Members of the House of Commons agriculture committee expect to find out this week whether and how much they will be able to travel in November for public hearings.
At a private planning meeting last week, members of the committee decided to make expansive and expensive plans.
Instead of the original proposal to travel to the three prairie provinces for a week of public hearings on present conditions and future policy requirements, they decided to add meetings in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada and to travel for three weeks.
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On the Prairies, there would be two meetings per province, likely in early to mid-November.
But the trip is not a sure thing.
Cost estimates put it above $300,000 and the budget has to be approved by the House of Commons, which already finds its committee travel budget over extended.
A request for funds was forwarded from the committee to the House of Commons last week, with a request that a decision be made quickly because little time remains for planning a November trip and public hearings.
Food prices up
Food inflation has been running significantly higher than general inflation in Canada during the past year, Statistics Canada has reported.
To the end of September, the consumer price index for food was 4.2 percent higher than a year ago. The all-item CPI, commonly cited as the inflation rate, was 2.6 percent, although the general number excludes volatile fruit and vegetable prices.
Higher beef and meat prices were the main reasons for increased food costs during the past year.
In September, the food price index cooled somewhat as fruit and vegetable costs declined in the face of the Canadian harvest and competition from local produce.
Ag official honoured
A former senior bureaucrat in Agriculture Canada has been honoured by the governor general and the prime minister for his work in the department.
In mid-October, former assistant deputy agriculture minister Brian Morrissey was one of five presented with the 2001 Outstanding Achievement Award in the public service.
Morrissey accepted a retirement package earlier this year after a career that took him to the top of the research bureaucracy at Agriculture Canada. He implemented and defended a government-ordered reduction in research funding as well as the move to attract more private sector research funding through the Matching Investment Initiative.
The citation at the Government House ceremony praised Morrissey for helping make Canada a world leader in agricultural research.
“He applied business principles to science management to gain greater efficiency and to ensure the continued protection of Canada’s food supply,” it read. “Under his direction, the research branch at Agriculture and Agri-food Canada earned a reputation as one of the finest research organizations in the world.”
Ontario premier’s legacy
When Ontario Conservative premier Mike Harris announced last week that he will resign this winter, he was remembered fondly by some Ontario farmers as the politician who led the fight to get more safety net money for Ontario at the expense of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
It is an accomplishment not as fondly remembered in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Rosann Wowchuk, Manitoba’s agriculture minister, said recently she is still fighting to have the decision overturned.
Several years ago, Harris helped create an interprovincial coalition which complained that the formula for distributing safety net money was weighted too much to need and too little to relative size of provincial agricultural economies. In other words, he thought Manitoba and Saskatchewan got too big a slice of the farm aid budget and other provinces like Ontario too little.
He and his allies in Alberta, British Columbia and elsewhere won and Saskatchewan and Manitoba now receive millions of dollars less in safety net funds each year.
