Platform Summary for National Cattle Feeders’ Association – Federal Election 2021

The following outlines the platform commitments of interest to cattle feeders’ across Canada. (You can download the full .pdf here)

Liberals

Forward. For Everyone

• Reform economic immigration programs to expand pathways to Permanent Residence for temporary foreign workers and former international students through the Express Entry points system
• Build on the Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot and work with employers and communities across Canada to welcome 2,000 skilled refugees to fill labour shortages in in-demand sectors
• Establish a Trusted Employer system to streamline application process for Canadian companies hiring temporary foreign workers to fill labour shortages that cannot be filled by Canadian workers
• Develop a sector-specific Agricultural Labour Strategy with employers and unions to address persistent labour shortages
• Triple funding for cleantech on farms, including for renewable energy, precision agriculture, and energy efficiency
• Work with provinces, territories, and farmers— including Indigenous and young farmers—to update business risk management agriculture programs to fully integrate climate risk management, environmental practices, and climate readiness
• Increase support to farmers to develop and adopt agricultural management practices to reduce emissions, store carbon in healthy soil, and enhance resiliency. Cover cropping, rotational grazing and nitrogen management are all part of a green farming plan for Canada
• Require large national carriers to accelerate roll-out of wireless and high-speed internet in rural and northern Canada between now and 2025
• Launch a new comprehensive Asia-Pacific trade strategy
• Provide full and fair compensation with respect to the new NAFTA
• Establish new front-of-package labelling to promote healthy food choices
• Achieve Zero Plastic Waste by 2030. Require all plastic packaging contain 50%+ recycled content by 2030
• Strengthen Pest Control Products Act. Increase transparency when reassessing pesticides already on market and increase independent scientist input into decision-making. Invest in government and independent science, including on water and soil monitoring and cumulative effects of multiple pesticides on health and environment. Ensure impacts of pesticides on wildlife are fully considered. Support producers who choose alternative pest management approaches
• Gun control measures
  • Toughen our laws on banned assault weapons by making it mandatory for owners to either sell the firearm back to the government for destruction and fair compensation or have it rendered fully and permanently inoperable at government expense
  • Crack down on high-capacity magazines and require that long gun magazines capable of holding more than 5 rounds be permanently altered so that they can never hold more than 5 rounds
  • Ban the sale or transfer of magazines that could hold more than a legal number of bullets, regardless of how they were intended to be used by the manufacturer
  • Lifetime background checks to prevent those with a history of abuse against their spouse or partner from obtaining a firearms license
  • “Red flag” laws that would allow immediate removal of firearms if that person is a threat to themselves or others, particularly to their spouse or partner

Conservatives

Secure the Future

• Reforming Canada’s business risk management programs, with emphasis on AgriRecovery and AgriInvest
• Amending existing laws to allow livestock owners to use local abattoirs
• Implementing a food security strategy that includes redirecting some federal agricultural research funding to partnering with the private sector to develop methods to grow more crops in Canada year-round in greenhouses
• Implementing an Agriculture and AgriFood Labour Strategy
• Extending the “right-to-repair” for farm vehicles
• Building digital infrastructure to connect all Canadians to high-speed internet by 2025
• Pursue a Canada-Australia-New Zealand-United Kingdom (“CANZUK”) agreement
• Launch a historic trade promotion effort connecting all aspects of Canadian industries with international opportunities
• Protect family farms by ending unfair tax treatment
• Create pathways to permanence for those already living and working in Canada, so long as they are prepared to work hard, contribute to the growth and productivity of Canada
• Appointing a Minister of Rural Affairs to Cabinet
• Setting aside a portion of federal infrastructure funds for projects in rural areas
• Appoint a Minister Responsible for Red Tape Reduction
• Improving cost-benefit analysis of regulatory proposals
• Animate the full potential of the Canada-UK trade deal
• Repealing C-71 and the May 2020 order-in-council that banned some 1,500 makes and models of what the government describes as “military-grade weapons.” (NOTE: O’Toole has since backtracked on this statement – saying he would keep the ban on assault weapons and launch a public review of the firearm classification system)
• Adopting a grocery supply code to deal with retailers’ abusive pricing and contracting practices against farmers, producers, and processors
• Working towards greater harmonization of farm product regulations with trading partners, especially the United States
• Pledge to finalize compensation for supply managed processors within the party’s first 100 days in office to cover off concessions made in recent trade deals

NDP

Ready for Better

• Creating a Canadian Food Strategy (including food labelling and traceability) that will take a whole-of-government approach to addressing needs and priorities by investing in our agricultural communities, supporting young and new farmers, and taking steps to ensure that
  rural livelihoods are good and sustainable
• Fully protect supply management
• Immediately ban single-use plastics
• With farmers and communities to support biodiversity and to monitor and protect pollinator health
• Work with provinces to put in place a new deal for rural infrastructure programs
• Declare high-speed internet an essential service
• Promote sustainable land-management techniques and methods to reduce GHG emissions
• Help the sector access low carbon tools and technology, assist with adaptation to climate- induced weather changes as well as pests and invasive species
• Put in place a Food Waste Strategy
• Establish a pathway to permanent residency for workers from other countries who came to Canada during the pandemic to work in agriculture, caregiving and more
• Support more options for women to build careers in the trades and other non-traditional fields like agriculture, innovation, research and STEM

Bloc Quebecois

• Integration of newcomers by repatriating the Temporary Foreign Worker Program so that it better serves the needs of Quebec and making sufficient knowledge of French a condition for obtaining citizenship in Quebec
• Add a category to the Criminal Code with a precise definition of what constitutes an “assault weapon”. The buyback program must also be mandatory and ensure that the rights of sport hunters, who respect the rules, are respected
• Severely restrict handguns and significantly increase the resources available to customs officers and the RCMP in order to intercept more weapons at the border