Chuck Strahl | The former British Columbia MP was also named honorary director of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute
Chuck Strahl scored two more honours last week.
Prime minister Stephen Harper named the former British Columbia MP chair of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which oversees and reviews the operations of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and hears complaints about the spy agency.
Strahl was also named an honorary director of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, a federally supported research organization housed on Agriculture Canada’s Experimental Farm in Ottawa.
CAPI was founded with federal support in 2004 under the previous Liberal government, but as the Conservative government’s first agriculture minister, Strahl supported continuing the support with extended financing.
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The institute has been sponsoring research on the potential elements of a national food strategy, including the link between health policy and agriculture’s ability to provide nutritious and healthy food.
CAPI also announced last week the first change in leadership in its history. Gaetan Lussier, former federal and Quebec agriculture deputy minister and CAPI chair since the institute was launched in 2004, stepped down at the annual meeting June 14. He was named an honorary member, as was Alberta cattle industry veteran and academic Robert Church.
Lussier spent most of the 1970s as a senior agriculture official in the Quebec agriculture department and after 1977 as federal deputy agriculture minister.
The new CAPI chair comes from the industry side of the sector.
Ted Bilyea is a food industry consultant and former executive vice-president of Maple Leaf Foods Inc.
Lussier was scheduled to speak about an agricultural food strategy and its importance to Canada at an Economic Club of Canada meeting in Ottawa June 12, but the speech was cancelled. Two days later, retirement from his almost eight-year term as chair was announced.
Bilyea said in a statement he wants to use CAPI as a forum to bring food industry leaders together to find solutions to “tough problems.”
The research institute has been working to develop a national food strategy that involves collaboration between all players in the industry.
Last year it launched a study on the beef industry that aims to prove how a system approach, in which all players co-operate despite their varying market power, “could help the Canadian beef sector become more competitive and profitable.” The study is expected to be published this summer, and CAPI says its findings could be applied to other sectors looking for collaboration, improved profitability and competitiveness.
