The committee met at 4:45 p.m.

[R. Leonard in the chair.]

R. Leonard (Chair): Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ronna-Rae Leonard. I’m the MLA for Courtenay-Comox and the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Agriculture, Fish and Food. I would like to begin with the recognition that our public hearing today is taking place on the traditional territory of the Ktunaxa, Okanagan and Sinixt peoples.

We are an all-party parliamentary committee of the Legislative Assembly with a mandate to examine matters concerning agriculture, fish and food in British Columbia. The committee’s first inquiry is focused on local meat production and inspection in B.C. This consultation is based on a discussion paper that was referred to the committee earlier this spring, which includes a number of questions asking about what’s working well in the local meat industry or how improvements can be made to better serve all British Columbians.

The committee is holding a number of public hearings in communities around the province. British Columbians can participate in these public hearings either in person or by teleconference. There are other ways that British Columbians can submit their ideas to the committee, including completing an on-line survey or sending in a written audio or video submission. More information about how to do this is available on the committee’s website, which is: www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/aff.

We invite all British Columbians to contribute to this important process. For those of you in attendance, we thank you for taking the time to participate today.

All public input will be carefully considered by the committee as it prepares its final report to the Legislative Assembly, which will be presented on or before October 1 of this year. Just a reminder that the consultation will close on Friday, June 15, 2018, at 5 p.m.

Today’s meeting will consist of presentations from registered witnesses. Each presenter will have ten minutes to speak followed by five minutes for questions from the committee. All meetings are recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services, and a complete transcript of the proceeding will be posted on the committee’s website. These meetings are also broadcast as live audio via our website.

I’ll ask now for the members of the committee to introduce themselves.

D. Routley: Doug Routley. I live in Duncan on Vancouver Island and represent the area from Duncan up to Nanaimo.

R. Singh: I’m Rachna Singh. I’m the MLA for Surrey–Green Timbers.

N. Simons: I’m Nicholas Simons. I’m the MLA for Powell River–Sunshine Coast, home of The Beachcombers.

R. Leonard (Chair): Then we’ll go to our Deputy Chair.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Jackie Tegart. I’m the MLA for Fraser-Nicola. That’s Hope, Merritt, Ashcroft, Cache Creek area.

M. Morris: Mike Morris. I’m the MLA from Prince George, which is the geographical centre of B.C. I cover Prince George right up into the Pine Pass.

I. Paton: Ian Paton, MLA for Delta South. Born and raised and still on a dairy farm in Delta.

D. Barnett: Donna Barnett, the MLA for Cariboo-Chilcotin, the heart of British Columbia.

R. Leonard (Chair): I’d say we’ve got a bit of a competition going on here.

Assisting the committee today are Jennifer Arril and Stephanie Raymond, at the back, from the Parliamentary Committees Office. Over at Hansard, we have Simon DeLaat and Amanda Heffelfinger. They’re here to record the proceedings.

Now we get to the presenters. Our first presenter today is Kyle Wiebe from B.C. Meatworks Inc.

Welcome. Come have a seat up here.

Presentations on
Meat Production and Inspection

B.C. MEATWORKS

K. Wiebe: Kyle Wiebe, B.C. Meatworks. Thank you all, of course, for being here.

[4:50 p.m.]

I just returned from a lengthy agricultural tour in Europe, where I did some consulting for a small group of small-scale meat producers in Scotland. They are begging their local and their national government, the U.K. government, for a forum like this. I knew this was coming. I asked them how accessible their government was, and they said: “Well, pretty accessible.” I told them what we were up to here, and they said: “What a great opportunity.” So thank you.

B.C. Meatworks. I’m going to tell you a little bit of our story. It’s going to sound self-interested, but it’s not really the case. I feel like we’ve been an excellent example, over the last two years, of what many producers — the farmer and the small-scale processor — are encountering and will encounter under the current regulation.

Over the last two years, we took over a small-scale poultry abattoir here in the Slocan Valley. We struggled with volumes — not that there was any shortage of customers, but we couldn’t get our daily outputs. We couldn’t get that to match our inputs, so we became quite hard-nosed about it. There are people in the audience who can attest to that.

We were trying to stanch the losses that we were dealing with on the poultry side. So we attempted a vertical integration strategy, where we grew our own product and processed our own product and tried to create a farm-to-table business model in hopes that that could help offset some of the custom slaughter we were doing.

I think a lot of the reality behind the fact that we couldn’t garner these volumes with the custom-slaughter model is because livestock production sort of went away with the introduction of meat inspection regulation. We thought if we built it, they would come. They did, but the infrastructure is sort of gone. It doesn’t take long for those in livestock production…. If there’s not a way to market, it doesn’t take long for the infrastructure to disappear.

I feel like we have a little bit of a unique perspective as a class A meat processor, and I’m going to reflect back to that a little bit in a couple of minutes.

I don’t know how many class A slaughterhouses are supporting the class E, class D idea. We absolutely support the idea. We feel that with most of these class E, class D proponents…. At the volumes they’re providing, we simply can’t viably service them.

On the poultry side, we deal with biosecurity quite a bit more than on the red meat side. That alone — the fact that we have small customers coming, multiple customers a day, potentially — is a biosecurity nightmare. The traceability at a small scale is almost impossible. So at the end of the day, we said: “We just can’t do it. We can’t pay money to process your animals.”

In an effort to sort of soften that blow to the local producers — Jim Ross can probably speak to it; he’s next, I think — we went to the Ministry of Agriculture. We said: “We can’t do this. We’re not sustainable under that business model. We don’t like the pressure of being their only way to market, so please reissue those class E licences.” It took a little while, but there were some new class E licences, potentially, issued, as well as some existing ones that were reissued.

I still believe the class D, which is only available in these designated areas…. They would be a viable customer to us, as a class A slaughterhouse, but at the volumes that a class D producer — that is, the farmer, the livestock grower — operates at, they also don’t really make or break a class A’s business model.

[4:55 p.m.]

You may get other information from other slaughterhouses, but that’s how we feel. We feel that for the volumes that a provincially inspected facility runs at in the far reaches of rural British Columbia, there’s probably only one really viable business model, and that’s farm-to-table boutique meat production. That means we’re producing our own, and that means we need class D licences. I would like to see something like a class C licence, potentially.

I recognize that meat inspection is not going away. It’s here to stay. One of the things that we were very intentional about in Europe was sort of chasing down how the regulation…. We hear lots about European regulation in the EU and all that kind of thing, and we want to actually see that in effect. We were surprised to find out how protected the agricultural tradition is in many places in Europe.

In Scotland, for example, there’s a lot of free-range rights, open-range rights. We would go on these sheep drives where the sheep would be running around in people’s gardens and right through villages, and if you don’t have a fence, that’s your problem. The farmer is absolutely protected to chase their sheep wherever they need to go. Here, the farmers…. We’re in a constant state of nail-biting because of the liabilities that we could incur on our land or on other people’s land. So that’s an example.

In France, we went to many of the small dairies in the French Alps. We asked them: “How does regulation affect you? How does the EU regulation affect this?” They said: “Oh, it doesn’t. France protects our traditional cheesemaking, so as long as we don’t export out of the nation, we are permitted to have this dairy and make our cheese the way we’ve been making it for over a hundred years.”

I’m not educated enough to know whether that’s good or not, but there’s a very tangible heritage flavour to these places, and it seems like there’s a protection in place. I would argue that the small-scale meat producer can be that in B.C., can be a little bit of a boutique industry that can be protected from some of the pressures of the large-scale commercial industry.

As a final note. I’ve been speaking in terms of a class A slaughterhouse operator. We’ve run into a lot of obstacles in the last six months. We tried to do a land inclusion into agricultural zoning. That was met with a petition and a threat of lawsuit to our regional district, so they immediately denied our application.

We were dealing with the new Water Sustainability Act, which for a small, biodynamic farm, where you have a lot of different stuff going on…. We are suddenly triggering three to four water licences, and all of those are considered, now, new applications, even though our slots are sort of safe, from the usage point. But they’re considered new applications, so we are now going to adjacent licence holders and asking permission: “Can we now have this licence?”

There are many obstacles, I think, and meat inspection is a significant one. I think we need a better system in the class D range provincewide.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. That’s your presentation. Well, thank you very much. We’ve got a hand up already.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Kyle. What would a better system look like?

K. Wiebe: We’ve relinquished our class A licence, so I will speak entirely in a self-interested sense. We think a class D licence anywhere in the province is appropriate. We think that the availability of the class D volumes makes a small-scale farm-to-table operation, where it’s potentially subsidized by fruit or vegetables, things like that…. We think that’s a viable option.

We think there are options in terms of even enhanced beyond that — a class C, because it’s just this perfect missing slot. We think a class C would be great. One way to do a class C, different from the class E and D, is single-source products. So whereas the class D permits multiple farmers to channel through a single slaughterhouse to retail and direct sales, there could be some kind of licence specific to farms that raise all their own animals and sell them.

[5:00 p.m.]

The traceability and the food safety, I would argue…. The risk is significantly reduced when you have a single source of product.

I don’t know if I answered that exactly. Really, I like the class D model, but it’s unavailable to us.

D. Routley: A couple of things. First I want to agree with you on the disappearance of infrastructure that’s happening on Vancouver Island in a big way. As we’ve lost farms and the viability of farms, we’ve lost the feed stock, the feed suppliers. All the knock-on businesses are suffering, and we’re losing the multilevels of the integration of marketplaces for niche market products like you’re talking about. We don’t have the production facilities or handling facilities that we used to have. So I totally agree with you.

Actually, we’re a bit ahead of you. We’re, like, losing, because we don’t have the economy of scale or the kinds of clusters that we used to have. So it’s a really, really big problem, and I hope that we can get in front of it.

You said something about class C potential. We’re hearing a lot about the conflict between A and B licence holders and D and E licence holders and the undermining of their investment and that sort of thing, and then an appetite for more inspection on the D and E side and more, sort of, structure. So maybe there’s an opportunity for something in the middle. I think that’s what you were referring to, right?

K. Wiebe: Yeah, I think so. I know that I share this view with unnamed inspectors as well. There’s such a massive gap between a class E and a class B. There’s nothing in between in this region. There’s no solution in between.

In terms of volumes and infrastructure requirements, there’s just no comparison. I would absolutely support bringing class E and D requirements up a bit, but I don’t necessarily see class A-B requirements coming down, so maybe that is where there is a slot for the C. I don’t know.

I think that, first of all, in my experience, you could give everybody — all of my neighbours — a class E licence, and as a class A operator, it wouldn’t change anything I do. They don’t have access to the retail market, and that’s what a class A-B facility…. That’s their bread and butter, in my small world here.

M. Morris: You talk about a single source, this boutique market with a class C. Can you not do the same thing under an A with the infrastructure that you had? You said that you’ve dropped your class A now, but could you not have done the same thing with your class A that you would like to do with a C?

K. Wiebe: Yes. But the design requirements of the class A are significant enough…. For us, specifically, it’s tough for us to justify that kind of infrastructure investment to have a small farm-to-table business. It’s tough for us to justify that. Our infrastructure as a class A is worth in the range from $200,000 to $500,000. It’s fairly difficult to justify under the volumes that we would be dealing with.

So you’re saying: “Keep your class A; just do it yourself”?

M. Morris: Yeah. You’ve already got infrastructure in place. Maybe I misunderstood you, but you already have the infrastructure in place for your class A?

K. Wiebe: We did. We relinquished it. We were unviable in our current business model, and we had to sell off some of our class A facility. So we’re back to the drawing board. We do anticipate building back into a class A eventually, but we don’t have volumes, and we lost our land base to the zoning issue. A bit of a very quick, tragic end that I don’t think pertains to this conversation. But, yes, we could have a class A. We would need to be processing 100,000 to 150,000 pounds a year to justify that input, that infrastructure cost investment.

N. Simons: Have you actually made any estimates on what it would cost to get the right infrastructure?

[5:05 p.m.]

K. Wiebe: For a class A?

N. Simons: Yes.

K. Wiebe: Well, I have two class As. We sold one of them. We sold the multispecies. We still have a class A poultry, in theory, but it’s not registered. I don’t think it’s….

In terms of rebuilding, depending on whether it’s mobile or fixed, it’s about $250,000.

N. Simons: My main question…. We’ve heard a lot from people who are concerned about the D and E because of the lack of inspection. Do you think that there’s a way around that? I mean, we talk about the need for a secure food supply, etc. I’m from Powell River, where the first exemption was granted, so I understand some of the challenges. Can you just comment on what you think the inspection regime should be for the D and E?

K. Wiebe: I think that at the volumes that we’ve processed in the last two years, I would be scared to see the numbers, what it costs the government to inspect our meat. I don’t think the taxpayer wants to know either. So in terms of something that actually works, I think it has to be some kind of audit system. I think class D and E need to have an annual audit by the Minister of Agriculture or IHA, whoever sort of wants to take that and run with it. I would argue the Minister of Agriculture, because they’re in with the class A already. The IHA has the commercial kitchen side.

My opinion is that it could go to a model where we have an annual inspection. We raise the standards for the class E and D operators. Raise the standards and go to an annual inspection — and then spot audits, more or less unannounced spot audits.

In the U.K., they’re talking about CCTV, closed-circuit television, watching it live. That technology is getting very economical. There’s no reason that couldn’t be in any and every slaughterhouse. You could flip it on and see what’s going on.

It doesn’t mean that each animal, each chicken, is being inspected, but it definitely would create a better system.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. I’m sorry. We’re on a fairly tight timeline here because we have to fly out of here before it’s dark. I thank you very much for your presentation and for taking the time to come and talk to us today.

Next on the roster is Abra Brynne, from Central Kootenay Food Policy. Welcome.

ABRA BRYNNE

A. Brynne: Hello, all. Thank you for coming to our communities to hear from us and for giving me the time on your agenda today. As has been indicated, my name is Abra Brynne, and I’m the coordinator of the Central Kootenay Food Policy Council.

I must preface my remarks, however, by making it clear that I’m speaking from my own experience rather than providing a position taken by the food policy council. From 2006 through 2012, I worked, through the B.C. Food Processors Association, with more than 100 abattoir proponents, to help them determine if and how they could come into compliance with the change in meat inspection regulation. So I’ll be drawing on that experience. I shall respond directly to the questions posed in your consultation paper.

One way that livestock production in B.C. could be increased is through regulatory and policy changes that truly restrict agricultural land to farming. By doing so, this land would be removed both from the speculative real estate market and from purchasers who do not need to derive their income from working the land. We do not raise a lot of feed here in B.C., so reducing the costs of land will help to lower the cost of raising livestock.

I also strongly encourage the committee to look into the possibility of amending the compensation and disaster financial assistance regulation that restricts emergency support to those who derive more than 50 percent of their income from farming. With the increase in violent weather events and fire seasons, livestock farmers who also have off-farm income, which is generally more lucrative, should have access to the supports that can help them to rebuild fences, barns and other infrastructure impacted by disasters. Few rural and remote citizens have the luxury of only one income stream in their households.

Increasing the processing in B.C. of B.C.-raised animals could be done through a range of interventions, only some of which are the government’s purview.

[5:10 p.m.]

Encouraging staggered breeding of livestock could help to spread out the supply of animals to abattoirs and lessen the pressures during the high season. It is natural for abattoirs to specialize in one species of livestock because it is more efficient and can entail less investment in specialized equipment. However, providing supports to abattoirs to process a wider range of species could help, also, to spread out the demand for slaughter over more months.

Another key to having B.C. livestock processed in B.C. would be to ensure that the cost of inspection never gets downloaded on the industry, as it would be a cost nigh on impossible to recoup for the scale of operators we have under B.C. inspection.

Slaughter capacity in rural and remote areas was not really a challenge before the 2007 change in the meat inspection regulation. It is worth noting that the motivation for that change was not the result of any evidence of food-borne illness related to meat processed in the uninspected areas of the province. It was driven by a decision to standardize slaughter across the province despite the significant differences in livestock, communities and markets — differences which drove the eventual adoption of the class D and E licences.

Those licences were created in response to significant push-back from many communities who saw their local livestock production and meat sectors drastically reduced or eliminated altogether under the new regulation. As James Mack explained to you all in his May 30 briefing, the parts of the province that can have a class D licence were so designated because there will never be a business case for a fully licensed abattoir there.

I’m sure you are aware that there are illegal meat processing exchanges all across the province by many who are determined to continue long-held practices of their families and communities. Introducing the class D and E licences was an attempt to fix what the new regulation broke and bring back some capacity to rural communities.

I do not know if it would be possible to return to some­thing that resembled the pre-2007 meat system, but if further amendments to the regulation are made that create additional options for slaughter, I strongly encourage you to consider those courageous and determined entrepreneurs who built or renovated their abattoirs to achieve a class A or B licence. The costs were very high. In excess of $500,000 is not uncommon for even the smallest abattoir by the time the facility and its waste-management infrastructure are completed. As I recall, one operator calculated that it would take her 71 years to recoup her investment.

There is no perfect solution, but I do commend the province for landing on the two-hour rule of thumb for class Es, with allowances for the state of the road and marine travel.

Access to B.C.-raised and -slaughtered meats could be increased by having the government strongly promote and endorse B.C.-inspected meat through programs like Grow B.C., Feed B.C. and Buy B.C. All government departments should ensure that any meat they purchase is from provincially licensed abattoirs. Put your money where your mouth is, and enjoy some of the best meat produced anywhere.

Most people do not understand that the meat in the large grocery chains and from the large distributors is all from federally registered abattoirs because they want to move their inventory across provincial boundaries. By seeking out independent grocers, local meat shops and other venues that are sourcing from B.C.-inspected abattoirs, we are automatically supporting our provincial meat sector.

I personally do not feel that there is a need to increase the standards for food safety and humane treatment of animals in the B.C.-inspected meat system. A quick look at meat-recall notices demonstrates that they are consistently from large plants. Our small plants under B.C. inspection receive high-quality oversight. Problems at the large plants should not default to changes in requirements for provincially inspected plants, with inevitable additional costs to an industry that has a long history of razor-thin profit margins.

To increase the number of skilled workers, I recommend collaborating with the B.C. Association of Abattoirs to promote the industry at job and career fairs everywhere they happen. Virtually none of our children are exposed to slaughtering as a profession. The curriculum at high school cooking and culinary arts classes should include carcass breakdown of a range of species.

As for the clarity and efficacy of the regulations impacting meat production, since I spend a lot of time personally reading acts, regulations and policy, they’re quite clear to me. However, for those who do not, some plain-language guides would be useful and also provide a platform to dispel some of the common myths about the regulations — for example, the myth that the two-hour rule applies to class A or B abattoirs. I would also like to point out that there are regulations and codes of conduct under the Ministry of Environment that hugely impact the meat sector.

I strongly urge you to re-examine the assumptions behind your final question about more effectively aligning the provincial and the federal meat inspection systems. What need is there, truly, to align our inspection systems with those of the federal government? As I mentioned earlier, it is federally inspected abattoirs, both in Canada and the United States, that are the major sources of meat recalls, pointing to the not unreasonable conclusion that, as I truly believe, provincial inspection is, in fact, superior.

[5:15 p.m.]

As I know you all learned in your Ministry of Agriculture briefing, there’s a huge quantitative difference between federally inspected plants and our provincial abattoirs. The ability to closely inspect the live animal and its end carcass is much more possible in an abattoir that processes 1,000 over the course of a year rather than a couple of hours. The integrity of each carcass and its resulting meat is much easier to monitor and track at a provincially inspected plant. It can be seen on the kill floor, the cooler and the plant log.

The regulations governing federal plants are prescriptive, not outcomes-based as ours are. This means rigid requirements with regard to the physical plant. It means a full HACCP program — policies and procedures that are an attempt to deliver safe meat, despite the enormous volumes that go through each plant.

These all have heavy costs that can only be borne by an industry that is both subsidized by the government and has scale efficiencies that will never be possible for B.C.-inspected abattoirs. Let’s celebrate the inspection model that B.C. developed and implemented in 2014, rather than chase a federal version.

Lastly, I want to state that mobile abattoirs are not the silver bullet that many perceive them to be. They generally do have, admittedly, a lower upfront cost, as you learned from Kyle. But they also have infrastructure requirements and costs at each site where they dock, and those are tough for many farmers to bear.

A mobile abattoir that processes cattle and that meets the dimension restrictions for travelling on our highways will necessarily mean that the operators are functioning in a very tight space. There are costs associated with moving the abattoir around, the wear and tear on both the trailer and the truck, never mind the fuel and insurance.

Mobile poultry abattoirs are also space-constrained. The animals being processed are not large, but the necessary equipment can make for a very crowded space. For poultry processing, you cannot get away with the one or two personnel that you can for red-meat animals. How do you cover the wage costs of moving staff around from place to place, on top of the costs associated with actually processing the animals?

B.C.’s topography also complicates the matter when hauling large trailers. A lot of the driveways I’ve seen on some of these farms don’t lend themselves well to large trailers.

There are quite a few mobile abattoirs operating in the USA. However, many of them are heavily subsidized and, like the few we have here in B.C., are often not moved, despite the fact that they can. Licensed mobiles will never achieve the simplicity and convenience of the truck-and-gun operators of the past or of the crews that used to set up on farms to process their chickens.

Thank you, once again, for giving me this time to speak with you and for taking on this consultation. The Central Kootenay Food Policy Council will monitor the outcomes of this engagement in order to determine what our role may be in fostering the vibrancy of our region’s meat sector.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much.

Any questions from our committee?

M. Morris: Are you leaving a copy of that presentation with us?

A. Brynne: I’m going to send it in electronically, yes.

D. Routley: At the beginning of your presentation, I think, you talked about the environmental crisis. We’re faced with, perhaps, neighbours to the south that are unfriendly to trade right now but have found ways to subsidize farmers over the years and decades.

I’m wondering if you were referring, perhaps, to the possibility of supports for farmers based on environmental crises, like fires and — maybe, I’m projecting from that — climate change. If there’s an environmental crisis, we might have the grounds for supports for farmers that wouldn’t be accepted under trade agreements otherwise, without that environmental crisis.

Interjection.

D. Routley: National security, yes, absolutely.

A. Brynne: Well, I can’t speak to the broader issue, but I know from having friends in the Bella Coola Valley that they’ve suffered a number of massive floods and then, of course, were massively impacted by the fires over the years. Last year miles and miles of fences got burnt. It’s mind-boggling. If you’re a farmer, under that regulation, if you do not derive more than 50 percent of your income from farming, then you don’t qualify for any support in rebuilding. I know that in Bella Coola it has been devastating.

D. Routley: As a supplemental to that, I know that at the beginning of the free trade agreement, there were subsidies for farmers in the United States for fence-building that were extrapolated and extended well beyond what they were meant to be.

[5:20 p.m.]

I guess I’m sitting here wondering how we can find a way to support farmers. It seems like maybe one of the restrictions, in terms of supports, is international trade agreements. Maybe we’re facing crises. Our farmers are facing crises that require support from us.

A. Brynne: Yeah. My specific comment was in the event of a disaster, though, when I think they really clearly need some support. But more broadly, yes, I’m all in support. I’m very excited about supporting farmers.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Hi, Abra. Nice to see you.

Just in regards to some of the disaster funding, we’ve certainly been lobbying the federal government to take a look at, maybe, a three-year window, rather than a one-year, because we found people in our areas last year who, because cattle prices were low and they’re trucking, made more money on their trucking. They didn’t qualify. So we saw a number of those cases, certainly, in my riding.

Do you have some ideas? What we asked for was a three- to five-year window of income-based, because it’s simply based on the last income tax window. Some years are good years on the farm, and some are not so good years. Very few people we know in small operations are making their living solely from the farm. Are there other options that you can share with us?

A. Brynne: For me, I think part of it would be to look at, actually, the nature of the farm. There are certainly, in this area, lots of people who throw a couple of horses on a field and maybe grow a little bit of hay. But there are also a lot of farmers across the province who are dedicated farmers. But in the current marketplace, it’s not possible to derive an income solely from farming. I think looking at the nature of their practice, the longevity in the sector, what kind of infrastructure they have so that you could gauge….

I know that the past chair of the Agricultural Land Commission used to talk about bona fide farmers. I think figuring out what is a definition of the kind of farming that actually contributes to our communal food security and food sovereignty in the province would be useful.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. I appreciate your considered presentation. I look forward to receiving the written submission.

All right. Next on the agenda is Jim Ross.

JIM ROSS

J. Ross: Hi, everybody. I wanted to echo Kyle’s comments in terms of thanking you all for coming. I’m sure there are other things you might rather be doing, but we appreciate you coming here. Sorry you’re jumping straight on a plane and won’t have a chance to check out the area.

I’m here today because I’ve grown livestock, specifically hogs and lambs, for about the last dozen years to make money. I got into it just as a subsistence farmer. I had so many damn kids to feed, and feeding them out of the grocery store costs a fortune. It seemed like if they wanted an allowance, they could darn well earn it, and they could feed some animals. That was, basically, how we got into it.

Much to the chagrin of my wife and my neighbours, I discovered that I really liked livestock. I liked doing it. I really like pigs, and of course, that doesn’t make you terribly popular with your neighbours. But what I’ve discovered over the last 12 years is that to be a small livestock farmer in this area or on any scale is very difficult.

As some of you are probably aware, in 1968, they shut the gates on Hugh Keenleyside dam. We lost the fourth-largest breadbasket in the province that day. It almost overnight went underwater. So when you go to areas like Grand Forks or Creston, they still have these big open valleys with big farms, whereas here, because that valley is now underwater, we tend to have a lot of smaller farms. We just don’t have the acreage to have these large farms.

When we looked at the issues of A licence, B licence, D and E, in terms of this area here, if you just take a string and go around for 80 miles, we don’t have farms that are large enough to support a B- or an A-class facility.

[5:25 p.m.]

Kyle has found that out the hard way, right? We just don’t have that kind of volume. So in this area, I don’t think it’s feasible. We have the two abattoirs. We have a B class in Rock Creek, Magnum Meats, and we have Tarzwell’s in Creston. The two of them, while they’re much closer to larger farming communities, really struggle. They have large investments, and to say that they make money would be a misnomer.

I’ve had my E licence now…. I’m just on my third run of that, and it was just renewed in October. I knew that Kyle was going to be purchasing this mobile abattoir from Grand Forks. I heard about it in the spring, and I knew that he was bringing it over and considering setting it up. I contacted Kyle in the spring, and I said: “Well, what’s your plan?” He said: “Well, I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes. I don’t want E licence holders to lose their licences.”

In the end, what happened is that when he got his A licence, we immediately became adversaries, because now I was going to lose my E licence. It wasn’t going to be renewed last October. I still had all that investment. I still had all those animals on the hoof, from this big to this big, and I needed to deal with them.

In the end, what happened was I approached Kyle. Our conversation ended…. I can’t remember who slammed down the phone, if it was him or me, but that gives you some kind of idea of where we’re at when I talk about being adversaries. Kyle was gracious enough to send me a letter that said that he wasn’t doing custom slaughter. He wouldn’t take my animals, and I got my E licence again. It just seems like a really shitty way to have to do it, to have Kyle and me be enemies because of a licensing system.

When we look at what I…. After my experience in the area, I think the D and E licences are fantastic, particularly when you get into these real rural areas where we just don’t have the capacity to support a larger facility. But also, what you find in the rural areas is that people are a little bit more connected to their food. They want to support their neighbour because their neighbour is somebody they know. You know, if they live in Surrey or on the Island, in a larger community, there’s that certain amount of anonymity that comes from that. But around here, we’re a lot closer as a community. We’re a lot more closely knit. I would argue that in certain regions of the province, like this here area, people are more concerned about animal welfare, supporting their neighbour, than they are about food inspection, per se.

When I hear…. I cringed a little bit when I was listening to Kyle talk about how he felt there was a need for more inspection or higher standards for the D and E licence. I just think to myself that when somebody in a large abattoir screws up and poisons a bunch of people or potentially poisons a bunch of people, they go home at night and go to sleep. They are never going to see those people. They are never going to look them in the face.

The people that I sell to from the farm gate — if I poison them, I’m going to hear about it. They’re my neighbour. I’m going to see them. I’m going to see their mother when I go to the grocery store. I’m going to see their kids when I go down to the bus stop. So there are some real connections there. This idea that the standards are low…. I take a bit of an offence to that, because of the fact that, I would argue, in many cases, that I take more care than the large facilities, because I know the people whose mouth that meat is going to go into.

I would agree with Kyle on the fact that you can’t make a living on 10,000 pounds of meat. If you have a licence for 10,000 pounds, you have an off-farm job. That’s the only way to make it work. Now, with a D licence, you can have up to 25,000 pounds. Now you’re starting to talk about something that a person could actually make a living on, right?

If we want farming to just be a hobby, then E licences work great. But if we want farming to be a respectable job and something that people can make a living at, we have to allow them to be able to make that living.

[5:30 p.m.]

Suggesting that they only grow 10,000 pounds, and if they want to grow more, they have to invest in $70,000 worth of truck and trailer and then drive it over the highest mountain pass in Canada to make a living, is ludicrous. It’s crazy. It’s unsafe. It’s hard on the livestock, and it just makes no sense at all.

I think that what we need is…. In this area, what would be very helpful for farmers of my scale is a D licence. Now, what would be ideal would be that I could have a D licence, Kyle could have his A class facility, and I could sell my farm-gate sales. If I get a retailer or a restaurant that wants to buy my food, I call up Kyle and say: “Kyle, I got ten hogs. They’re going to Overwaitea in Nelson. Can you slaughter them for me?” Kyle would slaughter them, and off they’d go. Then the next day, I’d slaughter five or six on my farm, and I would sell them from the farm gate.

That way, we don’t have that adversarial situation. We have a situation where now, Kyle and I are working together, right? I know somebody, a restaurant, who wants to buy a product to sell in their restaurant. I can tell them to call Kyle, and I have no misgivings about that, because we are now working together and on the same side.

One of the other things I wanted to point out…. I’m not sure how much time I have left here.

R. Leonard (Chair): You’ve got a minute and a half.

J. Ross: You can’t see it on this map at this scale, but tonight, or in the next few days, I want you to take a look at this map. Zoom in and have a close look. What you’ll see as you look around…. The stars are the class Es, the triangles are the Bs, and the green circles are the A’s. What I want you to look at is, around the province, how many spots there are where there’s an A class facility or a B class facility with E licences right around them, and they seem to be getting along just fine.

If you go up in the most northern location up in here, there is a class A, a class B, a class D and a class E, and they’re all within an hour of each other. The class D licence isn’t even in the designated area, so we have this disparity around the whole province where we have different rules and regulations.

If you’re in Cranbrook, you can have an E licence and have your cake and eat it too, as I described what would be an ideal situation for Kyle and me. But in our area, we don’t have that. There’s this two-hour rule. How do we make things fair for everybody in the province? How do we ultimately serve the taxpayers, the voters and the eaters of the province? Ultimately, that’s what we’re trying to do, right? We’re trying to feed people.

I think that’s about all I have to say.

R. Leonard (Chair): That’s exactly ten minutes. Thank you very much.

We’ve got a few questions for you now.

R. Singh: Thank you so much for your presentation. It was really good to hear about the collaborative approach you have towards other farmers.

We have been hearing from other people, and there were concerns about — and you said you take offence to it — less inspection. I understand that you are taking really good care of your animals. But why is there a perception…? Hearing from people about why there is not the same standard for class A or B that we have for D and E…. Do you encounter that too — like, why not the same kind of inspection?

J. Ross: Well, in this area, I encounter a lot of people who say: “I don’t give a damn about inspection. I know you. I like you. I can see your farm from the road. If I want to come and watch you slaughter animals, I’m welcome to.” So I personally don’t run into a lot of that, and what I find from the people who support our farm is that they don’t care about that.

When we start getting into this issue of inspection is when we start running into lobbies by people like the B.C. Abattoir Association — right? — or people who have a vested interest and feel like they have something to lose. I think that’s when we get all of these concerns and fears. Food safety issues get ramped up. How do you rally people to do something? You scare the hell out of them. You tell them: “You could be poisoned from this.”

All of a sudden, they’re up in arms, and they agree with inspection, when the reality, when the rubber hits the road, is that there are no food recalls from class D and E licence holders and small abattoirs. They all come from large abattoirs. What does it come down to? Care and attention.

You can’t legislate that. You can’t regulate that. You can give someone, a large facility, an A licence. You can give a small facility an A licence.

[5:35 p.m.]

I can guarantee you that the care that is taken in that smaller facility will be much higher. You know, it’s just the nature of the beast. People don’t become anonymous robots in a small facility. They’re accountable, directly accountable.

R. Leonard (Chair): Any other questions?

I. Paton: Maybe for the group. We visited yesterday, on Vancouver Island, an A licensed facility, Gunter Meat in Courtenay. We look at an A licensed facility costing roughly half a million dollars. Can you describe your E licensed facility to an A licensed facility, based on, say, the size of this room?

J. Ross: Well, to be really honest with you, my facility is the open air. I don’t have a roof that I slaughter under. We use a combination of a sort of tailgate, if you will, where they slide in the receiver on a vehicle. It’s got a winch on it that hauls the animal up. We use a skid steer for the larger animals to do that. But we aren’t actually in any kind of a facility at all.

I. Paton: Then you must have a Ministry of Health inspector that comes around once in a while — once every six months or a year?

J. Ross: They come around and do a very cursory…. It’s not even really an inspection. It’s cross the i’s and dot the t’s. Nobody has ever come and watched me slaughter on the farm; put it that way. While we’re shooting and gutting animals, I’ve never seen a health inspector on the farm.

I. Paton: Even if there’s an A and B provincial inspector in the area — you must know who he is — he’s never stopped by to look at your E licence?

J. Ross: No, never. Absolutely not.

I. Paton: I mean, that doesn’t make any sense. If he’s in the area anyway, to check on Brad’s A facility, why wouldn’t he stop by and check on the other facilities?

J. Ross: I think what it comes down to is that these guys are already run off their legs, right? They’re so damn busy that the last thing they want to see is Jim Ross’s farm, right? They’ve got to be at another A class facility tomorrow somewhere else. Like so many things, it just comes down to manpower.

The fact that we don’t have anybody inspecting our meat…. I can see you going: “Oh my god. Nobody has ever come by your farm. You’ve never seen an inspector.” Fair enough. I can understand why that might scare somebody. But I come back to the fact that we take a hell of a lot of care. If I’m going to be poisoning someone, I’m going to be poisoning someone I really like, maybe somebody I love.

I really take a lot of care, and I know that everybody else who I know and who is an E licence holder takes that very seriously. The reason that they do is because they don’t want to poison anyone. They know if they don’t take it seriously, they’re going to lose that. They’re going to lose that option.

R. Leonard (Chair): We’re at five minutes. Donna had her hand up, so we’ll let her ask one more quick question.

D. Barnett: You basically just slaughter your own animals?

J. Ross: Absolutely. That’s all you can do with an E licence.

D. Barnett: That’s all you do: use your own animals. What do you do with the SRMs?

J. Ross: We don’t have any SRMs, because we do pigs. SRM is strictly related to cattle, in the spine and the brain…

D. Barnett: You just do pigs.

J. Ross: …and to sheep as well. But they don’t get mad cow disease or encephalopathy or whatever the hell you call it.

R. Leonard (Chair): I’m being begged for one more question from Doug.

D. Routley: You speak of the implications that you would be poisoning personal friends or family members and people you love. That is admirable. The problem we have, as public policy–makers, is that not everyone is, perhaps, as responsible as you are. Public policy has to account for the outliers of all that. I really appreciate what you had to say.

Given the implications of a single problem to the entire industry — if, say, an export industry is threatened because of contamination of whatever it might be, BSE or whatever — our difficulty is finding a balance between the strict adherence in inspection of A and B to the rather less strict.

J. Ross: Lax.

D. Routley: Yeah, but counting on the responsibility of people like you. How would you suggest that we make that leap to where we can say comfortably to the people we represent, “We’ve done the job of protecting you,” and these D and E operators are still able to operate with a little bit less stringent regimen?

[5:40 p.m.]

J. Ross: Well, I think that Ian’s question brought up a very good point. This is something I’ve talked about before. I’m an E licence holder, and sometimes I look at the process and go, “Holy shit. How did I pass?” kind of thing. “How does that work?”

I think there has to be a balance in there. In terms of me as an E licence holder, honestly, I would welcome an inspector to come and watch us slaughter one day. We are an SPCA-certified farm as well, and every time that SPCA inspector comes, I learn so much. I tighten up my game. I learn little things, right? It could be the same with a meat inspector as well.

The one thing I do know is that…. You speak of striking a balance. When you’re striking that balance, what you need to keep in mind is that for every E licence holder there is in the province right now, there are ten people selling meat on the black market. I can drive down the road from my farm in Slocan Park, and I can just go: “There is one. There is one. There is one. There is one.” Some of them — I know a couple of them — are growing as much meat as me and selling it.

If you make the regulations too stringent, then you drive people into an underground market, and then you have zero control. So you have to find that sweet spot in there where you’re doing your due diligence in terms of protecting the public, but at the same time, you’re not driving everyone underground, because then you’ve got zero control and you’ve lost the reins, right?

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. I appreciate that. It was very good to hear your perspectives. You brought up a few new points that we hadn’t heard before. Thank you very much.

Now we have, on the telephone, Michael Noullett, from Kawano Farms. Welcome. Please proceed.

KAWANO FARMS

M. Noullett: I realize I only have ten minutes to speak, so just a quick introduction — Mike Noullett, from Kawano Farms. We’re a family-operated class A abattoir in Prince George, B.C.

I’m here solely to speak on the importance of inspection. I did get to listen in to a little bit of the last guy who was speaking, about his class E licence, and it just made me absolutely sick to my stomach that this guy thinks that he can do a great job in a facility that isn’t even a facility.

I’m going to go on a rant here, probably. He’s got no protection from avian…. Birds can fly over him, crap on his animals, flies. I mean, it’s just open to the air and dirt and everything else. He’s got no cement floors, no hot water, no sanitation at all. It just drives me nuts that people….

He might do a very good job, but he has not taken the steps that are required to ensure that he’s not passing on E. coli, fecal coliform or anything else onto his meat, because he has no facility to guarantee that. He probably doesn’t even have a cooler to properly cool them in a manner…. There are laws out there that say your animals have to be chilled within a certain amount of time.

J. Ross: You’re making a lot of assumptions.

M. Noullett: The temperature of the meat has to reach a certain temperature in a short amount of time. If he doesn’t even have a cooler or a proper cooler….

R. Leonard (Chair): Excuse me, Michael. We’re quite open to hearing your concerns, but if you could try to make them a little more anonymous and not directed at one of the previous speakers, I think we’d really appreciate that. Thanks.

M. Noullett: Well, that goes for any class E; that’s not just him. I just heard him, and he…. I mean, I’m sure he does a good job on his animals, and he’s concerned about it. But there are rules and regulations in place for a reason, and why the rules were not adhered to in allowing class D and E licences is beyond my comprehension, because the federal laws say that your meat has to be inspected if it’s sold in Canada.

I don’t know that the general public knows the difference between inspected and licensed. I think most class D and E licence holders advertise it that they’re a licensed facility. They’re not lying. It is a licensed facility; they carry a licence from the B.C. government. But it is not inspected, and I don’t think people realize the difference and the importance of inspection.

[5:45 p.m.]

We have to follow rules and regulations to ensure that our meat…. We’re not saying that it’s 100 percent safe, guaranteed, but we’ve taken every step possible to minimize the chance of passing on any diseased or contaminated meat, or anything that could harm the public or harm our trade with other countries.

In my opinion, it is very important to have inspection, simply because most farmers that are on a class D and E licence are not trained to identify diseases. They’re not trained to identify any kind of contamination that could possibly harm the public. I know most of them have no intention of harming the public, but they also are not educated and trained on how to not harm the public.

I know a lot of the class D and E licences…. They say that the class As and Bs are too big, and when you go too big, people get lost in the system and there are oversights and everything else.

You know what? I run, I would say, a medium-sized abattoir. I employ seven to eight people. Every one of my employees is trained, and they know my expectations. I’m on the floor with them all the time. We’re not huge, but we’re not small either. There is no way that I could say that without the inspectors there, we could do the same job that we do right now, because they are there to check, to make sure. They’re the ones trained in identifying diseases; we’re not.

I’ve slaughtered thousands and thousands of animals in my lifetime. I started when I was a child. I still don’t know how to identify certain diseases, so somebody that’s slaughtering ten animals a year cannot be trained to know. They can’t really know what a disease looks like, what actually is going to contaminate their meat, because they’ve taken a one-day or two-day course from the government and been given a licence.

I would suggest that most class A and B facilities are not running to their full potential, simply because we can’t find skilled staff. We try to train people. We try to keep up. We could hire more people; we just can’t find anybody to hire. If we could hire more people, we could do more animals and alleviate some of that waiting period that people are always complaining about and everything else.

There are also other ways that that can be fixed. With people slaughtering their animals at different times of year, we would have…. I mean, we have slow periods, where people change their breeding program or change their feeding program. We could do way more in the summer months and spring months. But everybody seems to want their stuff done in the fall, and we get overrun. We can’t handle that, simply because of short staff and lack of cut-and-wrap facilities.

We’re fully, fully…. Right now we do ship out quite a bit of carcass meat to some cut-and-wrap facilities. We wish we could get more cut-and-wrap facilities to take some of the pressure off of us for cutting, and we could spend more time in the slaughterhouse, on the kill floor.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. Is that the end?

M. Noullett: Well, yeah.

R. Leonard (Chair): I’ll see now if there are any questions for you from the committee. Donna has the first question.

D. Barnett: Thank you very much for your concern about inspection. I don’t think we can be safe enough. Anything we can do to protect animals and the public is our mandate.

The question I have is…. Of course, the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association is working on a proposal to build a big packing slaughterhouse in Prince George. Will this affect you in any way?

M. Noullett: I don’t believe it will. I believe that the federal plant will be mostly for export. We don’t export, because we’re a provincial plant.

[5:50 p.m.]

We provide our local community with a service of custom cutting.

R. Leonard (Chair): Anyone else have any other questions?

I. Paton: Thank you, Mike, for calling in. In your general area, up in Prince George, you must have some Ds and Es nearby. Do you feel they are affecting your business as far as…? I mean, could you be doing much better financially if they weren’t in the area — in other words, if everybody had to bring their product to your class A facility?

M. Noullett: I don’t believe there’s a lot of class Ds and Es in our area. I know there are a few people applying for them, especially in the McBride area, because their slaughterhouses might be closing down. They’re not sure.

As far as financially, if my bottom line depended on what the Ds and Es were doing, I’m in the wrong business. They’re not affecting my business on the dollar side. What they’re doing is affecting my business by…. If something happens at their facility, there’s a broad stroke of one brush across the whole province that says “B.C. meat tainted” — if there is one outbreak.

That’s my concern. They don’t have that third-party oversight with an inspector to identify disease, to identify…. Like I said, I’ve been slaughtering since I was a child — literally, as a child. I’ve done thousands and thousands of animals. Every time we have a new inspector come by, I learn something new on keeping things maybe a little bit cleaner. You know, you think you’re doing it as clean as possible. Another inspector will have a different idea, and it works.

That oversight of the inspector is super important. They see what you’re doing, and they see how things might be able to be done differently.

R. Leonard (Chair): Any further questions? No.

Thank you very much for your presentation and calling in. I know it’s not easy when you can’t actually see the folks in the room, but I do appreciate your experiences and sharing them with us and tempering things as you progressed.

We’re altering the agenda just a little bit. We’re going to have Magnum Meats with Chad and Erika Maarhuis. Thanks for joining us today. Off you go.

MAGNUM MEATS

C. Maarhuis: I’m going to be reading off — I just put something together — just a little bit of our background. I think it will paint a little bit of a picture of our views of the industry. We’re open to any questions as well.

A Voice: Where are you from?

C. Maarhuis: We’re from Rock Creek, just east of Osoyoos. We’re plant BC 48. Magnum Meats is plant 48, in Rock Creek.

We came into the meat industry and started running a custom cut-and-wrap shop in Rock Creek nine years ago, in 2009. We were young when we started out and had a passion in finding pride of a product we processed. Our goals and dreams have changed over the years as our business has shaped and grown through the hard work we’ve put into it.

We are actually both born and raised in Abbotsford and Chilliwack, much larger city centres than our rural town of Rock Creek.

Rock Creek itself is a small town, maybe about 500 people. When we moved there, we fell in love with it. We service quite a much larger area than just Rock Creek. I’m sure you guys are aware of where all the plants are.

That being said, we have many small farmers in this country. It takes a large area and a lot of animals to run a plant. We have people that bring us animals from as far away as Princeton, Keremeos, Penticton, Summerland, Grand Forks, Edgewood, Kelowna, Slocan Valley and anywhere — all the small communities in between that area, basically.

We have the opportunity to see many changes over the last nine years. At the beginning, we had a local gentleman that started killing for ranchers on the weekends and transitioned into becoming a provincially inspected facility under the CFIA inspection.

[5:55 p.m.]

At that time, we received approximately 70 percent of all our animals from him — processed at his plant — and about 30 percent from on-farm-killed animals. The reasons for farm-killed animals varied from quality of the kill at the facility, animal handling and health, not wanting to pay for a job they had grown up doing — for a lot of local ranchers, it’s been a way of life — scheduling issues — people weren’t used to having to book ahead, as we got busier — and wanting to save money and not have to pay for a job that, potentially, would reflect on their prices, what they were selling it for. A lot of the same issues that we have today.

Back then, I stood behind my farmers killing and selling illegally and also supporting the local abattoir during the inspection transition time. Hearing both sides of a story, we’re a little bit more open-minded. We heard from the ranchers that did their own and vice versa, that didn’t want to do their own — is how we took it during that transition time. It took quite a time in our area to transition to fully inspected — for enforcement issues, anyways.

Due to the lack of local health authority inspection, it was easy to manipulate the numbers to show we were an aboveboard operation all the time. We knew ranchers were potentially selling their product illegally. We were cutting it for them. Numbers showed it was pretty obvious. Had we not changed and started operating the class B abattoir alongside our cut-and-wrap facility, it would have been very easy to continue doing that, without a third-party oversight.

After operating and steadily growing our custom cut-and-wrap shop for five years, the owner of the abattoir informed us he had handed in his licence. I can pretty much guarantee you this would have never happened if he was operating under the current provincial inspection system, rather than the CFIA at the time.

At this point, we were left with a choice: either we lay off the few employees we had started to grow and close down our shop, or continue to operate in the fall, in the busy times, and find work elsewhere during the slow times, which would have ended our business in the long run, I’m pretty sure. We had the option to try to save our small farming industry locally — which we had grown to know and like, our neighbours and friends — and encourage sales and growth and some of the finest raised animals in this province that I’ve seen.

Under a long strenuous process, we got the former plant operating under CFIA right prior to inspection transitioning to the province. We had a steep learning curve ahead of us in slaughter and humane handling, and we immediately saw the positive effects.

During this time, we still took in some farm-killed animals — the first year — alongside inspected animals that we had processed, mainly because these farmers had supported us through uncertain times. We had six employees at the time. Four of them were seasonal, but we had been working on promoting farmers to stretch their seasons to help ease the peak seasons of September to December.

We could tell, over time, that even the nicest quality farm-killed product from some highly skilled generational ranch slaughtermen was not aging the same as meat that we had processed at our abattoir. We decided to make a hard decision to no longer take on any farm-killed products, giving our customers fair warning and knowing we would lose some business and small community support.

No one forced us to do this, and no local governing bodies knew the quality issues, as the local health authority used to come by once a year. Now we might see them once every two years in our cut-and-wrap shop.

We could see the effects and the importance of the inspected facility on slaughter with the third-party oversight. We realized it wasn’t fair to the farmers who paid us for top quality to have their products being contaminated by other uninspected products — not chilled out quick enough and the seen and unseen bacteria on those carcasses spreading bacteria growth that is next to impossible to get out of your hanging cooler during peak season. The effects were immediate. It was also very difficult to understand, even for farmers, because unless you were going through the entire process, you don’t understand the importance of every part and how crucial it is at the end of the processing, including raising from the beginning good-quality finished animals.

[6:00 p.m.]

In 2015, we purchased the property the class B plant was on. This was a challenge in itself. With little support and knowledge about our industry, it was very difficult for even Farm Credit to want to be part of our future. This was difficult for us to understand, because we thought that an institution that supported farmers would have, at the very least, acknowledged us as part of agriculture’s future and part of an essential necessity for farmers.

Other noticeable effects to the final processing quality happened after upgrades to our facility. We were able to receive funding through grants found by the B.C. Association of Abattoirs, sourced for provincial plants, including humane handling and humane slaughter. We were able to upgrade our corrals and pens. It took time, but you could see the quality effects at the end of the aging process when the animals were cut and prepared to feed local families, all by minimizing stress prior to slaughter.

Our most recent upgrade — we just finished — is our chill cooling system, also known as our drip coolers. Through the post-farm food safety grant…. As I’ve told people in the last few weeks countless times, if I’ve learned anything over the last 12 years of meat cutting here in Rock Creek, it is the importance of the rapid chilling of carcass animals. I shudder now at the thought of receiving animals that sometimes would take two to four hours before I would receive them at my cut-and-wrap shop and then proceed to put them into my cooler with other meat that is already chilled out.

Due to all of the support we have received from like-minded people we know, as the B.C. Association of Abattoirs that we have been part of for four years, I was asked to join the board of directors two years ago. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of strong points about inspection, over your different regional meetings, from other members, such as Mike who was just on there. I’ve gotten to know Mike pretty well over the last couple of years.

I want to highlight some of the points that I feel more strongly about. These are in no specific order. I know they have lots of different points, but we have our meetings, and what we feel is important might not be exactly what everyone else felt.

R. Leonard (Chair): You have about one minute.

C. Maarhuis: One minute?

Third party. Obviously, I’ve touched on that, just ensuring all of the potential animal diseases are caught. Also, just having that liability so that we know…. We have liability insurance, and the province takes on a lot of liability okaying that this meat is safe, and the concern of that not being out there is very concerning to the industry.

I’ll just go to my closing statement. I believe there is a lot of potential for the local meat industry in exposing the incredible products we raise in love and pride in this province — or that are grown.

I now know more than ever…. I believe the only long-lasting future of building this sector relies on absolute safety of these products. If we want our family, friends, neighbours and visitors to be able to enjoy these products and more, down the road, we need to minimize any potential risk of harming business for all of us.

We operate a small-scale facility, and any community interested in promoting farming should be looking at setting up similar inspected facilities for minimal costs. Without our plant, in our small area, a lot of people would not have the opportunity to even know about these incredible products that are raised by our neighbours and our friends.

And that’s it.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very, very much. Appreciate the presentation. We have a few questions. We’ll start with Doug.

D. Routley: Thanks very much for your presentation. You really reflect the dilemma that you face — the different customers that you’re accepting. It must have been very difficult to make that decision, but I support it totally.

I hope this doesn’t come out of their time, but I want to let everybody in the room know and anybody who ever reviews this Hansard how much the staff do here to support this. We were in Courtenay yesterday, Williams Lake this morning, now, and then tomorrow in Cranbrook and Kamloops. They set this up every time and pull people together. It’s pretty fantastic, and we really do appreciate everything they do.

I really do appreciate the sense of the local friends and small town and the difficulty of having to make that decision. What do you think we could do, in terms of public policy, to support you as a small-scale processor, in order to bridge that gap again?

[6:05 p.m.]

C. Maarhuis: I think Mike might previously have just touched on it too, in that you can listen to…. It depends on everyone’s quality and what their customers are looking for. Our customers are quite happy coming from a distance. I’m sure they’d be happier if it was right down the road, but it’s not, and they’re quite happy with the work we do.

That being said, we’re so limited on cutting capacity. We took on doing poultry now because our plant pretty well sits empty three or four days of the week, because what we can kill in two days is more than we can cut in the entire week. We could do a lot more. We could send out right now, with our cooler expansion, probably six times the volume we do to other cut-and-wraps or other stores or other markets. I’d love to do it all. We need to grow, but it takes time. It’s not a get-rich-quick industry; it’s a labour of love.

It’s tough. You need a lot of workers. We’ve been fortunate. A lot of small-town farm people grew up on farms not afraid to work. We have a lot of women working for us. It’s awesome. They’re happy for a place to live. But to keep steady, strong young guys working there is next to impossible. So that’s got to be number one.

Promoting the product just snowballs from there. We supply a lot to wineries and places in the Okanagan too. We source the product because we know the phenomenal job these ranchers are doing. It’s second to none. But we’re still limited on what can be out there. I don’t know if that answers your question.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation. Thank you for being so honest about the transition, because it’s really important for us to understand.

We’ve heard, in other presentations, people who were adamantly opposed to any kind of inspection who, through the transition process, through education and through their experience, are now in a different place than they were nine years ago. It’s refreshing to see the kind of honesty and some of the tough decisions that you had to make in order to move forward. Also, that you were able to prepare people who were your customers for those transitions.

I know it’s not easy being self-employed. It truly is a labour of love. Hopefully, whatever we recommend will assist and find that balance that people are looking for. I believe that people believe that when they buy any kind of meat, it is safe meat. They don’t have any sense of what the processes are or of the As, Bs, Ds and Es. So thank you for the work you do. I don’t really have a question, but it was great.

E. Maarhuis: I did send a video, but it didn’t really work that well because I was on the road, with Chad driving. I’ll try and send it off. It’s just a little overcap of what our facility looks like, who we are and some of the projects that we have been able to do through the grants that we applied for.

C. Maarhuis: That’s been huge in building the business as well. Those little things are just that push that you need sometimes.

E. Maarhuis: The community also sees that we’re invested in them.

R. Leonard (Chair): You say you sent a video, but it didn’t quite make it through the ethers. Okay. Connect with the staff, and we’ll make sure that it gets put into the record.

E. Maarhuis: Okay. That sounds good. Thanks.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. That’s great.

I think we had one more question from Ian.

I. Paton: Just quickly. I think I know your family from dairy farming in the Fraser Valley — Chris Maarhuis with the B.C. Holstein News.

C. Maarhuis: Yeah, a cousin.

I. Paton: I’m just clarifying. Are you under a B licence or an A licence?

C. Maarhuis: We are a B licence. Our cut-and-wrap facility is detached. It’s actually just across the road. We started in that place, and then we had the opportunity to buy the abattoir. We’ve purchased that, and now we’re finishing our major upgrades there. Then we’re going to, hopefully, build our plant up top, attach it. Then we’d be carrying an A licence at that time.

I. Paton: Okay, great. That still kind of confuses me. We had another situation where you’ve got a B licence, which says slaughter only, yet you’re actually cutting and wrapping across the street. Who gives you the…?

[6:10 p.m.]

You get that from the Ministry of Health to do the cut-and-wrap portion?

C. Maarhuis: Yup. That’s the public health authority, which is Interior Health for us. We started with them and then progressed to this. There were talks that it was going to change. I think that was just prior to the elections — that the province was going to start covering A facilities under meat inspection. They would also take on people like us that are operating both within close proximity, kind of that loophole — clear that up.

I. Paton: One other super-quick question. Your inspector that comes on kill days — where does he live or come from?

C. Maarhuis: She lives in Rock Creek, actually, in our area. When we decided that we were going to fire up a plant, they went for extra training. We had an inspector in Osoyoos and one in Rock Creek. Then sometimes they’ll pull an inspector out of Vernon or Cherryville, wherever it’s needed.

Like Mike touched on, those inspectors are very critical in us learning better procedure, because we didn’t go to school to slaughter. I did a little bout at Johnston Packers at the coast when I was young. That gave me kind of the vision to become a meat cutter but not really for the slaughter end of things. We hadn’t planned on doing that originally, but it went to this, and I’m glad it did, because we’re able to control the quality throughout. That’s where that comes from.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation. Once again, a whole new perspective. It’s really great to be out here and get to hear all the different voices here. Thank you very much.

At this time, we have Ed Conroy. Welcome, Ed. Are you good with five minutes and then some questions?

ED CONROY

E. Conroy: Yes. My name is Ed Conroy, and I live here in Castlegar. Pass Creek is kind of a side valley that comes into this valley. For about 40 years, I’ve raised purebred cattle here. It’s not the best place in the world to raise cattle, here. I tell people that we grow pinecones better than we grow anything else, because this is the heart of the Interior wetbelt. You notice our mountains are totally covered in trees and whatnot, so there are no grazing leases or anything. It makes it very difficult.

As I’ve heard from some of the other speakers, you can find your niche and work from there. My niche was that we sold breeding stock into Alberta and Saskatchewan and we sold bulls into the U.S. primarily and a few locally and all over B.C., as far north as Peace River country and as far south as into the U.S.

Anyway, that’s kind of my history. I’m not going to talk about A, B, C, D or anything like that, to give you guys a bit of a break. All I want to do is sort of explain to you, somewhat, what it’s like in our area, or in the whole southern part of the province, in the livestock industry, at least from my point of view here.

I kind of use Kamloops as a line. Anything south of Kamloops, it’s really hard to buy property because the real estate values are so high that you just simply can’t do it. The folks that just spoke, from Rock Creek…. I’m going to mention, as an example, about a guy I know. He hauled cattle for me and had a ranch in Rock Creek and had a heart attack and had to sell it. He sold it. It was a really pretty, nice little ranch that he worked on for years. It sold to a dentist from Edmonton. That’s very, very typical. When I say “south of Kamloops,” that’s very typical.

[6:15 p.m.]

Anybody that wants to get in the agricultural industry at all is fighting those kinds of odds in order to find the property in the livestock business to do that here. So somebody like me…. I started when I was in my 20s and found my niche and had the opportunity to get by, at least, anyway. I feel now that could never happen to me. I just simply couldn’t afford to buy the property.

I use that example. And along with that comes the shrinking of the livestock industry in southern British Columbia. A couple of years ago, there was a feedlot in Oliver, which our operation relied on very heavily. We sent all our replacement heifers and all our bulls that we were going to be selling to the feedlot for the winter. Well, it’s gone now, and that changed our whole operation. That’s a problem that we have to deal with. But it closed, and it’s now a vineyard.

I went to a sale in Okanagan Falls about three or four weeks ago, and it was the last sale of the season. I couldn’t get away from that place, thinking that it may be the last sale — period — here within the next short period of time because the shrinking of the livestock industry makes it uneconomic to run a stockyard to deal with the cattle that they can collect in the southern part of the province. For people here, my purpose in going over there was to buy steers so I could put them on my property, and then I’d sell the steers in the fall. Well, that’s going to be gone. If that shuts down, that’ll impact the farmers over here.

For our purebred operation, with any culls — like our cull cows and the calves that didn’t make it as purebreds — we generally marketed through the stockyard. So if that goes, we’ve lost the feedlot and we’ve lost the stockyard. That’s kind of the reality that we’re dealing with.

It’s tough. It’s really hard. I just came here to listen. I didn’t realize that the As and Bs were in that much of a donnybrook with the Es, and all that kind of stuff. That is really unfortunate.

These guys are trying to build a business, and I’m sympathetic with that. But the nature of our business around here…. I’m fortunate enough that in the business I had, we sold live cattle. We didn’t have to slaughter, so I never had to get mixed up in it.

The nature of the business around here, because of where we live and our climate and all that kind of stuff, kind of puts us off. There’s no organization, hardly. People that want to raise two or three head are really in a complicated, difficult position. I sympathize with all that.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. Did you have much more to say?

E. Conroy: No, that’s it.

R. Leonard (Chair): All right. Well, then, thank you very much for coming in and speaking off the cuff. We might have some questions.

E. Conroy: Can I say one more thing?

R. Leonard (Chair): Oh, sure.

E. Conroy: I sat where you guys are sitting, in the ’90s. I was on the Agriculture Committee. We toured the province, and we didn’t do a very good job. There were too many little issues to bicker over instead of looking at the big picture. The trouble is that the big picture, minus the stockyard and the feedlot and all that, changes.

I hope you guys can put the puzzle together a lot better than we did, because we didn’t do it very well. Good luck.

[6:20 p.m.]

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Ed. As you were speaking, my thought is that we’re looking at slaughter. We need to look at infrastructure. We need to look at the whole picture and how each is interconnected. As you said, the shrinking of the cattle industry has a huge impact on British Columbia as a whole. Hopefully, this committee will take on much more than the narrow topic that we’re dealing with right now and look at the big picture.

I come from an area where cattle country is pretty important, and we need to talk about the infrastructure we’re losing.

R. Leonard (Chair): Any other questions?

I. Paton: I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’m in the cattle auction business. My dad was the auctioneer for McClary Stock Yards when it was still on Fraser Street in Vancouver. Believe it or not, I just was told yesterday that McClary Stock Yards in Abbotsford is shutting down three weeks from now. Valley Auction shut down in Armstrong a year or so ago. Chapman’s auction barn in Chilliwack shut down probably 15 years ago. So yeah, it’s a real issue as to where people can go to sell their cattle and to buy some steers and whatnot as well.

E. Conroy: If OK Falls shuts down, I either have Kamloops or Fort McLeod. Those are my two options to go to and buy and sell cattle, so it makes it tough.

R. Leonard (Chair): Well, I appreciate you bringing that perspective. You’re not the first to start the conversation about the state of our livestock and our ability. Our first question is around how we can increase livestock production in B.C. The story is starting to weave together very well with all of the presentations that we’re hearing. So I really appreciate you coming out.

It was really good to meet you face to face.

Seeing that we have no further presenters, I would like to adjourn this meeting with great thanks to this community for hosting us.

The committee adjourned at 6:22 p.m.