Selkirk-Interlake-Eastman MP James Bezan organized a town hall a few weeks ago in Balmoral to gauge the state of agriculture in the area and gather input from farmers on how to improve the industry.
Bezan was joined by Alberta Conservative MP John Barlow (Foothills) at the Balmoral Community Hall where farmers, residents and municipal politicians sat down with the MPs to discuss issues such as agricultural exports within the U.S. tariff milieu, the veterinary crisis in the Interlake and farming succession.
The small gathering at the two-hour meeting on Nov. 29 brought big issues to the table and offered insights for the politicians to take back to Ottawa.
There have always been major troughs affecting Canadian agriculture. The BSE (mad cow disease) crisis about 20 years ago was one of them. The current trough is U.S. president Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs, which has “sharply reduced” Canadian agricultural exports to the U.S., with beef, pork and canola among the sectors hardest hit, according to researchers at Dalhousie, St. Thomas and Laval universities.
Touching on the issue of tariffs, Bezan said “we still ship a lot [of cattle] south and American packers need our animals to keep running full time.” Shipping Canadian cattle to Europe is difficult as European standards are used as “non-tariff trade barriers.”
There are two major meat processors in Canada — Cargill and JBS. With respect to Manitoba’s ability to slaughter its own cattle, Bezan said there’s progress. Although Manitoba has only one packer, that packer is increasing its capacity.
“We got one packer left in Manitoba run by Calvin Vaags [True North Foods, Manitoba’s only federally certified ruminant processing plant near Carman], and they’re expanding. They’re five days a week right now and they’re going to a double shift,” said Bezan. “So we do that have that option. They’re doing well. … Alberta has two big plants and Cargill still has a plant in Ontario, and that’s about it.”
Barlow said interprovincial trade barriers on processed meat were removed during the COVID pandemic to “move processed meat across provincial borders” and “we’ll be trying to do that again through legislation to make it permanent.” [Alberta] cattle producers “on the ground” want more competition.
“They’re not going to compete with Cargill and JBS; they want more options. We’ll see if that gives rebirth to [the industry] …,” said Barlow, who is the federal shadow minister for agriculture and agri-food. “This is [an opportunity] for us to move beef around interprovincial boundaries.”
Rockwood Reeve Wes Taplin and Coun. Neal Wirgau, who’s a cattle producer, expressed concerns about the future of farming as farmers and producers inch closer to retirement and the cost of farming has skyrocketed. Younger farmers just can’t afford to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to get into the industry. And fewer young people want to take over family farms when they look at the profitability of some sectors, such as cattle. The price and availability of land is also a challenge.
“It’s tough for producers to expand their cattle herds, and guys can’t afford to get into it. [After BSE, the industry] never came back. The guys were at an age in their life where it was easier to say goodbye,” said Taplin. “Things come in cycles and there was a cycle when everyone got out of cattle and went into grain and, now, I think they’re realizing they can’t have all their eggs in one basket. But it’s a heck of a thing to get back into [cattle]. For the younger farmer to come back into, it’s just about impossible.”
Barlow said they’re trying to come up with some ideas as to how “young guys can come in and start buying cows again.” There may be an opportunity to improve options through Farm Credit Canada, which provides financing.
One of the major challenges in the Interlake area is a shortage of veterinarians to take care of livestock.
“One of the things I think we’ve got to do is buy more seats for veterinary school,” said Wirgau.
At the recent Association of Manitoba Municipalities conference, Wirgau said he was talking with a counterpart from Alonsa who told him they have a fairly new vet clinic sitting empty because they cannot find a veterinarian.
“Can you blame them? You go work on a puppy or a kitty and you can charge $1,000,” said Wirgau, “or go do a caesarean on a cow in a cold barn for $500 and risk your life.”
In a briefing note from January 2024, the Manitoba Veterinary Medical Association (MVMA) said the province is at a “crisis” level with shortages of veterinarians and registered veterinary technologists (RVT).
“Based on a recent workforce survey, there are at least 68.2 full-time equivalent (FTE) veterinarian positions and 79.75 FTE RVT positions that remain unfilled and are needed to meet the current demand in the private clinic practice sector alone,” states the briefing note. “The MVMA asserts that the shortage of veterinary professionals is at crisis levels and that immediate action is required to ensure that Manitobans and their animals have reasonable access to veterinary care.”
Prospective vets have to leave Manitoba to train at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan or another veterinary college.
Barlow said the veterinarian situation across the country is “pretty much in a crisis.” And foreign trained veterinarians living in Canada are not being moved quickly enough through the system in order to make them eligible to practice.
“We meet with the deans of the vet colleges twice a year, and … the bottleneck is 1,000. They have 1,000 foreign trained vets that are in Canada and cannot get their credentials to operate in Canada,” said Barlow.
A 2023 briefing note from Saskatchewan’s veterinary college, which is the only English-language host site for the clinical proficiency exam (CPE) for foreign trained vets, says it can triple the number of qualified vets if it can obtain financial support to establish a national CPE testing centre with more capacity.
Barlow added that the opposition wants the Liberal government to keep the temporary foreign workers program’s agriculture stream going as it works and Canada needs “a reliable labour stream for food production.”
Bezan said there are issues with bringing in foreign workers to help with Canada’s agricultural issues, and they need to be addressed.
“The problem is all the students coming in here now aren’t students; they say they’re coming in as students. Our immigration system is broken,” said Bezan. “We’re talking about needing more teaching spots for veterinarians; you’ve got kids from other countries supposedly going into these [college, university] programs and they’re not. They’re taking up a spot that should have gone to someone else.”
