The committee met at 10:07 a.m.

[R. Leonard in the chair.]

R. Leonard (Chair): I’ll call the meeting of the Select Standing Committee on Agriculture, Fish and Food to order.

Welcome, everyone, on this hot summer day. Appreciate everybody making their way here, and those who couldn’t make their way here are here through the airwaves.

On the phone, we’ve got Donna Barnett. We also have our first presenter of the day, who is Gillian Watt, the program co-ordinator from TRU, to talk about the applied sustainable ranching program.

Welcome, Gillian. I’m going to turn the floor over to you to introduce yourself some more and talk about your program, and then we’ll open it up for questions after.

Briefing by
Thompson Rivers University,
Applied Sustainable Ranching Program

G. Watt: Great, okay. Thank you very much for inviting me on your call. It’s always a pleasure to talk about the program.

Donna Barnett is on the call, and she did just mention that the original funding for the program was very much appreciated — to develop the program and all the building of the curriculum and the whole start-up in our industry meeting. Thanks again for the initial funding.

Our program in Williams Lake is quite unique in the province. Actually, our dean of science at TRU, Tom Dickinson, said that it’s unique to North America for a couple of reasons.

One is the blended delivery model we’re using. First of all, it’s a diploma program, a two-year diploma which ladders into an agribusiness degree at Olds College. If students want to go on, they can go right into third year at Olds College, or they can have 30 transfer credits into the bachelor of business degree program at TRU or, I believe, it’s 33 or 34 credits into the natural resource science degree program at TRU.

[10:10 a.m.]

We’re working with other universities in British Columbia to look at transfer credits back and forth between the other ag universities as well.

Back to the uniqueness. There are a few things that are unique, but the main one is the blended delivery. I don’t want to be graduating students — and neither does the industry advisory board of the program — out of the program who really don’t have the hands-on skills in agriculture and in ranching, so our students all have to be on a ranch or an agriculture operation while they’re in the program, for the whole two years.

Some of them are on their own family ranches, but often, even if they have their own family ranch, they want to get out to other ranches and gain experience. So we have students from right across Canada, actually. We’ve had a few international students — I think we’ve had about ten international students so far — in the program, and they’re all doing work-based training on ranches throughout the province. There’s actually one still on another ranch in Manitoba, as well, taking the program.

It’s pretty neat, and it’s a really great way for the agriculture producers that are host ranches to be able to get the young, youthful labour. They’re very excited to see the next generation of ranchers coming up. They’re liking it because they’re getting some great labour, and they’re able to pass on their tricks of the trade.

The students are out there on those ranches. They log into what we call a Moodle on Monday morning, and they have their assignments for the week. Then they have to get their assignments done each week. They come to school, usually, on a Tuesday. It’s seminar day. They all come up to the Williams Lake campus, either in person, or — if they can’t make it because maybe it’s too busy on the ranch, or they’re too far away — they log in through a videoconferencing program called BlueJeans. It’s amazing. It’s just like they’re right in the classroom. They do group presentations together, even from a distance, as well. It’s really neat.

That blended delivery model and having the kids seeing the hands-on skills which they can…. You know, when they’re doing their assignments, they’re actually putting them into practice right on the ranch. That’s a very unique aspect. The courses are all…. I think you’ve got a schedule.

How it works is we do one course at a time. It’s not like in university, when kids are taking four to six courses at a time. These kids are only taking one subject at a time, it’s condensed, and that’s all they’re taking. It’s a similar model…. I did my MBA in agriculture through the University of Guelph, and most of it was on line as well, other than the residency period. This is how they did it. That was many years ago, mind you. That’s kind of how we’re doing it, after that program.

The kids throughout the program are doing assignments that all have application to building their own enterprise, building their own ranching or farming enterprise. We go through. In the beginning, we do applied skills and diversification, and the students get a look. Every week, we go out on a field trip to a different type of an enterprise, so the students learn the options for diversification out there. On each one of those weeks, they have to pretend — the assignment is — that the owner of a ranch they’re managing has come to them and said: “I want to get into ten acres of raspberries. Can you do a business analysis on that for me?”

[10:15 a.m.]

They have to do a gross margin and a return-on-investment analysis, and then they have to do a written three-pager on key success factors for that type of enterprise. They have to do best management practices, and then they actually go through a lot of different things. Then, at the end, they tell the owner whether they think it’s got a good risk factor, if it’s strategically a good fit for the ranch and if it has a decent return on investment.

By the end of that module, which runs from September 4 to November 25, I could throw anything at those students, and they could do an analysis on it and tell me if it was going to be a good enterprise for them to get into. That’s what I like. I used to be an ag banker for a while, and I really like that. They’re getting the practice in this kind of an analysis.

That’s the first course in the first year. We have three courses in the first year. It’s the diversification. We have business enterprise, which runs from February to April. That is kind of like a mini-MBA in agriculture. We go through business strategy. We do three weeks on enterprise accounting and financial management. We do finance.

For each one of these modules, they’re building one for their own farm or ranch or their virtual farm or ranch that they would like to build in the future. They do a strategic plan. They do a financial plan with a cash-flow projection, income projection and net-worth projection.

Then they go in and do a capital-expenditures plan. They structure their financing needs and calculate their loans and what they would be. Then they calculate their borrower-risk rating — if they were to take it to a bank, what their borrower-risk rating would be. So they’re getting a good background in what the banks are looking for.

Then we move on to marketing and logistics. They do two weeks of that, which is equivalent to a one-semester course of marketing, say, if they were taking it at TRU in the sort of normal delivery model. Then they do human resources and seasonal staff. They do a human resource management plan for their ranch. As well as in the previous one, they do a marketing plan.

We look at balancing farm and ranch and foundations for succession. We look at succession planning and work-life balance on the farm. If any of you have ever farmed or come from a ranching family, you’ll know that that sometimes is something that they have trouble with. We talk a lot about that, taking time for the family as well as the work.

Then we go into land resources. This is taught by David Zirnhelt. We do land resources, B.C. governance, aboriginal rights and title. They look at a lot of the things in a changing landscape, not just in the Cariboo but in British Columbia in general, about the land resources which they operate in.

Then they do a one-week course on communication, conflict resolution and crisis management. This is actually taught by a professional mediator, and he’s very, very good. They do some role-playing in class. They actually come out of there with some really new perspectives on how to handle a crisis or a conflict. They also, in that module, develop a communications plan for their farm and ranch.

The third course in the first year is called “Environmentally Sustainable Ranching.” We go through everything from biodiversity to wildlife interactions, soil health. We touch a lot on building soils with organics, rather than heavy chemical fertilizers, using more of what the ranch can use from within.

Our program is based a lot on more of the low-input, regenerative type of agriculture that we believe the markets in B.C. are after. We believe that the whole environmental aspect of that…. We’re looking at reducing the carbon footprint. We spend a lot of time rejigging the thoughts on soil health with the students. It’s more of looking at the living soil.

[10:20 a.m.]

Lee Hesketh, who is an expert on watershed and riparian systems, teaches that. We do invasive species with Bob Drinkwater, who is an old colleague of mine from Kamloops — Ministry of Agriculture. He’s just an absolute wealth of knowledge, so he comes up.

All of these courses are taught by people, not by…. I’m not knocking academia, of course, and researchers, but for these students, we bring in people who are actually experts in the field in the industry. They may not necessarily have a PhD, but they’ve got recognition in the industry as being very top.

Our range ecology and grazing management will be taught this year by a NRS graduate, natural resource science graduate, from TRU, who was with the Ministry of Forests for years. He’s now bought a ranch, and he’s ranching. He’s going to be teaching that. We’d look at urban agriculture interface.

Then another great one that’s very popular, this module — and I think it’s a very, very important one — is we do one on ethnobotany. We have the students learn about the medicinal plants and the traditional use areas so when they’re out there ranching or farming or on the land, they can have an appreciation of the uses of the range land by other users, particularly First Nations that have those traditional use areas.

This module is taught by Cecilia DeRose, who’s an elder here in the community, and I’m telling you, you can’t hear a pin drop when she’s talking in the class. They just love her. She takes them out, and they pick Sxusem berries. They make Indian ice cream, and it’s a great treat. There’s a lot of assignments on that too. It isn’t just for fun.

Then they finish off that whole course with building a three-year range and pasture plan for their entire ranch and grazing lands, taking all these things into consideration, from the biodiversity to riparian — everything. They do that.

I’m not going into the second-year courses in such detail. Each of the first-year courses is 12 weeks long, and in second year, they’re each six weeks long.

We’ve got 2010, which is beef production. That’s taught by Grant Huffman and a new, younger, up-and-coming rancher who has an NRS degree — he’s working with Grant — which is Ty Johnston. Ty and Ingrid run the Onward Mission Ranch, which is a very historical ranch just outside of town.

Then they do sheep and goat production, which is ASUR 2020. They do that for six weeks. Then they go on to do 2030, winter feed production. That’s done with Greg Taggart, who most of you may know. He was with the ministry. I think he was a regional director for years. He was in the ministry when I was in the ministry as a young thing, and I always looked up to him. He’s now retired, and it’s lovely to have him be able to share his vast knowledge with the students — Greg Taggart.

Then the last course is taught by an instructor from TRU Kamloops who also has his own tourism enterprise, Peter Larose. They do a whole six weeks on soft adventure and agritourism.

Then the final module of the second year is…. Their final project is their business and operations plan. So that’s what the second cohort of students is working on right now. They’re pulling together all of these plans that they’ve done through the last two years. A lot of them may have changed because they’ve learned a lot since the beginning. So they’re revamping. Maybe they want to do a new enterprise and have that as part of their business. They’re rejigging every­thing, putting it together in a comprehensive three-year business and operations plan.

Then we started a new thing this year, since the end of September. We have a beef and beer tasting, which is part of their grad celebration. We have local craft breweries and local ranches with the beef, and then we have local chefs cooking the beef. And we pair them up, and we have beef- and-beer-tasting stations across the gymnasium.

That’s all part of the grad celebrations. We have a lot of community people come, and we keep the grad celebration really short, and we keep the socializing really big, because a lot of people don’t get together very often.

[10:25 a.m.]

This year we’re starting a new thing. A lot of you have probably heard of Dragons’ Den. A lot of the students, as part of their business plan, are going to need some financing to get them going. One of the students said: “Well, let’s call it ‘the Bull Pen.’” So we’re calling it the Bull Pen. We’re taking very successful ranchers, vegetable farmers, feedlot producers, whoever we feel is a good match for the students. We’ve got a couple of bankers going to come in and be on the panel. We’re going to have a six-member panel, and the students have each got ten minutes to pitch their final project — their business plan and their operation. Then they will have feedback from each of the panel members.

I think this is going to be so valuable, not just for the students but for the community as well, because there’ll be community members that can sit and watch. There may be some people that will be in the audience that will be potential investors, or they may have land that they really could use someone to come and look after and start an enterprise. So it’ll be kind of a match-making as well. And from the feedback from the experts, I will learn a lot as well and be able to help the students in the future to fine-tune their business plans with some of the feedback that’s received that day.

I think I’ve talked long enough. I’d really love more to hear your questions that I could answer.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. Well, thank you very much for taking us through the program. Can you tell me just how long this program has now been in operation?

G. Watt: We’re going into our third cohort. We actually started the cohort very quickly because it was sort of timing with some funding, and it started in January. We felt it was just off-kilter with the rest of the academic world as well as the high schools, so this last year we’ve changed the cohort date. Now we’re starting in September, like everyone else, with a one-week residency at the end of August. Already we’ve had double the students this year, just from changing the date, so we’re really excited about that.

M. Morris: I’m curious. How many students are regis­tered, and how many students were in the first couple of cohorts?

G. Watt: Well, we started out with 14 in the first cohort, and I believe we graduated nine. Students are coming and going, so some students came in and decided: “Oh, I’m going to not take this next course because I’ve got to go do some­thing over here.” They can take a course or two and then take a break and then come back. So some of them are still ongoing in the program, so we only graduated ten of the 14. This year we’ll be graduating nine from the diploma, and starting this September, we’ve got 18 students.

M. Morris: Are they all British Columbians, or are they from right across Canada, or…?

G. Watt: Well, it’s interesting. The majority, of course, are from British Columbia, but we’ve had three students in the program from Quebec. They came all the way over from…. Two from Montreal, if you can believe it.

Then we’ve got one student who has a degree in agriculture, in animal science, from the University of Saskatchewan. She’s a young rancher from Manitoba, and she works for Manitoba Beef and Forage. She actually didn’t get enough of the business in her degree, so she’s in our program to learn more of the business and the regenerative agriculture part.

We have had one student from Ghana. We’ve got another one starting from Zimbabwe. We’ve got another one starting in January from Nigeria. We’re graduating one student this year from Belgium. We’ve had Switzerland, Germany. I can’t think of where else. We’ve had them from all over. It’s pretty fun.

[10:30 a.m.]

It’s very fun when you’re doing, say, a human resource management presentation and the students are doing a presentation for the class and they’re doing the performance management plan and the young man from Ghana, who we call MJ, said: “Well, my performance management plan will be different because none of my workers will be able to read and write.”

It’s amazing how…. It’s just great for the kids to all learn about the different ways in the different parts of the world and how agriculture is handled so differently.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation. It’s quite exciting to hear the kind of training that’s available and that it’s not just taken for granted that if your dad was a farmer, then you get to be a farmer.

Do you follow your students, as they leave the program? If we’re trying to grow ranchers and farmers, it would be helpful for us to know where they go from the kind of training that you’re providing.

G. Watt: I’m so glad you asked that. I do. In fact, one of our students has just started a…. She’s doing a consulting business, and she’s helping some First Nations bands. Actually, she just did a business plan for one of them to take over a targeted grazing with goats enterprise. They were so excited with her work that they’re asking her to do all their other enterprises, as well, and help her. That’s just one example.

Now that this second cohort is going to be graduating, this same student, Angela Abrahao, is starting what’s going to be called a study group, rather than an alumni. They’re going to be getting together. I don’t know if it’s going to be every month or every two months. They’re going to be doing field days at the different ranches and farms. They will be bringing in people who…. Say they’ve got an HR problem and all of them have something that they want to learn about. They’ll bring in an expert on that, and they’ll have more of a discussion group than a presentation.

They got that type of an idea from Woody Lane, who is a sheep nutritionist from Oregon. He started these study groups down in the States. It’s more that everybody is on the same level and they’re all collaboratively discussing a challenge and how to overcome it, rather than having a presenter at the front of the class lecturing.

The ASUR study group is going to be meeting, like I said, every two months. I will be there with them at their meetings, just actually as a bystander, just to listen and to keep informed. I believe Angela is looking for a little bit of funding to get them started. So she’s actively doing that. They all put in the money every year, but then they…. It will give her a little bit more money to bring in these speakers to work with them on different problems.

It’s going to be really fun. I’m excited that they’re starting this alumni study group, and we’ll be following them.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): The next question is: in the discussion in the class…? We’re looking at abattoirs and the challenges around how to process meat. I’d be interested to know what the discussion amongst students and teachers is in regards to those challenges.

Also, when you have an opportunity to talk about government and governance and the impact of regulations, feel free to invite this committee. We’re new, and we would love to hear from young farmers who are just starting out and are looking at what they have to go through in order to do certain things on their farm and if there are ways we can improve that. But particularly around the abattoir challenges, I would be interested to hear what the discussions, perhaps, have been, if there have been any.

G. Watt: Oh, there have been lots. Actually, the one module I do in the beef course is the…. They have a traditional marketing one, and then I do the one on grass finishing and sales and marketing. The seminar I had on that we opened up to all of the ranchers, and we brought in a panel. We had a panel through the whole value chain. We had a retail store there, we had an abattoir, and we had two or three ranches that are actually in the business, commercially, of finishing their own beef here on grass and then taking it to an abattoir and marketing it that way.

[10:35 a.m.]

We had the largest turnout ever here at the university. I think we had something like 50 people. We had to bring in more chairs to the classroom and everything. It was all because of the need for a licensed abattoir in this area. I mean, we’ve we got Schellenbergs out west, but it’s quite a long ways for people to take their beef out there and then have it shipped. There are a lot of logistics around that.

They were very much wanting to start a B.C. meat centre of excellence here in the Cariboo somewhere that specialized more in the grass-finishing type of beef and really research and a training facility around that and a production facility.

A lot of the discussion we had that day was just around, even: what is the average daily gain you can get on these different pastures types here in the Cariboo when you’re trying to finish animals? It was kind of funny. We went through a growth margin analysis on it. All the producers agreed on every one of the numbers going through except for the average daily gain potential. There was a huge gap.

There is a lot of research on that type of thing needed. We’re graduating students here out of the program that are going to be finishing beef. They’re going to be finishing sheep. They’re going to be doing pasture poultry. They’re going to be doing pasture pork. They’re going to be doing targeted grazing with goats and selling those goats as well, the young goats, into the meat market.

The abattoir deal is a huge one because, you know, it’s our limiting factor in British Columbia for getting our beautiful, healthy, grass-fed beef and other protein to the market. Some areas have enough abattoirs; some don’t. The belief is that the B.C. meat inspection system that’s there now is working wonderfully for the abattoirs that are in business. We just need more abattoirs. I believe the market is there. We just have to get more abattoir capacity in British Columbia.

A. Olsen: In terms of your cohorts, just following up on the questions from Mike, just wondering what the participation is from First Nations people in British Columbia in your program, if at all.

G. Watt: Good question. We’ve had one student graduate in the first cohort, T.J. Walkem from Spences Bridge. He’s looking after his family ranch. He’s managing it down there. We’ve got two students, two First Nations girls, in the next cohort coming in.

We had another girl, who was so great, in the program. She did so well, and she learned so much. But she needed to stop after first year and leave with her certificate because she had a full-time job and it was just too much for her. She didn’t carry on, but she was from the Williams Lake Indian Band.

We are working at increasing the First Nations percentage in our class. We’ve had meetings with the First Nations person in Kamloops, whose name is Paul. I’ve forgotten his last name. He’s great. We’re working on that.

The other thing we’re doing is I sit on an agriculture and range advisory committee out at the Dog Creek band. We’re working on having students out there working in the enterprises they have, helping them build those enterprises. Then the young people will start to see…. Because we’ll have students out there working in the community, they’ll be able to actually see that there is a future in agriculture and go to it. Getting a whole bunch of students from the First Nations community, I thought, would be easier. But it’s something that’s going to take a long time.

[10:40 a.m.]

I think the trick is to help them build their enterprises as an extension part of the TRU ranching program. I’m just out there helping as part of my job. Then having students placed there, then the young people seeing, and then they’ll get interested. That’s kind of what we’re doing to try and increase that.

This deal with Dog Creek is really so great. They’ve already, now, in the last month, started a fencing enterprise. Conrad Lindblom, from Beaverlodge…. They’re buying his targeted grazing operation with all his goats. They’re going to be doing the noxious weed control on a lot of the bands in this area with the goats. How great is that?

R. Leonard (Chair): I just pumped the air. I actually had a project where I was doing knotweed control with goats.

G. Watt: You did?

R. Leonard (Chair): Yes, I did.

G. Watt: Wonderful. You know what we’re starting here at TRU? We’re starting another course. It’s not going to be part of the diploma, but it’ll be a specialization after you get the diploma or people can come in and take it as a one-off. It’s starting next July, and it’s called “Biological Weed Control with Goats.” It’s going to be the first one in Canada. I’m quite excited as you can tell.

It’s going to be two weeks on line followed by three weeks in the field working with the goat herders followed by a one week summary on line. They do the goat herding on horse, too, so I think it’s going to work really well with Dog Creek because that culture has got a history of horsemanship out there. When they can be herding goats on horses, I think it’ll be a lot more appetizing for them than if they were just walking around with canes.

R. Leonard (Chair): Great, nice visual.

G. Watt: It is pretty exciting.

I. Paton: Hi, Gillian. A couple of things. As Jackie had mentioned, we’re basically all in this game together regarding processing of meat, abattoirs and slaughterhouses. As you probably know, we flew around the province a few weeks ago. We’ve had a lot of submissions on line, and we’ve chatted with people. I think, as an educator, it would be important to get your opinion, as well, while we’re here on the phone.

If you sent some students out to get into the business of raising grass-fed beef, and they said: “Okay, I think we’ll process some on-farm ourselves….” Do you understand the D and E licences which we’re all having trouble with? Because the As and Bs are inspected by our B.C. Ministry of Agriculture, which everybody seems to think is a good thing. They like it. They want to be part of the program.

Would you send students out? What would be your opinion for them to be 100 kilometres in the backwoods doing their cutting and slaughtering with a D and E licence that doesn’t have any ministerial inspection, only inspection from the health department? They only come around every couple of years to just check for cleanliness. Your opinion on these four different licences.

G. Watt: I was sort of dodging a bit around. I think you guys need to know that before my position here with TRU, I was executive director for B.C. Association of Abattoirs for five years. I did their original strategic plan. I worked with them. We built B.C. Beef Net. We built the B.C. beef information system. There were a lot of good things done.

What I tell my students is: if you’re in the business, if you’re going to be commercially raising beef for the families and consumers in British Columbia, which is really what the target is for all of my students — we’re not about exports; it’s all about our B.C. market — then you need to be business-like. Just like your quality all the way through in your business, all the way to when it gets to the abattoir, the most important part of the quality, then, is how it arrives at the customer.

[10:45 a.m.]

The insurance for a healthy product and a safe product is so important, not just for you as individual ranches but for the future of the B.C. beef industry and the B.C. sheep industry and the B.C. pasture pork industry or pork industry — period. It’s not really any different than I teach them all the way through all of their programs and all of their enterprises. It’s quality, quality, quality. My mom used to say: “If you’re going to do a job, do it right.” That’s sort of what I teach them as an educator. Don’t cut corners, and do it quality.

When they’re doing their gross margin analysis on their finishing and sales enterprise…. Their cow-calf enterprise is one thing, but then if they’re going to keep them through and background them and finish them, that’s a different enterprise. They look at that separately. Then they look at the enterprise. Are they going to just sell it on B.C. Beef Net or sell it to a butcher hanging, or are they going to actually sell it and deliver it themselves and all that kind of thing? When they do that, in their gross margin analysis is the cost of transportation to the abattoir and the transportation from the abattoir to the Vancouver market or wherever it is via Clark Freightways. They have all those calculations in there.

It would be nice if we had an abattoir here in the Cariboo that could handle the capacity for these students that are coming out. But for the most part, the students, in their gross margin analysis to date, have used Rainer Custom Cutting if they’re in 100 Mile, or they’ve used the new abattoir started in Heffley Creek, which is Devick’s farm, and they’ve calculated their transportation to either Rainer’s or Devick’s farm, rather than going north because then they have to go south again to go to Vancouver. That’s what they’ve done.

I believe we’ve got a really great B.C. meat inspection system. There was a lot of work that went into that, and I think it’s working, from what I know from when I was working for the abattoirs. I think we should stand behind that.

I. Paton: Can I just quickly follow up? In the end, I’m hearing something that I thought a little bit different. You’re saying the system’s working well. There’s no problem. So you’re saying that the system right now, with A, B, D and E licences, is working well, and we shouldn’t play with the Ds and Es that are uninspected?

G. Watt: I don’t want to talk about the Ds and Es. I tell my students to use As and Bs and to focus on the As and Bs. That’s what I tell my students. I think to increase the numbers of Ds and Es or to increase the amount they can slaughter could potentially be a problem. That’s all. But I’m not here to tell anybody what to do. I just tell my students to make sure they’re using an inspected facility and leave the business of that to people who are experts at it.

R. Leonard (Chair): If I may, I could follow up with just one more question along those lines. We heard a lot about trying to increase capacity for slaughterhouses, to extend the finishing time so that we could…. The bottleneck was where the slaughterhouses were being inundated with animals.

G. Watt: Absolutely.

R. Leonard (Chair): So is that part of your program — to try to introduce that idea of extending the season so that they’d have more access?

G. Watt: That’s a great question. Yes, it is. At that seminar I was talking about, that’s what we talk about. If you’re going to be doing it, you need to be not just having a glut of your animals ready in October or November or September but have them ready in January or February or March, depending on your market. Our students know that they’re going to have to spread out the timing of their finishing.

R. Leonard (Chair): I just have one other question, and that’s about how you market your program so that you get students coming in.

G. Watt: Well, we’ve got a very good on-line presence, with our Facebook and our social media. One our students actually is managing that for us. Then, of course, the websites and all the search engines and that…. We’ve got the power of TRU behind us. We go to a lot of industry events — 4-H events, cattlemen’s meetings.

[10:50 a.m.]

We’ve got some wonderful sponsorships for our program, by the way. Annually we have an entrance award for $5,200 to a 4-H member in British Columbia. That comes from Cariboo GM here in Williams Lake. They are huge supporters of the program. Then we have Darlene Freding, who is the former wife of our dear Bill Freding. She donated $100,000 to the program, in student awards, over ten years. So we’ve got two $5,000 awards a year from that to go to the students. We do a lot of promotions of those at 4-H events and those kinds of things.

Then we have two videos that we recently made. We were fortunate to get funding from Northern Development Initiative Trust for some international marketing, and we did two videos. I’ve sent the link, I believe, to Jennifer for those short clips of videos. They’re great, and that’s what’s bringing in a lot of our new students. They see the videos. Then they can’t….

I think that that’s mostly how we’re doing it. If you have any other ideas, please let me know. We have a monthly article and a student profile in Beef in B.C. as well.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you.

I don’t want to forget Donna on the phone. Do you have any questions, Donna?

D. Barnett: No, I don’t. I was involved in the original starting of the program. It’s just a wonderful program. I’m so pleased that it’s here in the Cariboo. I watch how the program is delivered and how it has evolved, and I am just excited to see it continue to grow.

D. Routley: Thanks very much for the presentation. It’s really impressive.

You mentioned $5,000 bursaries. But what is the total cost of the program per student?

G. Watt: Oh good. Yeah, sorry. I forgot. The first-year cost is just over $6,000. For the second-year course, the cost for the program is just over $5,000. So I think it’s between $11,000 and $12,000 — the program. Last time I looked it was.

For a lot of students, when they go to university — I know for my kids — 50 percent of the cost is the room and board. So this work-based training thing is such a great deal financially, as well, for the students, because they’re not paying room-and-board costs. They’re working that off. In some cases, they’re getting paid on top of the room-and-board costs, depending on how many hours they’re putting in. So it really cuts down the overall costs for the education.

There’s one other thing I forgot to mention. We’ve been in meetings this winter with school district 27, and I’m happy to say that we’re going to have our first three students coming in, in February, from the high schools under the dual-credit program. They’re going to be taking the business enterprise course, and they’re going to be getting credit for it in our program as well as their high school. That way, I believe, the school district pays their tuition. So we’re very, very excited about that.

D. Routley: That’s really cool to hear that about young people coming in. But what’s the oldest student you’ve had? I’m 57.

G. Watt: You’re older than me.

D. Routley: You wouldn’t believe how often I hear that.

G. Watt: Actually, I’m thinking that the oldest student in our program was probably about 47, 48. The youngest was 17.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Just one more question, Gillian. On your Dragons’ Den event, I’m thinking, in my area…. I’m Fraser-Nicola. I know that we have a number of properties owned by corporations, such as CN, CP, etc. I think that’s a perfect opportunity to look at partnering with those corporations to provide opportunity for young people on their properties. If you need any contacts or anything, your MLAs are really good access to those people and the opportunity, perhaps, for partnerships.

[10:55 a.m.]

G. Watt: That is so great. It would be really wonderful to invite them to the event, right? Who would I speak to, to get some of those contacts?

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Probably if you contacted Donna and myself and any other MLA that you think might be in the area where students could still access the program, we could get those names and numbers for you.

G. Watt: Wonderful. Thank you so much. That is such a great idea. I’m so excited about that. Can I get your contacts from Jennifer?

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Yup.

G. Watt: Okay, perfect.

A. Olsen: Very, very quickly. You really caught my attention with your comment at the very end here about high schools. We deal with, in agriculture, an aging population where Doug’s 57 is quite young, in my region. Getting the youth, the kids, involved….

In the city here, we’ve got academy programs where, actually, kids going into grade 9 can identify that they’re interested in a sport. It’s primarily sport-based.

I’m wondering if you have any intention of expanding that high school program to capture the imagination at a much younger age and develop through so that maybe most of this course work is done by the time they get to graduation level, especially in rural communities around the province, in rural high schools.

G. Watt: You know what? That’s a great idea, but I just need to move slowly and make sure that at each step we’re doing, we’re being successful before we go and bite off too much to chew. But that is a great idea. I think that would need to be done….

If any of you have contacts within a school district that you think this would apply to, I’m always open and our industry advisory board is always open to entertaining new ideas and new structures and things like that.

We have the framework built now. We may need to modify it here and there. But if it could fit with another model, for sure we would like to look at it. I think that phase would need to be based more on school district to school district.

A. Olsen: Some of us even know the Minister of Education.

G. Watt: Right.

That’s certainly something we could look at. I just want to make sure that we’re doing a good job with what we’ve got for a year or two, you know, bringing in the new students from grade 12 and ironing out any wrinkles in that program. Then that’s a great idea.

D. Routley: Boards have the ability to do board-authorized and -approved curricula, so you could possibly get the sponsorship of a teacher and a board to help development. But if you established in even a couple of districts, it should be pretty transportable.

G. Watt: Very cool, okay.

R. Leonard (Chair): Nothing like adding a little more to your plate.

Well, thank you very much for your time, for your presentation and for answering all of our many questions. I really appreciate you helping to expand our understanding of what we’re dealing with here.

G. Watt: Great. Just so everyone there knows — I don’t want you to get confused in the future — we are changing the name of our program to “sustainable agriculture and enterprise management.” That’s not going to come down here for probably a few months, because it has to go through all the approvals. But just if you see that name in the future, that’s still us.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. Thank you for that.

G. Watt: Okay. Thanks for your time.

R. Leonard (Chair): Does anybody need to do a little stretch before we go on to the next?

Okay. Take a five-minute break, recess for five minutes.

The committee recessed from 10:59 a.m. to 11:05 a.m.

[R. Leonard in the chair.]

R. Leonard (Chair): I’ll call the meeting back to order.

Next on our agenda we have another presentation to hear from the Ministry of Agriculture from Gavin Last, the executive director, and Brent Smith, the enforcement officer.

We really appreciate you coming today. Certainly, during our tour we heard questions around enforcement, and as we began our deliberations, we had questions. We’re really pleased that you’re here to help us get ourselves moving forward here.

I will turn it over to you now. Please present, and we’ll ask questions after, if that’s okay. Or are you okay to have questions thrown at you during?

Briefing by Ministry of Agriculture

G. Last: Absolutely. I’m Gavin Last. I’m the executive director of the food safety and inspection branch, and we also have today Brent Smith. I’ll get him to introduce himself.

B. Smith: Brent Smith. I’m currently the enforcement officer for the Ministry of Environment posted to Vernon, B.C. I’m here at the behest of the committee.

Interjection.

B. Smith: Sorry, Ministry of Agriculture, not Environment. That’s a prior life.

R. Leonard (Chair): I was wondering, and I thought: “Boy, there’s something I don’t know. How’d that sneak into the picture?”

G. Last: Formerly with Ministry of Environment.

We’re here today at the request of the committee, an opportunity for Brent to…. I understood that it was going to be mostly directed around questions to Brent, so we didn’t prepare anything specific. I did forward the job profile for the position earlier so that you could have a look at that.

We’re prepared to answer your questions today. If there was anything specific or in particular that you wanted us to explore or develop more fully, we’re happy to do that.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. I’ll just frame it, then. During our tour, of course we were looking at the differences between the As and Bs and the Ds and Es and, I guess, the challenges between the two ends of the spectrum. There is the perception out there around the Ds and Es, from one end of the spectrum, that there isn’t sufficient inspection happening. From the side of the Ds and Es, a lot of the presentations that we heard were around the trust being the driving factors, that people who are providers of the meat products are working very hard to make sure they’re delivering a good product to their customers, because if they don’t, that’s the end of their business.

Then the other question that came up was: “Well, it’s all well and good that everybody who’s presenting says they deliver a safe product.” There are challenges, and perhaps the enforcement officer would be able to tell you about some of the challenges that are out there in the province around the people that are not so high quality providers.

That’s sort of the framework. We’ll start with Jackie.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): I guess what we heard, also, is mostly, we believe, from people who are very caring and very aware of product quality, etc. The suggestion was perhaps we weren’t hearing from the people that the inspector sees and that it might be helpful to have an overview of what happens when there are concerns and what that might look like. Certainly, the people who we’ve seen in front of us seem to be extremely aware of quality and animal welfare and those kinds of things. Even the Ds and Es, who again, said: “It’s our name. It’s our business. It’s our farm.” But perhaps we’re not hearing from the people who we might have concerns about.

R. Leonard (Chair): Maybe you can start by giving us an overview of your role and then maybe move into that question.

[11:10 a.m.]

B. Smith: The authorities for the enforcement officer come under the Food Safety Act. Primarily, we do the en­force­ment for the class As and Bs, to backstop the inspectors. We also combat unlawful slaughter or unlicensed slaugh­ter and its associated unlawful sale of uninspected meat.

The meat inspection regulation under the Food Safety Act provides a list of offences. We investigate reported…. We gather information. We get complaints regarding uninspected meat sales and unlicensed slaughter. We go forward and do an investigation from there.

Some of the people that we have investigated and are currently investigating, I don’t believe you would have run into them in your travels around the province.

The primary concern is human health and safety. Number 2 is animal welfare. Number 3 is herd and flock health. With the As and Bs, the inspectors there, the CFIA, can report on any reportable diseases — anthrax outbreaks, Newcastle disease in poultry, etc. None of that oversight exists in the unlawful slaughter.

R. Leonard (Chair): What kinds of numbers are we talking about, in terms of your complaints that you have to investigate?

B. Smith: Numbers of files per year? I think the first year that the position started was 2015, and we had, roughly, going back in my memory, about 27 files. In 2016, we were at 33. In 2017, we were at, I think, 37 or 38. This year we’re on track to be in the mid-40s.

R. Leonard (Chair): So it’s rising.

B. Smith: The trend is upward, yes.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. What happens when you investigate and find fault? Is it a fining? What happens?

B. Smith: Generally, what we do is we attend and assess the situation, with the overall goal of having an assessment of the operator’s skill and desire and the facility to actually bring them into the legal fold and get them licensed, if there is any interest in that. We have had some success doing that. Probably at least three or four abattoirs that have started in the last three or four years were as a result of…. They were in the unlawful world, and we’ve got them transferred into the legal world.

Some of the operators have no desire to operate lawfully. Some of the numbers that are involved…. Typically a weekend operation. They’re running underground. They know the enforcement people typically aren’t working weekends, and that’s when they can get their staff. So a large place might be 15 to 20 large animals — hogs, lambs, beef — during a weekend. Those would be the year-round operations. Some of the operations might do 50 to 250 poultry per day, operating three or four days a week.

The largest beef production we’ve seen was about nine or ten animals per day. Then there are certain times of the year, particularly during some celebratory times, where you’ll have these seasonal spikes in the demand. We were aware of places that were doing up to 300 lambs in a three-day period.

R. Leonard (Chair): You’ve mentioned the unlicensed. Do you also inspect the Ds and Es who are going beyond their licence?

B. Smith: Currently the Ds and Es are within the purview of the health authorities, and we have not inspected a D or an E to date.

G. Last: Maybe a little context around that. That type of follow-up from an enforcement officer would not be around ensuring their compliance. We’re talking about ensuring their compliance with the requirements of the D and E licence. So it’s the operator compliance, which is the responsibility of the health authorities.

B. Smith: Yeah. I have done investigations regarding Ds and Es, but as a result of a complaint, not as a result of an inspection duty.

R. Leonard (Chair): Right.

I don’t see people putting up their hands. I’ll ask one question. Then I’ll get you to….

G. Last: Can I just suggest also…? Brent, you might want to mention tickets. It’s another enforcement tool that we’ve applied.

[11:15 a.m.]

B. Smith: Currently we use a graduated enforcement model, where you educate, perhaps issue a warning. We’ve got the authority to issue violation tickets for certain sections of the meat inspection regulation. There are legislative-based orders, and then there are judicial orders. We can request a judge to have an injunction against a place.

We’ve done a lot of work, especially in the last probably 16 or 18 months, with other enforcement agencies that have some authorization, such as bylaw control, SPCA, some of the health authorities, Ministry of Environment, RCMP.

Some of the operators, predominantly in the Lower Mainland, that are engaged in this unlawful activity are also engaged in other unlawful activities as well. It’s commodity-based. They see the livestock and the slaughter end as a commodity. It’s purely a cash crop that hasn’t been turned into cash yet. There’s no desire to further their farming knowledge or anything like that. It seems to be that all it is, is a financial gain, and that’s the reason that they’re operating.

G. Last: I think it was important to mention the collaborative approach with other agencies. We are working along with local governments and bylaw enforcement where concerns have been raised. That may be closer to some of the issues that you’re thinking of.

R. Leonard (Chair): Well, that just brought a flurry of interest.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): You’ve indicated that there’s an increase of files each year. Is your sense that you’re catching more people, more people are reporting due to a better understanding, or there’s just an increase in activity?

B. Smith: I think there’s an increase in awareness and a better reporting structure for us to get the information. I think we’ve also been more successful in developing contacts that are giving us the information regarding these places.

Are there more of them today than there were three years ago? I have no way of answering that. I think we’re just getting better at utilizing our contacts to find them.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Second question, the percent­age of files that are in the Lower Mainland versus the rest of B.C.

B. Smith: Without going through my records, I would say approximately 50 to 60 percent would be based in the Lower Mainland, with the rest of them scattered throughout the province.

M. Morris: Curious to see what your structure…. You talk about “we” all the time. One of the things that we heard from the folks around the province was that there are very few enforcement folks out there dealing with some of these issues here. Just give us an overview of what your office looks like — how many investigators you have and how long the average investigation takes. Do you have to do any surveillance, covert, just to try and get some of these undesirables out of the market?

B. Smith: It’s an order-in-council that authorizes certain staff within the meat inspection program to issue tickets. Currently that’s Executive Director Last, Operations Manager Noegel, the four meat inspectors, myself as the enforcement officer and the provincial veterinarian.

That being said, that’s more of a service of documents to date. There’s a certain amount of training and experience that goes into…. A ticket is no different than a form to information with regards to prosecution and rules of evidence and whatnot.

The other inspectors — I believe there are 43 or 44 meat inspectors throughout the province — are also what we would term as compliance personnel. If there are issues with a class A or B or they get enquiries from the general public, they can use their various tools to bring an A or B into compliance and pass that information on to the enforcement officer. But currently there is one enforcement officer, and that’s me.

[11:20 a.m.]

I. Paton: Brent, along the same lines, if you could just give us an idea…. The fact that there’s only one of you and it’s an awfully big province with a lot of backroads all over this province of people doing what they do…. What’s a typical week for you? Where’s your headquarters? Where’s your office? How much time do you spend around the province chasing down leads that you get from illegal activity?

B. Smith: Realistically, I would probably say one week a month on the road. It might be a day here, five days here, six days there or two days somewhere else.

Sorry. What was the first…?

I. Paton: Your office is in Abbotsford?

B. Smith: No, based in Vernon.

I. Paton: Vernon. Oh, okay. I think you said that.

B. Smith: I’m sure I missed that.

I. Paton: Then you get, obviously, leads from legitimate ranchers or people in the abattoir business or whatever that they think so-and-so down a gravel road 12 kilometres east of such-and-such has no licence whatsoever but that he’s killing game for people or that he’s killing hogs for the neighbours, or something like that. You would get tips like that?

B. Smith: I would get information like that. You’d assess the information as to its veracity, and then, you know, some of these files could be solved by simply calling the person. You get information that they’re doing this for a couple of friends and neighbours that they used to…. A quick phone call can sometimes alleviate that issue.

Other times it’s a long drive, and you’ve compiled your information. I tend to like to stockpile complaints so you can go down to the Lower Mainland or the Island for three or four days and have three or four files to look at rather than just attending immediately on one file. It’s a little more cost-effective to group them. It might involve surveillance, binoculars. It might involve coordination with other agencies, such as MyLaw. Then there are scheduling concerns in the summer. So these things take time to develop.

It might involve the use of unmarked vehicles or following somebody from where they’ve delivered their animals, picked up the meat, to see if there’s a restaurant involved. It can involve a lot of those things.

G. Last: Can I just add to that? I don’t want to create the impression that we throw up a wall when there’s anything to do with the D and E operations. Those do come to, through a complaint…. I think Brent said that, but I just want to emphasize that if there is a complaint…. There was a particular example of that, where a complaint came in about a particular E operation, I think it was. It appeared to the person making the complaint that they were doing much more business than they were licensed for, and there were people bringing the animals in to the operator, which is against the conditions of the licence.

Brent, I’ll let you finish the story.

B. Smith: Further to what Gavin said, in 2018, there was an allegation made against a class E in the Interior. What we did is get in touch with the ownership identification group and looked at all the….

Interjection.

B. Smith: Sorry. That’s the cattle ear tag, OII. They have a form 3 for transporting of beef. We received all the form 3s that went to that particular cut-and-wrap and class E shop. We contacted everybody from 2017 that brought a cow there and basically asked them the questions. What type of cow? Was a bull, a heifer? What was the branding on it? Was it killed on farm, or was it killed at the class E? That was the information that we were after. It proved to be unverified and unfounded. So the class E, to our knowledge, has not engaged in any unlawful activity, despite the allegation.

G. Last: The business had a class E licence for slaughter, which enables them to kill a limited amount of their own animals. They also had a cut-and-wrap business on the side. Through investigation, following up on the complaint determined that all of these 70 people who had brought, according to the OII, animals to that operation had brought them there already slaughtered for the cut-and-wrap business, which is perfectly legal.

There is follow-up with complaints around Ds and Es. We’re not saying that that’s something we don’t deal with.

R. Leonard (Chair): Do you want a follow-up?

[11:25 a.m.]

I. Paton: Thank you, Madam Chair. Just as a follow-up, in my past, I’ve had quite a bit of dealings with the Agricultural Land Commission. I know, out of frustration over the years, that as far as soil deposit permits, illegal filling, all these different things…. There are only, I think, four or five enforcement officers for the entire province of B.C. for the Agricultural Land Commission.

It sounds like you’re the only person dealing with these issues in B.C. In your opinion, are you able to stay on top of what’s happening, or do you feel that your department’s very understaffed and that you could use more people in the enforcement business?

B. Smith: I don’t think there’s a government agency out there that declares themselves adequately staffed and funded. But that sounds like a….

I. Paton: I mean, one person for the entire province. That’s a bit much.

B. Smith: There are capacity issues at certain times of the year, definitely. There are a few months of the year there where you have time to delve into these things. That’s more of a…. That’s above my pay grade, as they would say — those decisions.

R. Singh: You’ve partly answered my question. Mine was about the…. When we were doing the tour, there were some concerns about health authorities dealing with class D and Es and the Ministry of Agriculture not getting involved with it. But you have partly answered.

I wonder. Is there some kind of coordination between the two ministries? You talk about the complaints and then taking it on, but there is also some coordination, like when they are going and when they are…? I know they don’t inspect the places, but some kind of dialogue going on between the two departments.

B. Smith: We’ve definitely had information sessions and meetings with health authorities, sort of the informal meet-and-greet, and then case specifically, we have as well. So far, to date, if I need information from a health authority or they need information from me, there’s been a free exchange of information across there. There have been no barriers.

R. Singh: Okay, that’s good.

B. Smith: There is a clear delineation, though, between the roles and responsibilities in my legislative authorities to conduct work. There’s a definite dividing line there.

G. Last: Can I just add, though, that we’re dealing with five separate health authorities? So it’s six agencies. Each has a slightly different approach. But the communication and the collaboration with them is good.

R. Singh: It’s good. Thank you.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Brent, can I ask, in regards to files that you see, what percentage of those files would be a very real concern about the quality of meat that’s going into the market?

I guess I constantly ask at this committee: what is it that we’re trying to solve when we talk about abattoirs? From an enforcement perspective, when you hear from people in regards to a concern, how often is it about numbers? Is it about quality of…? I know that if people are doing it illegally, then we, of course, would have concerns about whether it’s clean, whether it’s done properly, etc.

As was pointed out to us many times during presentations, what are we trying to solve? Nobody has been able to share with us that there has been an issue in regards to tainted meat. Maybe we don’t know about it. Maybe you’re doing such a good job that it never comes to that.

I guess I would be interested, from your perspective, as to: do we put more people into enforcement because we’ve just been able to keep it on the edge, or are we doing a good job? Should we be putting some emphasis elsewhere?

B. Smith: As a percentage of the overall files, I could probably take you to five abattoirs that would convince you to be a vegan in no time. There are some legitimate human health and safety issues.

G. Last: These are unlawful operations.

B. Smith: These are unlicensed, unlawful operations.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): No D or E — nothing.

B. Smith: No D, E. No A, B. No inspector. Nothing.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): They just kill.

[11:30 a.m.]

B. Smith: Nothing. They pick up the animals cheap, usually at an auction. It’s all about price point. They will take the animals back to the farm, wait till they have enough orders, and then they’ll typically process them on a weekend. The processing can happen outdoors in a rainstorm tied to a fence post. Some of the animals are, we would say, compromised healthwise, which is why they were so cheap at the auction in the first place.

There are certainly animal welfare issues. There are also some other issues. They’ll pump them full of antibiotics to keep them alive until the slaughter date, and then there’s no withdrawal period. Somebody with an allergy to whatever they were using might have a reaction to it. A lot of times with these operations, their clientele are low socioeconomic, and they’re buying it because it’s the price point again. It’s the cheapest available meat.

A lot of times it’s the client that provides a certain percentage of the labour. I’ve watched four people cut up a cow into cubes in 35-degree heat on a piece of clear poly on the lawn. This stuff happens. Why that doesn’t translate into an outbreak of human health…. I think a lot of times the animals are cooked almost immediately so that it doesn’t have the time — and well cooked.

What our major concern is…. If you want to partake and if you want to buy animals and you’ve seen the quality of it, regardless of whether or not it’s lawful, that’s an individual choice. One of the major concerns is that it’s restaurants or corner stores that are also purchasing this, and it’s resold to the public. We haven’t been able to…. Well, we’ve had suspicions. We’ve had reports. We know that it happens. We haven’t been able to follow through and actually track that meat to that third-party vendor.

G. Last: Maybe another way to think about it is that we know the risk is there. The fact that it hasn’t manifested, that we’re aware of, doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s there.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you.

Jackie has a follow-up, and then it’s Adam’s turn and then Mike.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Just a follow-up. Following the food chain, do we not have any regulations in regard to what is auctioned? If somebody bought it at an auction, is there no inspection of the quality of product that somebody buys at an auction?

G. Last: Do you mean buying a live animal at auction?

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Yeah.

G. Last: Then it would be inspected as it goes through the slaughter process if it’s going through a licensed A or B abattoir.

B. Smith: Transport of an animal that would be compromised would be the responsibility of the CFIA. You can’t ship a cow with a broken leg. The actual quality of the animal — I’m not aware of any regulation other than the fact that if it’s got a reportable disease, people can identify. Obviously, if you did that knowingly, I’m sure there’s a CFIA regulation in there as well.

G. Last: BC SPCA would be responsible for the animal welfare aspects of the auction yard.

B. Smith: Regarding animal welfare. Animal welfare on farm is the responsibility of the SPCA. Animal welfare in transit would be the CFIA.

G. Last: Then once it gets to the slaughter establishment, our inspectors in Brentwood have authority at that point.

R. Leonard (Chair): But we’ve missed that piece of the auctions.

Adam?

A. Olsen: I’m just going to hold off. My questions are being partly answered here, but they’re changing. So I’m just going to leave it. It’s kind of evolving.

R. Leonard (Chair): We’ve still got some time.

Donna, we haven’t heard from you. Have you got any questions?

All right. We’ll go to Mike, then.

M. Morris: You know my background is in investigations, and listening to you speak about some of these operators that are accumulating livestock, those would be lengthy investigations, and they would be based on the bad guys’ timeline rather than yours.

[11:35 a.m.]

I see some issues here, and I’m just wondering how you address that. How do you conduct the surveillance and gather the information on some of these operators and shut them down just with yourself? Did you collaborate? Do you have special constables that you can hire once in a while or private investigators that you hire once in awhile to do the surveillance and set up on some of these operations to get them in the act? Because these are pretty in-depth types of investigations with some dire consequences if these guys get the product out on the market and people get sick as a result of that.

B. Smith: I’ve spent many a morning sitting there in a vehicle with a pair of binoculars from five till eight in the morning, and nothing has happened. But you try to narrow it down. You understand the guy is likely going to be operating on Thursdays and Saturdays. Those are his particular days, so those are the days that you’ll attend.

In the meantime, bylaw has been really good about it, in particular in Surrey. Because when we sat down with bylaw and we went through addresses and locations of our problem areas, it coincided with their problem areas as well. They get public complaints about activities going on and agricultural issues and parking of vehicles and non-ALR use and all this other stuff. So when we started to coordinate with bylaw, our success rate went way up because they could handle whether it was a simple business licence.

The other thing that they could do is…. A lot of these places the land itself is owned by a person who is not farming it. It’s an investment, and they’re waiting for the value to go up. In the meantime, they want to lease that property out for an agricultural activity to capitalize on that for tax purposes. The landowner owns the land. There’s a third party leasing a portion of the land and conducting an unlawful activity on it. However, it’s still reportable as farm income for the purposes of taxation.

When we got bylaw involved, bylaw in Surrey was explaining to me that they have to go after the landowner, not the lessee. And the landowner doesn’t want any problems with this, and once he’s aware of it, a lot of times he’ll evict the person.

Now, is that solving the problem or is it moving it? We haven’t ascertained that yet either. The places that we’ve had successfully shut down in Surrey, to date, have stayed shut down, and we haven’t seen them reopen in other areas. That doesn’t mean they haven’t.

G. Last: Also, I want to add that we haven’t contracted with any third parties to do any of this work. You suggested investigators, that sort of thing. We have been able to, on occasion, bring in a meat inspector who wasn’t scheduled to be in a plant to be a kind of expert witness, to be available. And we do have a program veterinarian who functions in the same regard, at times, for investigation to provide his expert perspective.

Collaboration has become almost day-to-day business I would say, not only with bylaw enforcement but SPCA and occasionally RCMP, as well, and other provincial government enforcement people.

M. Morris: I just want to follow up. You take some of these nefarious characters down for drug trafficking, and they disappear, and they’ll relocate somewhere else. You take somebody down for illegal gaming, they disappear and show up somewhere else, particularly if there are no prosecutions and follow-up. Prostitution — quell it in once place and it bubbles up in another spot.

The people that have nefarious intentions anyway, and everything is dealing with a commodity and price point and whatnot, are going to show up someplace else. So do you have an active surveillance program? When they disappear from one location, do you have any kind of a program that tracks them to see where they might show up in the next area at all?

B. Smith: I wouldn’t say we’ve got any, like an Anacapa program or something like that. We’re not utilizing that. I do utilize…. Basically, I keep track of them on a simple Google Earth program — have all my locations marked out.

[11:40 a.m.]

We do get active support from members of the agricultural community — A and B operators, auction operators, other people that attend auctions all the time. It’s a whole network of contacts, and a lot of times they’re calling us unaided or on their behalf, although sometimes we’re prompting as well. As far as an official tracking program or an intelligence officer or something like that, no. But we’re doing what we can.

A. Olsen: Recognizing that every ministry that has some enforcement would like more enforcement or more inspection capacity…. I recognize that. I’m still trying to get, I guess, an understanding of the scale and scope of your casework, just to get an understanding if…. You say that there are peaks and valleys in, say, a 12-month cycle.

Overall, are we in a situation where the file, the casework, is much too much for a single person? We’re in a situation where we have to make a recommendation, and I think we need to know if this file, the casework, is oppressive to the current resources that we have and we could use more.

I think the problem that we’re trying to solve here is, perhaps, ensuring to the best of everybody’s ability the health and safety of consumers, people who are consuming these products. That’s an important part of the work that we have to do. So I’m still trying to get from this an understanding as to whether or not you could use more resources, if the resourcing in the enforcement, the inspections is enough.

I’ll leave it at that now because the second question has slipped my mind. So I’ll do it as a follow-up.

B. Smith: I would say that I honestly don’t believe that we’re quite at capacity, but it’s rapidly approaching. There are some issues coming up in September with FAPCA, the new legislation, the farm classification act, the organics regulation.

G. Last: That’s in force now. It’s the enforcement of the organic labelling requirements that will become our re­spon­sibility as of September 1. So we are planning to bring in some more resources for that, but that’s going to be cumulative to what Brent’s already doing.

B. Smith: There are almost two components to what I’m doing. One of them is trying to build the structures that you need with an enforcement agency, with the goal of having it expandable — whether or not it actually expands is not my decision — and then actually doing the work as well. What we found is we made great progress in building the structures for the first couple or three years, and we’ve made less, but we’ve done more field work in the last couple of years. So as one goes up, it’s transferred in that way.

A. Olsen: Just as a follow-up, I’m wondering, in your opinion, what the most effective deterrent is. Is it the actual punishment once the person’s been…? What do you see as being the most effective deterrent? Is it the fact that you’re out there, there’s this network, and people understand that the chatter…? You know, you go to this auction, and there are people talking, and the fact that we don’t know who those people…. Or is it actually catching the people and then the punishment? What is the most effective deterrent from this really, I think, potentially dangerous behaviour?

B. Smith: I think the most effective deterrent is bringing people into compliance and getting them as part of the legal, licensed structure. To use an example, in Langley a few years ago, there was a fellow that was doing a specialty bird for restaurants — unlicensed, unlawful, a thousand a week, roughly. Gross revenues were about $750,000 a year. He has since opened up his own abattoir. He’s doing other people’s birds and is part of the legal, licensed regime now and expanding his flock as well.

[11:45 a.m.]

That would be probably our best success story to date. The most effective deterrent for somebody that is not going to or has no interest in becoming part of the licensed regime, to date, has been the multi-jurisdictional approach — with bylaw, SPCA, health authorities, Agriculture and Environment. That has been the most successful.

When they’re operating an unlawful slaughterhouse, they’re not disposing of their waste adequately. They’re operating against bylaws. They might be ALR concerns. There are all these other things that go with it, so the more people, the more agencies that we can bring in and coordinate….

We kind of do that by a priority system as well. We work on a matrix of what the human health and safety risk or the animal welfare risk is. Is it high, medium or low? And what’s the person’s willingness to comply? Is that high, medium or low. You sort of rank them: that this is the one that we have to target, and that’s the one that we’ve been going over multi-jurisdictionally. That’s had the best success to date. It’s not to say we won’t have a better tool next year. We’re just not aware of it right now.

G. Last: Maybe I can focus a little bit closer now that I have a general sense of kind of a common theme. It’s not a case of files that are building up that we can’t get to, at this point, that we know of — a huge problem that’s out there that we just don’t have the resources to address. I will say — and it’s a relatively new program — that the more effort, the more we learn and the more we see that is potentially out there. That’s reflected by the increase in the number of case files.

I guess from the beginning it’s been a case of we don’t know what we don’t know, and as we put more effort into it, we’re finding out more. As Brent says, at this time, we’re not looking at piles of case files that we can’t get to, but with one person, we could see that. We could anticipate that.

R. Leonard (Chair): I have a few questions. First of all, there are kind of two ends of the spectrum. You’ve got the nefarious characters who don’t care and flaunt the law. Then you have people…. The complaint that we were hearing was that if make too onerous restrictions on licences, people will go into the black market. That was particularly around the Ds and Es. I guess that begs the question of how much regulation is too much or not.

The second question. The issue of compliance didn’t just magically appear in 2015 when you started doing this. What happened before that?

B. Smith: I honestly don’t know what happened before that. I was with Ministry of Environment up until 2013.

R. Leonard (Chair): I’m looking at the presentation you gave us way back at the end of May, and I see that in 2014…. CFIA did a notice of service withdrawal in 2011. I guess the withdrawal happened in 2014. Was this a downloading of federal responsibility to provincial? Is that what happened?

G. Last: No, I wouldn’t describe it that way. The history of the provincial meat inspection, as I outlined in the presentation we did here initially, goes back to that point where CFIA was providing inspection services for the province for a fee.

They gave us notice, I think, in 2011, if I remember correctly, that they were going to be withdrawing that. They did the same in other provinces, where they were no longer going to be providing that service for the provinces for a fee, because they, presumably, didn’t think that it was good value for their services. Then the responsibility was the province’s, and they turned it back over to us — for that inspection, for the production of meat within the borders of the province.

[11:50 a.m.]

Now, going back to the question about compliance and enforcement, back to those days, I’m not sure what CFIA’s compliance and enforcement capacity was, but they certainly had inspection, and there would’ve been investigation authority related to the production of food, which they still have today.

We would have, at that time, still had a lot of the other agencies that are involved now. SPCA. BCCDC was part of this. The health authorities were part of it as well, but the Ministry of Agriculture wasn’t. So there would have been compliance and investigation. You’ve heard stories about even prior to that, before there was any regulation. There was just a lot of meat production going on that was unregulated. What the consequences of that were at the time I don’t think we’ll ever be able to say with accuracy.

I. Paton: Going back to the ‘80s and ‘90s, I used to be involved in McClary Stock Yards and livestock auction in Abbotsford. It seems to me there was a federal agency called health of animals that used to have a veterinarian that would check each animal as it came in. It would get run into a chute, and a veterinarian would actually check over that animal to see if there was any…. Maybe a blood draw for brucellosis, even a test on a milk cow for mastitis — things like that.

I’ve been out of the business for a while as far as the McClary Stock Yards. Do we still have any kind of inspectors in the auction yards such as Valley Auction in Vernon or McClary’s in Abbotsford or Kamloops? Is there any kind of provincial inspectors there to check?

What I’m getting at is that they used to actually turn down certain animals that arrived at the auction and say: “That cow is not getting sold to the public. That’s going to go straight to dog food or a rendering plant.” They wouldn’t allow it to go through the auction, obviously for the idea that you were saying: there are certain animals that are being purchased super cheaply because they’re really poor quality animals.

G. Last: Our inspectors are performing a similar function, I would say, at the slaughter establishment.

I. Paton: Rather than at the stockyard.

G. Last: They do an antemortem. If it’s come from a stockyard…. If there’s ever any question about the state of an animal and whether it’s humane or even safe for producers or operators to transport them, there is something called an emergency slaughter program that allows — with the approval of a veterinarian, who must be present — that the animal can be slaughtered either on farm or at a slaughter establishment without the presence of an inspector.

There are guidelines and forms and requirements for notification of CFIA to govern that kind of process in cases where animals are clearly…. There’s some question about their state and the humaneness of transporting. That would, I think, cover some of what you’re describing that may be going on at auction yards, but there’s no Ministry of Agriculture inspector at an auction yard.

I. Paton: Right. I think one of the problems is the fact that the provincial inspector can inspect that animal as it gets off the truck at the slaughterhouse at an A and B. But if some guy drives 50 kilometres from the backwoods and picks up two animals at the auction that are in very poor health, loads them in his truck and goes off to his place, those are uninspected, basically. Nobody has a look at those.

G. Last: I’m not as familiar with auction yards. Again, going back to the responsibilities for transport, which are federal, obviously they don’t have inspectors everywhere. Again, it would probably be on a complaint basis — similarly, I’m thinking, at auction yards as well.

[11:55 a.m.]

I. Paton: I’m sure that back in the day it was an expensive program to have a full-time veterinarian spending eight or ten hours a day at an auction yard inspecting animals.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Well, not being an animal expert like…. The discussion in that last question says to me there’s, perhaps, a point of inspection that might help keep animals that shouldn’t be eaten out of the auction process. So I’m looking at: where are there gaps, perhaps, that we could plug as we look at how animals are put through the process?

The other thing we’ve heard a lot about is that…. The As and Bs have inspectors there for kill days, etc. Everybody who talked to us about As and Bs really appreciated that and said that even though they were against that in the beginning, they wouldn’t think to go back.

Also, we had the health authority talk to us about their role, which is to make sure things are sterile and clean. They really don’t have expertise around animals, so they’re doing Ds and Es.

What we’ve heard many times is it would be helpful, even in the discussion now…. Well, the SPCA does the on farm. The federal agency does the travel. The As and Bs are provincial. The Ds and Es are the health authority. As a non-farmer, I’m thinking: “Wow.”

The request has been: why can’t we have one agency? It seems that Agriculture is where we should be talking about it. I assume that someone in Agriculture has had that discussion with…. It’s got to be thrown up, even in a staff room, about: “Wow. There are a lot of people involved in this.”

I just wondered if you had some thoughts that you could share with the committee in regards to…. I’m an outsider looking in and thinking: “Holy cow.”

A. Olsen: A lot has gone right.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Yeah, thank goodness. If I’m a lucky, nefarious person, I haven’t seen any of those guys while I get my cow that I want to….

How do we coordinate? How do we ensure the safety…? We have been very fortunate. Kudos to everybody who is part of that system. But is it a coordinated system, or are there places that we can improve it without making it too cumbersome for farmers and consumers?

G. Last: I guess I’d say I’m not surprised that that question or that perspective has become clear to the committee. Personally, I would have…. That’s one of the questions that I had hoped would rise to the surface.

As for answers, yeah, casually, there’s often…. It seems like a simple solution to say: “Let’s just make one agency responsible.” But the devil is always in the details, of course. Whether that is as practical…. Maybe there’s something in between — some slight shifts that can be made to make improvements.

R. Leonard (Chair): One last question for Brent. What qualifications do you bring to the job? I didn’t see your….

B. Smith: Specifically, with the Ministry of Agriculture, I was trained and qualified and worked as a provincial meat inspector for approximately 12 months before I was offered the position of the enforcement officer. Prior to that, I spent just over 20 years with the B.C. conservation officer service. Prior to that, I was with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans as a fisheries officer as well.

[12:00 p.m.]

R. Leonard (Chair): To become that meat inspector, what was the training for that for you? I sort of don’t know how you become qualified as a meat inspector. I’m looking at the differences between the environmental health officers, who have a certain set of talents and skills…. What do you bring in the meat inspection part of it?

B. Smith: I think it was about three and a half weeks of training full time in Abbotsford at the…. They had access to the animal health lab. It was put on by a recently retired veteran meat inspection supervisor with the B.C. meat inspection program. Most of the people involved, or a good portion of them, had been trained under the federal system as well and were seasonal CFIA meat inspectors that went into the provincial regime. It was lots of biology.

R. Leonard (Chair): So it is conceivable that the environmental health officers who are out there doing the facility inspection as opposed to the animal inspection could be trained up as inspectors.

B. Smith: As meat inspectors?

R. Leonard (Chair): To be equivalent to what the Ministry of Ag does right now. One of the challenges that we’re facing is the remoteness of a lot of these slaughters and how we can get inspection out to those more remote locations. Environmental health officers are out there doing a number of different things, and this is also on their plate. There has been some talk about that.

G. Last: We have a very comprehensive training program for inspectors and would never hesitate to make that material available. We have ongoing assessment, as well, as part of our ongoing training program. We have a number of resources that I think are really innovative in our program that would be always available.

R. Leonard (Chair): Great. Thank you. Obviously, you have an extra-special set of skills to bring to the enforcement part of it.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Just further to that, I’m trying to think logically about where we should land in regards to how we pull all these special skills together and provide a coordinated approach.

My concern, on the health authority side, was to hear that high risk got inspected once a year, medium risk and low risk once every five years. So they’re doing it off the side of their desks amongst all the other responsibilities.

Where in the priority should this be, if we did one agency or one ministry? What melds well to provide the kind of inspection we’re looking for without us setting up a brand-new agency and inundating every D and E that has never seen an inspector with a monthly visit, right? Where do you find that balance? I guess that’s the challenge that the committee will have to discuss.

G. Last: We’re certainly sensitive to striking the right balance, the compromise, and not being…. You know, that’s always the challenge with regulation: to get what you want out of it without, basically, putting people out of business. It’s definitely a challenge. What’s the right balance?

I would say that our inspectors have the right training and background. There’d be a slightly different kind of an inspection approach but not entirely different from what they do now. They’re not only looking carefully at animals for signs of concern but also at the facilities around them and how they’re being operated. So that kind of inspection is familiar to them.

[12:05 p.m.]

Again, it would be a matter of, perhaps during less busy times of the year…. Although those days are becoming less and less as the industry grows and the licensed establishments are getting busier throughout the year. In the early days of the program, there certainly were some slower days, during the depths of winter, when there would be an opportunity to do that kind of inspection.

R. Leonard (Chair): Any more questions?

Well, I think we’ve probably wrung everything out of you that we possibly can. I really appreciate you taking the time. We had a lot of questions, and you answered them very fully for us so that we have a really good idea now of that one piece that we really didn’t understand at all before this morning. So we really appreciate you coming in and helping us out.

G. Last: Thank you. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go without having prepared a presentation, but I thought that was what you were looking for and hoped that it would be effective.

There were a few topics that came up, and maybe I’ll follow up with Jennifer to see if you want me to develop some information further for you.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay.

Do you have any last comments you’d like to make, Brent?

B. Smith: No, other than thank you for having me, and I hope I’ve answered some of your questions and cleared the air a little bit on some of the other issues.

R. Leonard (Chair): I thank you very much for your service. We really appreciate the work that you do on the ground, and we hope that when we come up with recommendations, it’ll be supportive of your endeavours too.

Now we’ll recess for lunch for half an hour. Or how long?

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Let’s do half an hour.

R. Leonard (Chair): I agree. We’ll recess for half an hour and return.

The committee recessed from 12:06 p.m. to 12:44 p.m.

[R. Leonard in the chair.]

Deliberations

R. Leonard (Chair): All right. We’re back in session again with a motion to go in camera. Moved by Jackie, seconded by Mike.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 12:44 p.m. to 2:59 p.m.

[R. Leonard in the chair.]

R. Leonard (Chair): Moved by Adam, a motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 2:59 p.m.