QUEBEC CITY – Environment Canada is working at the request of Agriculture Canada to develop standards for use under the farm environmental plan program.
The environment department, now the home of former Agriculture Canada deputy minister Samy Watson, wants to increase its collaboration with the agriculture department, Environment Canada official Elizabeth Roberts told a national agricultural conference Nov. 8.
It is part of the government’s implementation of the environment chapter of the agricultural policy framework, negotiated when Watson was chief bureaucrat at Agriculture Canada.
Over the next three years, the department will create standards that can be used to judge farmer progress on issues such as ammonia discharge and odour, habitat conservation, pesticide management and water quality, she told the annual meeting of the Agricultural Institute of Canada.
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By 2008, Environment Canada will make its recommendations to Agriculture Canada.
Roberts stressed that Environment Canada is not taking over design or operation of the environmental program.
“Agriculture Canada is still doing the environmental farm plans. They have come to us for science,” she said. “They’ve asked for our expertise. It’s still their baby and they have 100 percent control of the APF.”
Environment Canada has a supporting role that will help farmers.
“In the end, what we are developing will feed into environmental farm plans, to give direction for future environmental practices,” she said. “They are going to increase farmer productivity by producing food in an environmentally friendly way.”
The rules being developed could become the payment basis for federal support of farmer environmental practices and outcomes.
Roberts said there is a desire within government to have the two departments work more closely together.
“In the past, there’s been a rigid line between environment and ag,” she said. “Environment has been seen as protecting the environment whereas ag has been protecting the farmers. I think now we’re merging and I think through this program our collaboration with ag has significantly increased.”
