Board, has received a loan in the way of $2 million from the Farm Loan Board - how is that not perceived as a conflict of interest?

KEITH COLWELL: I will investigate that.

ALANA PAON: I would appreciate that, Minister Colwell, because from the information that I have received, that loan was approved directly from Order in Council.

Moving forward, I would like to ask a question again with regard to the Farm Loan Board. With regard to the Farm Loan Board, last year the board loaned $16 million. It was less than planned, so I’d like to know what accounts for the difference, Mr. Minister.

KEITH COLWELL: That number you quoted is not correct, it is over $30 million.

ALANA PAON: So, to be clear then, the Farm Loan Board loaned out $30 million last year?

KEITH COLWELL: One second, we’ll get the exact number. The exact number is $27,752,000, if I can see this properly.

[7:30 p.m.]

ALANA PAON: Again, to clarify, that’s $27.7 million that was loaned in its entirety by the Farm Loan Board last year?

KEITH COLWELL: Yes, that is correct, for the Farm Loan Board.

ALANA PAON: With only a few minutes remaining, was that what was planned for this fiscal year or is that less than what was anticipated?

KEITH COLWELL: Actually, the department over-budgets every year to ensure that we have enough money in the fund to cover the loan requests for the year. It’s standard policy.

ALANA PAON: With only two minutes remaining, I’d like to take these few moments to speak to the question that I asked previous to this one.

I have a great deal of respect for the office of sitting ministers. I know that the job that both staff and the minister’s office deals with on a daily basis, I can only imagine, is astronomical and I certainly, in no way, during this period of questioning you, have I, in any way, purposely tried to be disrespectful towards you, Mr. Minister.

I always appreciate conversations that we have outside of the Chamber and I am hoping that I am wrong on what I asked you previously. I am actually hoping that I am incorrect on that one, but I think it is important that I bring it forward and that I bring it to your attention, and I look forward to your response.

THE CHAIR: That’s about it. We have 20 minutes for the New Democratic Party remaining, so just quickly, did you want to take 15 and leave five for the minister, or do you want to do the full 20 and bring him back tomorrow?

Ms. Zann.

LENORE ZANN: Thank you. How long do you need to finish up, minister, at the very end when we finish my questions?

THE CHAIR: One moment here. Just give me a second.

So, you have the full 20 minutes. The Progressive Conservative Party has indicated they want to bring you back tomorrow on Agriculture.

LENORE ZANN: Okay. How are you doing? Okay, 20 minutes. We can handle this.

I want to ask the minister how much the department is spending this year on dikes and protecting the coastlines from rising sea levels, and how much of that will be allocated to improving the dikes specifically along the Isthmus of Chignecto?

KEITH COLWELL: We are going to spend this year, and I mentioned this earlier, we are going to spend this year $3.36 million on the dikes program as a nine-year, $50 million project, and next year that will ramp up to around $5 million.

The Chignecto program is not included in the $3.36 million we talked about here. That’s a program that you should actually talk to TIR about. There is an engineering study going on that we are involved with TIR, but TIR is the main lead. The engineering cost is going to be about $700,000 to start. If you ask TIR, they can give you more details on it than I can give you.

LENORE ZANN: So, that $700,000 is just for the study?

KEITH COLWELL: It is a joint study between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and TIR is the lead on it in Nova Scotia. It is going to be a major project; I don’t think we have any idea what it’s going to cost yet. It’s just a preliminary engineering assessment to see what’s available. We’ll have to address the issue when it comes forward with the federal and provincial government to see what is really needed, to make sure it’s done properly.

LENORE ZANN: Yes, I completely understand. Do you happen to have any idea how long it’s going to take to do the study?

KEITH COLWELL: It’s going to take between 12 and 18 months to finish that part of the project. It’s a very extensive study they’re doing.

LENORE ZANN: When did it start?

KEITH COLWELL: This program, New Brunswick is going to be the lead on it because even though TIR is involved in it and we’re involved in it, New Brunswick is the lead on the project. We figure it will be a few more months before the proposal to do the work will be out and completed, so it’s going to be a while. I would suggest for more detail you should really talk to TIR about it.

LENORE ZANN: Yes, I was just wondering if they’ve actually started doing the study, so when we say 12 to 18 months, when is that period going to start?

KEITH COLWELL: Optimistic start date on that would be June, and I stress “optimistic.”

LENORE ZANN: I understand. Great, thank you.

When you mentioned the $3.36 million that’s going to be spent on dikes and protecting coastlines from rising sea levels - is that an increase or decrease from last year?

KEITH COLWELL: Over the last six years we’ve spent about $15 million total and in the next nine years we’re going to spend $50 million, so it’s a big increase in the budget.

LENORE ZANN: How much of that $3.36 million is for new improvements?

KEITH COLWELL: It’s all new capital improvements, everything.

LENORE ZANN: How much of it is for maintenance?

KEITH COLWELL: Maintenance is a separate budget, under Land Protection.

LENORE ZANN: That’s in your department as well?

KEITH COLWELL: Yes, that’s in our department.

LENORE ZANN: How much of the budget is going to maintenance this year?

KEITH COLWELL: Again, to make sure I’m clear with this, we’ve got $3.36 million that’s new work, and I’ll just get you the number for the maintenance. Yes, the maintenance budget will be $2.37 million. Last year, we spent $2.1 million, so we’ve actually put the budget up for maintenance.

LENORE ZANN: Great, thank you. Will the changes in dike locations impact any private or public property?

KEITH COLWELL: It is really premature to ask that question and we don’t know, we can’t answer it because we don’t know. It will depend on each dike and I know some dikes might be better if they’re straightened, easier to maintain, and indeed last longer, but again those evaluations are ongoing, so I can’t give you a distinct answer on any particular one of them.

LENORE ZANN: So, do we know where compensation comes for private landowners or is there compensation that will be given to people?

KEITH COLWELL: The short answer is no, but everybody is being consulted on this to see what’s in the best interest of landowners and the property is going to be in place. So, I would say it’s no compensation at this point but, again, we have to finish the consultation in any of those areas and see what all of it entails.

LENORE ZANN: That consultation, how long are you expecting that to take?

KEITH COLWELL: It’s a very difficult question to answer because it depends on the location, who they have to consult with. I know we have to consult with First Nations, the property owners and they have to come to a consensus of what’s going to be done. Some of them, like the dike in Grand Pré, it was just mentioned to me that now it has been three years in the consultation process. It just depends on what areas. Some of them are pretty easy. They get together, and everybody says okay we need to do this, and they go forward, and they get it done and it’s done, but other ones are very complex.

LENORE ZANN: Okay, thank you. So what level of sea-level rise do the planned improvements prepare for - is there a particular height?

KEITH COLWELL: What happens is the predictions change every year and we use the current year’s projection as the amount we raise the dike to meet that standard. So, it’s really a moving target all the time. It’s very difficult.

LENORE ZANN: So, can I take it that it’s rising every year or are there some years where is goes down or is it actually every year it’s rising?

KEITH COLWELL: It appears to be rising every year, but we want a 25-year solution, so we’re looking at the best scientific guesstimate or advice we can get for a 25-year solution out to the year 2050.

LENORE ZANN: Right, and is there a guesstimation for that particular height, that number, like 25 years out from now?

[7:45 p.m.]

KEITH COLWELL: It’s very complex because if it’s protecting a community it’s a higher standard than just agricultural land because there’s potentially more risk. So, it’s very complex how this whole system works and it’s one of these things that - I’ve been minister for five years now and every time we look at a new project it seems like there are different standards. But there are not new standards, it’s all just continually working on it and we, even as a project that we’re working towards with New Brunswick and TIR, they put an engineer in our department to work with us to get the best engineering experience we have because our staff are the experts in the field on it but we didn’t have the resources so they put another engineer with us and, hopefully, that engineer now is bringing us up to speed on what’s going on and how this all happens. It’s very complex.

LENORE ZANN: Is the department working with the Department of Environment to figure out how much the dikes might need to be raised or whatever because I know that at one point when I was ministerial assistant to the Minister of Environment they had a video that showed pretty well the dire future if nothing was done and they predicted at that point in time the level of how high the sea level would be likely to go, and it was pretty scary, a lot of those coastal towns and Truro, for instance, under water. So, is your department working with the Department of Environment as well on this?

KEITH COLWELL: We continually work with the Department of Environment. They have a special group for that and we also have a special group that works as well to review this on a continuous basis, because I don’t think anybody really knows what the long-term effect is going to be. So, we have to use the best science at our disposal and we have to keep on changing where the goal is.

LENORE ZANN: Okay, I’m going to move on to another topic here now. The Environmental Farm Plan administered through the Federation of Agriculture helps farmers identify and assess environmental risks on their properties and enables farmers to incorporate environmental considerations into their everyday business decisions. So, how much money is going into the Environmental Farm Plan program this year?

KEITH COLWELL: It’s a double answer to this question. The budget under the program we had was under the CAP program federally, if I remember right, and I’m going to have to get my staff to correct me if I forget the number because it’s a while since I looked at it, I think it was $2.5 million in the old Growing Forward 2 program and I believe now, under the program, it’s $1 million. That’s the federal cost-share part. So, we have been working with the federation. We’re going to have a meeting with them again very shortly to talk about the Environmental Farm Plan and I can give you a little bit of information on that if you like, where you can ask me specific questions. What’s your choice?

LENORE ZANN: I have a few specific questions if that’s okay.

So, I take it that that’s a decrease because it was $2.5 million. Now it’s $1 million. Is that right? He’s nodding his head - I’m telling that so that they can write that down - and how does the department measure outcomes of funding for the Environmental Farm Plan program?

THE CHAIR: Unfortunately, we’re going to have to bypass that question. I was just informed by the Progressive Conservative caucus that they will not be extending you until tomorrow. So, it’s time for closing statement and the question - unless the NDP want to extend until tomorrow.

So, minister, you now have three minutes for your closing statement and for the question. Thank you. Unless the NDP want to use the rest of the time and have you come back tomorrow. We need to make this decision now.

Ms. Zann, sorry.

LENORE ZANN: Thanks. I’d just like to know a quick answer to my question because I already asked, and we’ve taken up another five minutes. I just want to know how they judge the outcomes and how many farmers made use of the program and that’s it, that’s all I want to know.

KEITH COLWELL: I can get you that information, the detailed information. I will get it.

THE CHAIR: Okay, and so, now, you have about two minutes to do the resolution and a closing statement.

KEITH COLWELL: Well, thank you very much and I appreciate the questions put forward by the member from the Progressive Conservative caucus and we will investigate that information.

I want to thank everybody for the questions they have put forward and we will endeavour to get the information that we promised everybody.

THE CHAIR: Shall Resolution E1 stand?

Resolution E1 stands.

E50 - Resolved, that the business plan of Perennia Food and Agriculture Inc. be approved.

THE CHAIR: Shall the resolution carry?

The resolution is carried.

I will ask before we leave that all Parties respect the time here. It’s particularly difficult with a minute and a half left for people to all of a sudden change it. I understand things change. We also have departments waiting to come in and out and I know it was kind of one of those spur-of-the-moment things. So, I really do appreciate it, but in the future, if all Parties could talk to your staff and to your Party Leaders and make sure that we have this down pat.

Have a great night. That’s it.

[The subcommittee adjourned at 7:53 p.m.]