HANSARD

Printed and Published by Nova Scotia Hansard Reporting Services

Mr. John MacDonell (Chairman)

Hon. Barry Barnet

Mr. Patrick Dunn

Mr. Ernest Fage

Mr. Sterling Belliveau

Mr. Clarrie MacKinnon

Mr. Wayne Gaudet

Mr. Leo Glavine

Mr. Harold Theriault

In Attendance:

Ms. Mora Stevens

Legislative Committee Clerk

Wild Blueberry Producers Association of Nova Scotia

Mr. Ken MacPhee, President

Mr. Neil Erb, Vice-President

Mr. Dave Sangster, Executive Director

HALIFAX, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2007

STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES

1:00 P.M.

CHAIRMAN

Mr. John MacDonell

MR. CHAIRMAN: We're at 1:00 o'clock. I'll call the committee to order. I want to welcome the Wild Blueberry Producers Association of Nova Scotia. Welcome, gentlemen. The usual format, what we'll do is introduce the committee to you. Then the floor is yours. Please introduce yourself before you speak in the microphone, for Hansard. Generally we tend to give presenters whatever time they deem they need to make their presentation, and then there will be a question-and-answer period afterwards.

[The committee members introduced themselves.]

MR. CHAIRMAN: The floor is yours.

MR. KEN MACPHEE: My name is Ken MacPhee, President of WBPANS. I'd like to thank you, the Standing Committee on Resources for inviting us here today to participate in this dialogue on the wild blueberry industry in Nova Scotia. I would just like to digress for a moment. I'd like to tell you that I grew up in Upper Rawdon, Hants County, and I moved to Middle Sackville a few years later. I lived across the street, on the Lively Road, from the Honourable Barry Barnet. Of course in those days he was just a little boy, like my son. Who would have dreamed that we would be sitting here today in a meeting like this. I still reside in Sackville, but all my blueberry fields are in Cape Breton. Believe it or not, 50-odd years ago, when I was a youngster, I was hand raking blueberries in East Gore, in a field leased by Mr. Wells from Amherst. I guess there are a couple of members here who probably appreciate the blueberry industry, Mr. MacDonell from Hants East and the member for Pictou East.

To my left is our Vice-President, Neil Erb, and he comes from a blueberry family as well. His father, Curtis, was one of the blueberry pioneers in Parrsboro. To my far left is Dave Sangster, our Executive Director. I'll pass it over to Dave, unless you have a word to say, Neil.

MR. NEIL ERB: No, you introduced me. I'm pleased to be here today.

MR. DAVE SANGSTER: Thank you very much. Again, we're very pleased to be invited here today, any time we can have an opportunity to talk about the wild blueberry industry in Nova Scotia, that's a plus, because we think it's a positive industry with a lot that it contributes to our rural economy in this province. It's good to see some people around the table here who I've worked with, as well, in the past, in my past career in the Department of Agriculture, I don't know how many years, 25-plus-plus, probably, and a former minister of mine, Wayne Gaudet, and of course John MacDonell, we've worked together in the past, as well. I feel reasonably comfortable here in this setting, for sure.

My job here is to take you through some slides and maybe just give you a bit of a snapshot of the wild blueberry industry in Nova Scotia, and maybe give you some background so that, hopefully, at the end of the session here, you're briefed on the industry and will learn more about us, because I think that's important, this type of communication. They've got me set up here electronically, so all I have to do is push this mouse, and they said it works, so I'm counting on that, Mora. (Laughter) Here we go.

Again, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today. We'll get right into the slides. Now, when we looked at the state of the industry, there are three or four things that came to mind, really quickly. I think the first thing I want to mention is the strong market demand worldwide. This little wild blueberry that we grow here in Nova Scotia is processed and frozen, and it goes all over the world. It goes into Japan and Germany and the U.K. and France and the Netherlands, and we're looking at other opportunities in other countries as we speak, like China and India and Taiwan and so on. This is clearly an export commodity that we're talking about here.

The other thing is the strong field prices. Any time that we get good prices back to the producer level, that's important because it allows the producers and the industry to reinvest in those fields and in the production areas. Recently we've had very strong prices, to the tune of, last year, 85 cents a pound, I think is the given figure now, my colleagues here would agree with me, that's the going price. Indications are that the prices could get stronger because of the demand, really; the demand, for a number of reasons. Strong processing infrastructure, that is clearly so important in the wild blueberry industry. Ninety per cent of our product is frozen and sold as a frozen ingredient so we need a strong processing infrastructure and we have it.

You may already be aware that in Oxford we have the Oxford Frozen Foods, they have a plant there, they have a plant in Parrsboro and they sometimes do some freezing in

Hillaton, in Kings County in the Annapolis Valley. We also have Bud Weatherhead at Rainbow Farms and they have a strong processing infrastructure there as well. P.E.I. has a processing industry there, Wymans, a company out of Maine, has a processing plant and then Quebec has a number and also we're looking at the State of Maine as well, who have a number.

So processing, we're in pretty good shape and I just want to comment on that a little later on in the slides. Then we look at the health benefits. The health benefits, of course, this has been a real bonus, I guess you'd say to us, because blueberries are regarded as having the highest antioxidant content of any of the fruits and vegetables. Because of that position, that allows us to market blueberries in a place like Japan, where that is extremely important to the Japanese consumers.

So those are four things that come to mind right away. The other thing I haven't listed there but it is kind of unique to the blueberry industry and that is, blueberries are grown only in Atlantic Canada, in Quebec and in the State of Maine. So it is a very small area within the world. Therefore, it is unique in that commercially we're growing them in these areas and marketing them worldwide, as opposed to, say, apples or potatoes or other commodities that are grown in all corners of the world. So I think we enjoy that aspect of it as well.

Okay, how many people have seen this - the harvesters working, probably quite a number, and you're driving by in August and seeing the fields and this, of course, is homegrown technology, the blueberry harvester here, was developed really in Collingwood in Cumberland County by the Braggs. They have done a marvellous job really over the years in modifying this and adapting it to do the best job possible in the fields. So this is an extremely important piece of equipment to us. Here you see a single head and you see the blueberries in front of it. That's the way the blueberries should look in a good crop, you want to see lots of them there. Then you can see also in the background that clearly this is rural Nova Scotia we're talking about here, I mean this is one of the fields up around Folley Mountain in that area as well. So again, a picture of a single-headed harvester and we'll show you another one as well.

Now again, this is probably the second generation in the mechanical harvesters and here you can see a machine, three harvesters that are mounted on a John Deere tractor, there are three heads there if you look at the hydraulic arms, the booms, there are three heads. That can pick a lot of blueberries when there is a strong crop in the fields. When that moves across the fields a lot of blueberries come off and they come off well.

The other part of this slide is the yellow or orange bins there. These are the big bins and the recent technology, they're picking in these larger bins now, I guess, for convenience, they use less trays, for example, the smaller trays are 20 pounds and these, I think, hold something like 15 trays.

MR. ERB: They hold 350 pounds.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Is that a tray on the back of that truck, that yellow thing?

MR. SANGSTER: The big bins, yes. And they are filled and there is one in the foreground here, it has been filled with blueberries. Then there is a tractor with a front-end loader that would come and pick it up and put it on a flatbed and go off to the processing plant. So this is the latest in the technology in the blueberry industry.

Again, when we talk about the wild blueberry, and we talk to the Japanese and to our consumers, this is in the wild, you don't see many houses around these areas. This land would probably not be doing very much if it wasn't for growing wild blueberries, because it is pretty isolated, but these are important fields.

A few statistics; There are 1,000 producers in the province, we use that as our figure. We have 40,000 acres in production, 20,000 of that each year, because the crop is staggered, so if you had 100 acres yourself, you'd probably have 50 acres in production one year and 50 acres in production another year - 50 acres in production, 50 acres out of production - and then you would just reverse that the second year.

[1:15 p.m.]

Then we have a five-year average of 40 million pounds. That has climbed considerably over the years, and we'll talk about that in a minute. Then, this past year, our yields are down 3.6, 31 million pounds, below the five-year average, because this crop is weather-dependent. Like a lot of agriculture crops, you're depending on having the right weather conditions in order to get the job done.

We'll look at a few statistics here, showing the years 2000 to 2006 on the left, and then if you look at the middle column, it's the Nova Scotia production, and that's in millions of pounds, so that would be 41 million in 2000. Then the column on the far right is the combined wild production for the Atlantic Provinces, Quebec, and the State of Maine. It used to be that that far right column - that if we had close to 200 million pounds of wild blueberries everybody was very nervous, and this year we had 203 million pounds, you can see on the bottom there, 2006. We had 203 million pounds for 2006, and in fact our processors were saying that their crop was sold at Christmastime.

We basically were in a position last year and the year before, and I think the year we're going into, that we need to have more blueberries in Nova Scotia. So that's a nice position to be in, in the short term. We do not want to turn customers away. So that would be the disadvantage. We need to keep the production levels up.

The only thing I would say is in about 1956, if you look back at the data then, the provincial yield was 4 million pounds, and today the five-year average is 40 million pounds, so we've come quite a ways. Those are the statistics.

If you look at the pollination of the crop, the bloom period, this is critical in the wild blueberry industry. We need good weather during this pollination period, and this is usually the first and second week in June. This past year we didn't have that. We had some wet, cold weather, as you probably recall. Bees won't fly, and if the bees don't fly, you don't get the pollination, and if you don't get the pollination, you don't get the crop. So, it's very much related. This is a critical time. This year, if you could help us get some good weather in the first two weeks in June, we would appreciate that. Thank you. (Laughter)

We do use a lot of bees in the blueberry industry, and we work very closely with the Beekeepers Association, because they have the supply of bees and they rent them to the blueberry growers. We think we use somewhere in the neighbourhood of 18,000 hives of bees for the blueberry industry per year. As I say, they're rented.

This is our office in Debert. The association has their office in the Debert Industrial Park. If you're going from Truro to Amherst, the Exit 13 where the Tim Hortons is, that's where you would pull in. This is a relatively new building, three or four years old, I think, maybe. Five years old, perhaps, already. We have our offices in there, and then the upstairs part is where we have our boardroom, where the Board of Directors meet, and our President, Ken and Vice-President, Neil conduct the business of the association, which reflects the industry.

Now, we have educational days, we have field days, like a lot of other agriculture commodities, and the thing here is we have all of the equipment lined up here, whether it's harvesters or sprayers or some of the latest technologies in mowing equipment and so on. With these field days, we also have research plots and the growers are hearing the research results from the research scientists and observing some of those field plots as well. This is in Debert, and this was last year; we get excellent turnouts. We have 200 to 300 people coming out to these field days and that's good for an agriculture commodity. A lot of the industry is there, represented with those 200 to 300 people, so that's the other part of it.

We do some other things - pesticide certification courses. Of course pesticides - we're very conscious of being responsible with this whole pesticide agenda. This pesticide certification is a course, a requirement that goes through the Department of Environment and Labour and we are in compliance with it. Here we are teaching or having teaching sessions for some of the members so that they can get their licence and purchase pesticides and be able to apply them in a responsible way. This is an ongoing program that will be ongoing, I think, for a long time. Also, transportation of dangerous goods and WHMIS, we're also involved in those courses as well for some of our members.

We have a telephone information line where growers can phone in and get information from what we call the blight line. Again, we have scouts who are out looking at the plants during the crop seasons, to check to see whether there is blight there and, if it is there, how much is there. Is there enough there that it causes an infection period? All this information then is packaged on this phone system and is made available to the growers

throughout Nova Scotia. The idea, of course, is if there's not an infection period, you don't need to spray. That saves you money and it is also very responsible in terms of the pesticide arena.

Research is extremely important to this industry. If you had to single out one of the most important areas, or factors affecting the industry, research would be right on top. We have a research budget, a year ago, of $40,000 and that is seed money. We use that seed money, then, to lever, as shown in this slide, $4 million. So we think $40,000 will lever $4 million worth of project money. This year we've increased it to $50,000 and I think it will grow in the future more and more, because of the value that we see in the research of it - to try and be more efficient.

A number of the projects there that are involved - I guess this would be one here, this AIF project - I'll just mention it quickly. That is the Atlantic Innovation Fund, it is through ACOA. That's one that Oxford Frozen Foods and the Nova Scotia Agricultural College and ourselves are partners in. Again, we would have seed money into that project and I think that project, as I recall, is $1.5 million, so there are some big dollars there, just with our input.

Some of the challenges we have in the blueberry industry are at the production level. We need to grow more blueberries per unit area. We're looking to grow more on each field so that we can make it more profitable, more efficient, and two of the areas that we have to look at are weed control and these leaf diseases. We have experienced excellent weed control with clean fields for many, many years but some of the materials we're using, they get tired and we need to have some new tools in the toolbox. These days we need to have some of these what we call bio-pesticides that are non-chemical because that's the road, I think, that we're going down quite rapidly.

We're involved in promotion, of course, and we're involved in promotion at two levels. One is the international, because 90 per cent of our crop is processed and sold internationally, out of Canada, so that is one area. This lower icon here is the Wild Blueberry Association of North America - we'll talk about that a little bit in a minute. Then these five areas here are domestic promotion activities. You can see them there.

We're involved in health shows, expositions and telling the story of the blueberry, but also the blueberry patch. I don't know how many of you would know that there is a blueberry patch or an area in the Visitor Information Centre in Amherst and so that when the tourists arrive from New Brunswick and come into Nova Scotia, we intercept the traffic. When they get information on travelling and accommodations and so on, they also get information on the wild blueberry. We serve them wild blueberry ice-cream at times, and we sell them wild blueberry ice-cream and yogurt. They're able to sample blueberries at different times, and so on. We think this is important, because this is part of the experience of Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia's provincial berry, the wild blueberry.

The Blueberry Harvest Festival - let me just talk about that for a minute. That's going into its third year. We've run it for two years now. I grew up in the Annapolis Valley, and we had the Apple Blossom Festival there for I don't know how long, but a lot of years. All of a sudden one day we said, why don't we have a wild blueberry festival, it's a natural. So we started it in Cumberland and Colchester Counties, and got it going there. There's quite a bit of momentum going now, as you can appreciate. Getting these things started, you're starting from day one. It reaches out into a lot of the rural communities. Today we have the brochures, like this, that will be developed, and posters like this that you may have seen somewhere that describe the festival itself and the number of events that are associated with it.

Those are a couple of the promotional things. The other thing I should tell you about international promotion is that this year we increased our membership dues from $6 a ton, at the grower level, to $16 a ton. That's quite a significant increase. A lot of that new money is earmarked for international promotion. We want to maintain those strong markets, and we want to get strong prices back to the growers.

This is just another ad for the Blueberry Harvest Festival that you may have seen in the ChronicleHerald from time to time. I think this is an excellent opportunity actually for the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage in government to partner with this group, because, in my mind, there's a significant impact in terms of the effect that it has in attracting tourists and entertaining tourists while they're in the Province of Nova Scotia.

WBANA Canada - WBANA is the acronym for Wild Blueberry Association of North America - began in about 1980, and if you can believe it, this was an occasion when the Canadians sat around the same table with the Americans, and we talked about growing, promoting and selling wild blueberries, because they all realized that there's more mileage in terms of working together on this.

We've set up a number of agencies throughout the world. This slide at the top here shows some of this. This gentleman here is from the U.K., and there's where we have an agency in the United Kingdom, in England. This person is from Germany. This lady is from Toronto. We have a Japanese agency. So we work through the agencies, and it's mainly at the processor level.

This is the Japanese delegation that visited Nova Scotia last year and had an opportunity to actually set foot in a wild blueberry field, and actually raked wild blueberries. We have gone to Japan for years and years, and suddenly we decided, why don't we bring the Japanese here and let them experience the blueberry firsthand. So we had them here last year, and this delegation was made up - this person is from the agency in Japan, and that would be a key contact for the Oxford Frozen Food Group for the Rainbow Farms.

The rest of this group represents food journalists, they write about wild blueberries. There are some chefs there who use wild blueberries in their cuisine. And there's one person

who's a host for a food TV show. They were here for about a week to two weeks. Imagine, after that experience and that information, how they become ambassadors for us when they go back to Japan. So that's the idea here.

Just a couple of comments on the developments, and then I'll finish. Industry developments. Again, I want to mention the strong processing infrastructure. This is a picture at Oxford Frozen Foods. This is their plant no. 2, with a lot of money invested, state-of-the-art technology. It's so important to the wild blueberry industry to have this sort of infrastructure in place, for freezing the blueberries.

This is an aerial shot several years ago of Bud Weatherhead at Rainbow Farms and since then they have doubled their capacity there, their freezing and their storage capacity. Again, extremely important to our industry. I might have added too, that on the previous slide with the Oxford Frozen Foods plant, they have one line that will receive and freeze one million pounds of blueberries in a 24-hour period. It is just amazing to see the blueberries going up this belt, it just looks like a full highway of blue and it is big, big business.

Again, so fortunate to have the entrepreneurs and the creativity and the innovators, in terms of the machinery that we use in the fields, the two-headed harvester here and the mowers and so on. This is homegrown technology.

[1:30 p.m.]

We get a lot of good publicity, and I'm sure you've seen a lot of the articles in the paper over the last number of years; a lot of them related to health benefits. Here you can see a Stats Canada report on the top indicating that blueberries is positioning itself pretty strongly relative to other agricultural commodities across Canada. Van Dyke's international juice award that he won and that's really the association - the industry - and I think Nova Scotians are generally pretty proud of that. We have the juice that he took to Madrid, Spain a couple of years ago and he competed against the giants, the Gerbers and Pepsi-Cola and so on and this small plant, modest plant out of Caledonia, Queens County, won the Innovative Juice Award, so I think that speaks pretty highly of some of the product. A couple of other clippings here, too.

I'm going to quit about there, that's a bit of a snapshot. Hopefully it gave you a little background and you could talk quite a while on wild blueberries and probably I've talked too long now but it's a nice crop and a good one to be excited about. So I have my other colleagues here; President, Ken and Neil our Vice-President and myself, we'd be happy to entertain any questions.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well thank you very much. I really enjoyed the presentation. We've had one member join since you started so I'll let him introduce himself and then we'll go to our list which starts with Pat Dunn.

MR. CLARRIE MACKINNON: First, Mr. Chairman, I want to apologize, I was only across the street but like most politicians, when you get in a crowd you kind of lose track of time and I looked at my watch and I said, oh my goodness, I thought it was about quarter to, so I apologize to you. The time went very quickly over there.

I'm Clarrie MacKinnon, MLA for Pictou East and in saying that, I want to say that it is very important to my constituency because the East River Valley, from Bridgeville up to Sunnybrae, has a number of very good growers, and also Blue Mountain is in my riding as well, so both are good blueberry areas and hope to become even more progressive down the road a bit. Thank you very much and it is really a pleasure to have you here today and hear a good news story in price. I know the numbers are down but I'll turn it over to Pat there. Thank you.

MR. PATRICK DUNN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for the presentation. I didn't realize that your exports went to so many different areas. Just one question I have - I am curious, you mentioned on one screen dealing with production, I believe it was the year 2000, and in 2001 there was a significant drop. Was the weather the only determining factor in that major drop, in 2000-01? I think it went down 26 or 26.5.

MR. SANGSTER: I'll respond to that, I'm thinking back to that year and I guess it could be a number of things. I know we went through drought years there, but I'm wondering whether that extended itself into 2001. I remember it very clearly in 1999 and 2000 for sure and where we had the blueberries set, but we didn't get the moisture and that's usually not the case for Nova Scotia but in those days we did and that reduced the crop severely because the berries were sometimes cooking in the field because there was extreme heat and lack of soil moisture. That may have been part of it.

Again, the other thing that can really trigger that is winter-kill sometimes. If you get cold temperatures and you don't get snow load for coverage to insulate the plants. The other part of it, of course, as I mentioned earlier is the pollination, you need good weather then. It is usually a combination of things but sometimes - the past year, for example, the biggest issue, I would suggest, probably was the weather during pollination.

MR. DUNN: My second question - staying with production, you referred to Maine and Quebec. Our production numbers compared to, say, Maine or Quebec - are they similar? Less? More?

MR. SANGSTER: Anybody want to take a crack at it? Do you want me to go?

MR. MACPHEE: You probably know more about it than we do.

MR. SANGSTER: Well I'll start and if they disagree with me, they can jump in. (Laughter)

Maine has traditionally been the biggest producer in wild blueberries for a good number of years. I think their average production - this year they had roughly 75 million pounds. You can almost expect on average, 80 million pounds from the State of Maine. You can expect from us, on the average, 40 million pounds. Then Quebec is growing and it is hard to know what their average is right now because there is new acreage that is coming into production there. I would suggest it is probably 35 million to 40 million pounds, running close to where we are. Then there is New Brunswick that would have 18 to 20 million pounds and they are growing. They developed land in Tracadie and that's new land there. P.E.I. is something like 8 million pounds, I believe, in that neighbourhood. And Newfoundland - some berries in Newfoundland; it is much smaller but there are fields there and perhaps 1 million to 2 million would be their max. So I think that gives you a bit of perspective of the production from the other areas.

MR. DUNN: I have one last question and it is dealing with the - I assume that you are very concerned about what's happening in the States with the bee colonies, with the mite that is affecting the bees and so on.

MR. SANGSTER: Oh yes, yes.

MR. DUNN: Is there a possibility that that could continue to spread from Maine into Atlantic Canada?

MR. SANGSTER: Well, over the years there's two mites, there is the tracheal mite and what they call a varroa mite and both are serious pests. As I say, basically they inhabit the bee and they cut down on the efficiency of the bee, in terms of the bee being an effective pollinator, really. That has moved its way, I mean this goes back probably 10 years or more - maybe longer than that, perhaps 15. So Nova Scotia has always been very careful on that, in terms of trying to keep this mite out of Nova Scotia so that our bee colonies and bee populations are strong. It is really difficult to do it because over a period of time, it gets harder and harder because you get more opportunity, I suppose, or more chance for an infestation by these mites.

So yes, we are concerned, but you know we do have the honey bee but we also have the alfalfa leafcutter bee and I think we use, to some extent, the bumblebee. The wild bees, are a big, big factor year to year. So that's our native pollinators that we have, depending on the winter or the severity of the winter, that can move up or down. But yes, we are concerned about it, we definitely need a strong pollinating force in order to make this crop do what it should do.

MR. ERB: There's been a shortage of bees, too. I think some years there has been a shortage of bees from the beekeepers so I think more and more growers are starting to get into bees themselves, to ensure that they have them when they need them.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Mr. Dunn. Mr. MacKinnon.

MR. MACKINNON: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. In the list, I guess first this would be a comment which could, in fact, be turned into a question. The Wild Blueberry Harvest Festival - you indicated with one of the slides, a number of sites. The East River Community Development Association is a very aggressive organization that is promoting tourism in the East River Valley now. They're in the process of building four kiosks to attract tourists and so on. They're looking at every avenue possible to bring tourists into that East River Valley. I'm just wondering, if they were to make an overture, could they, in fact, get listed as a festival site, if they so wished? There are a number of good growers up there. I guess I will put that in the form of a question.

MR. ERB: Yes, we can certainly look into it. I know we want to promote the industry as much as possible.

MR. MACKINNON: So if I could get your cards, I would pass those along. I'm meeting with them next week, and I could pass the information along. It might be something that they might want to pursue. About 10 days ago, I met with one of the producers out in the East River Valley, and he was talking about the old days of the hand-pickers and the employment that was created by hand-picking, and the move to first-generation mechanical harvesters and second-generation mechanical harvesters and so on. I guess there are still some producers who involve a little bit of both technologies. Is that a truth? Are we still employing hand-pickers to some degree?

MR. ERB: Yes, I know, myself, every year - I work down here in Halifax for most of the year - I take a month's vacation and go up and work on the family farm in Parrsboro. That's one of my jobs, I look after the hand-harvesting crew. We have some rough ground, some side hills and so on that you can't get machinery on. So we hire in the vicinity of 30, 40, 50 hand-rakers, just about everybody we can get who wants to go rake blueberries, because it's very hard work. That's still being done, as well.

MR. MACKINNON: Another question, sort of in the modernization aspect of things, the high antioxidant level and so on, my wife has been fighting cancer for a year and a half, and not that she believes blueberry juice is going to be helpful to her to a great extent in her fight, but nevertheless, she and many other people believe that the blueberry - and I believe, as well. So I see a tremendous, tremendous potential for blueberries in the field of health. Having said that, in talking with this person a week and a half ago, he was stating that it's very hard to get involved with organic blueberries, because you just can't get the per-unit, the per-acre yield without pesticides. I know some of the pesticides that you're using are not all that severe, but is there such a thing as the possibility of getting involved with organic blueberries?

MR. ERB: Do you want to handle that, Dave?

MR. SANGSTER: First of all, yes, there is a real demand for organic produce, whether it's blueberries or fruit and vegetables. The challenge has always been to grow it in

such a way that you can make money, so that it's sustainable. We would very much like to have more organic fields in Nova Scotia. There are some, but they are few and far between. There are some, and we do sell some product. Organic means that it needs to be certified, you just can't use the word loosely. It has to have inspectors and a certification process that it goes through. There is a market there, a market share. We would like to capture that market share rather than somebody from away capturing it in our backyard. That's our attitude.

To grow them organically is a real challenge. If somebody is fortunate enough to have a field that's isolated, perhaps somewhere that has a low-weed population, and perhaps in a given year has low-insect and disease problems, then you can do quite a bit, but most fields don't define themselves that way. Yes, there's an interest, and we would like to be able to do that.

[1:45 p.m.]

I do know that Jim Burgess in Musquodoboit - not Musquodoboit . . .

MR. MACPHEE: Glenmore.

MR. SANGSTER: Glenmore, thank you - he has a new, fresh pack operation there that's HACCP certified and has all the bells and whistles, and he's doing an excellent job. I do know that he does deal with some organic berries, but the percentage is quite low. Having said that, though, the antioxidant content of wild blueberries is high, regardless of whether it's organic or inorganic, it's still a high content.

It's interesting because this whole area, I'm learning about it year by year, but there's a whole medical team out of the United States that meets with Agriculture Canada, researchers, processors, but the medical profession, they come together in what they call a Wild Blueberry Health Summit in Bar Harbor, Maine. They have been doing that for quite a few years, and they basically feed off each other, I guess, in terms of the research projects and the research that's necessary to do, in order to drive this whole health benefit agenda. So there's real progress being made there and that's pretty exciting for us because if it's helpful, then I think we all want to be in a position to enjoy it.

MR. MACKINNON: Well, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to keep the mic for about half an hour with these distinguished guests . . .

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, you can't. (Laughter)

MR. MACKINNON: One final quick question, do you, in fact, have membership from the East River Valley and from Blue Mountain?

MR. MACPHEE: Oh, yes. Every grower in Nova Scotia is a member of our association, by the fact that when they sell the berries there are dues taken off them.

MR. MACKINNON: Okay, that leads to a couple more questions. (Laughter)

MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, thank you, Mr. MacKinnon. Mr. Glavine.

MR. LEO GLAVINE: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you very much for being here today. Of course, Clarrie used up a lot of his time with his introduction, I didn't know where he was going with that. (Laughter)

Probably I shouldn't bring up this area, I guess, but just for perhaps the committee's benefit here, what are the differences with highbush blueberries, the cultivated, and the wild blueberry? In my part of the Annapolis Valley, highbush blueberries are pretty significant and growing, so what would be one of the differences with that?

MR. SANGSTER: Well again, I'm familiar, too, with some of those plantings in the Annapolis Valley - the Kidstons come to mind right away; they're a big player and they do an excellent job. The berry is bigger, the flavour is different than the wild blueberry. I'm just pointing out differences here, I guess, that's your question. I think for cooking and so on and using it in muffins and pancakes and that sort of thing, the wild blueberry seems to be a preference.

Another difference is that the highbush or the cultivated blueberry is sold, to a large extent, fresh. I think Kidstons perhaps sells all of theirs fresh. I stand to be corrected, but if not all of it, a high percentage of it, well into the 90 per cents, and that's typical of highbush blueberries. The growth habits of it are different. It's a different product.

We have, through this WBANA group, this Wild Blueberry Association of North America, at times, and particularly years ago, distinguished ourselves as much as we could from the cultivated blueberry. More recently it seems that the mindset is that look, blueberries are good for you and it doesn't matter, so we really don't need to take that road. So I think the case has been more that we're the blueberry family, rather than the wild versus the cultivated.

MR. GLAVINE: I was just wondering, especially along the lines that one of the major benefits of the blueberry, of course, has been its antioxidant, its medical and related values there, and I just wondered if there was a difference in the wild versus the cultivated berry.

MR. SANGSTER: That's a good question. That has arisen before, that question, for sure. The wild blueberry - as you look across a field of wild blueberries, there's so much genetic difference, there's a real gene-pool difference in the clones and the time they bloom, the time they mature, the size of the berry, the colour of the berry, a lot of different genetic variation. Our samples, when we test the antioxidant, are composite samples. That's at random. So they'll take samples from Nova Scotia, samples from New Brunswick, Quebec, Maine, and it's a composite sample, and then they'll test the antioxidant content of those berries.

The highbush blueberry growers have a whole lot of different varieties, Jersey Bell, Jersey Blue, a whole group of them, and there are newer ones than that. They tend to, from their perspective, select the cultivar, the variety that would have the highest antioxidant, and they would put that forward as their position, whereas ours is more of a random sampling.

MR. GLAVINE: In terms of adding more acreage to wild blueberries, is that a possibility? A lot of people have the concept that they're there, this is an area that is prolific in the production of wild blueberries. Can you advance the acreage, again from a grower's point of view?

MR. MACPHEE: Yes. Just backing up a second, about the difference between the wild and the cultivated, the wild grows naturally and the cultivated is planted. The wild blueberry, we have a biennial crop, in other words we prune, it's a sprout year, and the second year is the fruit year, where the cultivated blueberry or the highbush, they have a crop every year. So that's different.

Now, getting back to expanding wild blueberry fields, I think most - I don't know about most, but there are a lot of growers that are expanding their fields. Now, if you ever drive the Cobequid Pass highway, just before you get to the toll station, you can look off to the left and see where the forest is being cut down. They're bringing in land that has blueberry plants on it, and once it gets cleared and the sun gets at it, they'll expand. Myself, I've been expanding blueberry fields in Cape Breton for the last 12 years.

I bring in 30 to 50 new acres every year. Going back, that might entail cutting logs and pulpwood and clearing old farms that were - when I say old farms, they're not farms now, they're forestry, but they were old homesteads, on the mountains, of the settlers years ago. Amazingly, I have three or four properties like that, that within six years of cutting, I have 50 per cent plant coverage which warrants picking, but then you can take another property that has basically nothing on it except plants and say, I'll get some plants really soon. You might work at it 15 or 20 years, and it's still not in a position that warrants harvesting.

But to get back to expanding the base, one of the problems - well, it's not a problem, but it's kind of a bug in our bonnet in eastern Nova Scotia - Guysborough, Antigonish and Cape Breton - is that the Crown has a lot of property there, and we, as blueberry growers, don't seem to be able to get our hands on that land to develop blueberry land. There's a lot of developable land that the Crown owns. Now whether that's government policy, or whether it's DNR local personnel who think it's their mandate to exclude every use from those Crown lands except forestry, I don't know.

MR. GLAVINE: As part of that process of expanding, is it totally a wild generation or regeneration process? Is there actually some physical movement of plants to open areas?

MR. MACPHEE: Well, they grow naturally, so they have to be there when you start, but the clones will expand, they'll grow. If you have a bare spot, over time it fills in. I don't know if that answers . . .

MR. GLAVINE: That's fine, that's where I was wanting to go with that.

In terms of, yes, it has now been historically a period here of good prices per pound for blueberries and 90 per cent, as you said in your overview, are shipped frozen, to be added to other products and so on. Are we developing an added-value industry here in Nova Scotia? We need to be looking at ways in which we can get more than 85 cents a pound, if you wish. I was just wondering where that's going, since it seems to be quite in its infancy from how you described it earlier.

MR. SANGSTER: Well, I'll start and then maybe Neil can add something. I guess the traffic flow of it has really been internationally to freeze the product and to send it international to further value add, because it's used in many ways in various countries - you can imagine, Japan versus Germany and so on. So that seems to capture the larger part of it.

Yes, we have sat down and thought from time to time if we should be doing more value-added type work here in Nova Scotia with this wild blueberry. There are examples, Van Dyke's blueberry juice that we have is an excellent one and that's growing. We have Sarsfield using wild blueberries in their pies in the Annapolis Valley, so that's a good example. Jost makes wine out of blueberries, and some others. You've sampled it, it's not too bad either, and in fact some of it's very good - the more you sample it, the better it gets, I find. I don't know if we brought any samples. (Laughter)

Then we have the jams and jellies that have been made for quite awhile, but there's more room for development there. Chocolates, there's another one. If you are familiar with the chocolates that they make, those are very good. Oftentimes you'll see those used at weddings, on a table that the guests are sitting at, so that's a nice touch. Syrups and juices and, of course, the blueberry muffins that Tim Hortons has, they use wild blueberries in those. So they're there and I think if there was more pressure on the system, and there could be in time because the markets, we're going to compete against other commodities, we're going to compete against highbush, sour cherries, we're going to compete against other products on the world table. Then that will probably move us in that direction more aggressively.

We're doing quite a few things and you just have to add them all up and there was even somebody making dog biscuits out of blueberries, with the high antioxidant content. I know I have a Labrador retriever and he would like them, but you have to be careful that you don't get your hand and the biscuit too close to his mouth, because he can ingest those quite quickly. (Laughter)

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. Mr. Gaudet.

MR. WAYNE GAUDET: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to start off by saying you had an excellent presentation, Dave. Looking at your handout indicating the wild blueberry crop contributes about $60 million to our provincial economy. In your presentation you mentioned there are about 1,000 producers, you mentioned a number of processing plants, you talked about the Bragg enterprise with these harvesters, so I'm just curious, do we have a sense, or a better sense, in terms of how many direct or indirect jobs the blueberry industry is creating in Nova Scotia?

MR. SANGSTER: That's a figure that I need to get, that we all need to have. I saw some press coverage, I think on an announcement at Bragg's where they were talking about 500 or 550 employees at that plant, and then during the blueberry season having another 400 or 500 involved. So that's one figure from that one source. Of course, there are a lot of other areas where there would be employment as well. I don't have a good figure on that. I need one, and I need to get it, we need to get hold of that in the near future. That's the challenge for us to come up with, and I think we can do that. It's just a matter of sitting down and looking at the whole industry and the different components of it.

[2:00 p.m.]

The figure that we used for $60 million, basically what we've done there is taken the $30 million for the farm-gate value and doubled that at the process, the same for the processing level. I think that figure is very modest, but it's one that I can stand behind. I think it's higher than that. Again, we need to do a little more research and involve more than just ourselves, the processors and the whole industry, to come up with some good figures on that.

MR. GAUDET: I want to turn over to the market. You've indicated in your presentation that we export about 90 per cent of our wild blueberry crop. I suspect if the crop was more, we'd probably be exporting more. I'm curious, looking at the local market, obviously there needs to be more work done here on the ground to try to promote our own crop to Nova Scotians. I'm just curious, why is only 10 per cent of our crop, basically, sold locally? Is there more money in exporting, or less interest to buy blueberries?

MR. SANGSTER: Let me start by saying that fresh berries are sold in Nova Scotia, and that would account for a significant part. I think there's probably 1 million pounds of fresh blueberries that are sold each year through these fresh-pack operators, so that puts a lot of blueberries - there might be 1.5 million, but there's at least 1 million pounds that are sold fresh. There's one portion of it. I guess you'd have to say that the others get into those value-added products that we enjoy throughout the year, whether it's juice, pancakes or pies or muffins or whatever. We consume some of our crop that way.

It's still a challenge. There was a time when people bought blueberries and put them in their freezer in little tubs, and that's still good for perhaps some of the seniors, maybe that's a better-sized package. But I know in our household, it's common for us to put 10-pound boxes in our freezer and use them a lot more. I think there's more of that being done.

Of course the trick then is to be able to get those berries and have them available to Nova Scotia consumers. We need to work harder at that, because we have all these wild blueberries and we don't want to send them all away. We want Nova Scotians to enjoy them, too.

MR. GAUDET: I want to finish off with - Leo mentioned the production - can blueberries grow anywhere in Nova Scotia? In your presentation you talked about the right weather conditions. I understand when you have fog and rain, it certainly doesn't help the crop. I'm just curious, can they grow anywhere in Nova Scotia, or do we have to be away from wind and water and rain and so forth?

MR. ERB: I think they can grow in just about any area of the province. Right now they're grown in small pockets just about everywhere. Maybe some counties don't have as many, like Kings County or wherever. Blueberries grow in acidic soil, low pH soil. Typically down the Valley, it's very fertile land. That's the type of soil that's not conducive. Of course forestry land, land that's cleared out from forests, that land is typically acidic soil. That and rundown farms, farms that have land that hasn't been farmed for many years, typically the soil becomes acidic, and it's conducive for blueberries to grow and spread. A lot of the blueberry land we have are fields that weren't farmed for many, many years and they grew up in blueberries.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Barnet.

HON. BARRY BARNET: Mr. Chairman, I guess that was one of the things I was going to ask about. I did see the map that you provided, showing where blueberries currently are grown. I was kind of curious as to whether it was a micro-climate that may have caused that or it is just simply the fact that that is where people started growing blueberries - I shouldn't say cultivating blueberries - harvesting blueberries in this case. So they can grow anywhere pretty much?

MR. SANGSTER: Blueberries are grown, I guess, really when you look at this placemat here and the map, you can see that Colchester and Cumberland Counties have historically had, I guess, the lion's share of the production - I'm not sure why that is. I mean, it goes back in time, perhaps there were more fields that were available then. Blueberries are grown - it is a native plant and so it is indigenous to the province, it grows all over the province. The reason you wouldn't see it in the Annapolis Valley so much is the floor of the Annapolis Valley is in apples and vegetables and all sorts of other crops. As Neil has said, too, the pH is not quite what you would want there either.

I think we're still discovering areas in the province where you can grow wild blueberries and they could be developed and managed. So basically they're grown throughout the province, but in some areas the concentration is much larger.

MR. BARNET: I know they're grown in my community and I know we don't want to compete with Oxford to be the blueberry capital of Nova Scotia or of the world, for that

matter. We happen to be the bungalow and split entry capital now, so we'll have to stick our own sign up.

The single most important thing I think that I'd like to talk about, and primarily as a result of my Cabinet responsibilities as the Minister of Health Promotion and Protection, is the health benefits with respect to wild blueberries and blueberries for that matter. Your flyer outlines a number of things, we know we've heard a great deal about anti-aging, about the impact on Alzheimer's and cancer as well, I guess one of the things I'd like to know is whether or not there has ever been any work or research to determine how to extract the properties of blueberries that have health benefits and use that in other food products.

If you look at, as an example, the omega-3 fatty acids being extracted from fish and being used in bread and pastry - you name it - it is pretty much injected now into any manner of food because of its positive health impact, is there a way and has there been any research done to see if that can happen, particularly with blueberries, because then what you would end up with is not just simply selling the product itself, but selling it as a byproduct to produce other things.

MR. SANGSTER: An excellent question, I'm not sure I have a good answer for it, other than we would want to move in that direction. I think there is some movement in that direction. We do have basically - I guess, I'll call it the expert, the world expert in Kentville at the Agricultural Research Station and that's Dr. Willi Kalt. She is part of that medical team I mentioned earlier that operates out of the United States, sits on that, has gone to Japan, has talked about health benefits and has been in front of our annual meetings and our field days and so on. She is the one who is closer to that sort of chemistry you are mentioning than anybody that I know of. Whether she has extracted those compounds and placed them in some other form of, I guess food consumption is what you're - is that what you're thinking of? Either in a pill or in something that you can consume, that would benefit humans. I'm not sure, I suspect there has been some work done on that but I don't know at what level but it is a direction to move in.

MR. BARNET: It would seem to me that it would mesh with what we now call the new Nova Scotia and that is a Nova Scotia that is investing in research and innovation. Yesterday I attended the announcement of a multi-million dollar research grant that was awarded to Dalhousie University. The total contribution from a variety of countries is $160 million and the idea was to do research on our oceans and fish, based here in Halifax, done around the world.

It would seem to me, with our natural advantage, the fact that we have a good supply of the blueberries here, we have people like research scientist Dr. Ivar Mendez, who heads up the Brain Repair Centre here, that there should be some kind of mesh between the health community, the university - Dalhousie University and/or others - and the industry, to look at ways we can maximize the benefit and export not just the blueberries but the expertise around what blueberries do for people and how you can incorporate that in your diet and your

daily life. To me, this would be one of those things that I would say, if there was some work with the universities, they would look at this as a positive opportunity to go out and seek out that research funding.

We know that Nova Scotia doesn't get its share of research funding, primarily because the researchers just don't go and ask for it. To me, I could see some tremendous opportunity coming in that regard. My goal, as the Minister of Health Promotion and Protection, is to make Nova Scotia the healthiest province in the country. We can do that right here by doing the right kind of research, having the evidence, selling the product and including it in things like the Canada Food Guide, and I know blueberries are an important part of the new Canada Food Guide as well.

So from my perspective - I think to help this industry - that's one of the directions that we need to focus together, both the industry and the government and the post-secondary side of government as well.

MR. SANGSTER: Definitely we support those initiatives and I think there is some collaboration now, I know that this person I mentioned, Dr. Willi Kalt, does have some projects with Dalhousie University but I'm not sure to what extent and certainly there is much more room for activity there, research.

MR. BARNET: I'll close by saying my only disappointment is the fact that there was no wild blueberry grunt brought as samples, so that we could take your word for what you said. (Laughter) That's okay, maybe there's another opportunity where we can go to your head office on a road trip and experience some of that, maybe later in the summer this year, right?

MR. ERB: We brought some juice today for you. (Laughter)

MR. BARNET: Okay.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Mr. Barnet. Sterling Belliveau.

MR. STERLING BELLIVEAU: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's easy to want to jump in on that, but I do want to thank you for your presentation. As a young boy in the early 1960s I believe I picked my share of blueberries - hand picked them, not raked them. In my community there was always somewhere between 10 and 15 cents for a quart of blueberries. One particular gentleman would always pay you above the going rate, 25 cents, but most days, I have to confess, I did not reach the point of sale, I always ended up eating them myself. (Laughter) So I am a true fan of this particular product and each year, for the last few years - my birthday is in August and from my mother-in-law, I get a pie and it is made of that particular product.

One of the things that you just simply may have overlooked is that blueberries are not only in grunt but also in pancakes. That is something else, another product. I remember, as a young child, my mother stewing blueberries. This was always part of our diet in the winter months. I just wonder, thinking as all of the other colleagues have spoken, is this part of our tradition now? Do we have this in our diets, as we move away from our traditional diets or beliefs?

It was interesting in your presentation, you talked about the berries are basically sold by Christmas, if my notes are right here. I was interested in that because this product to me, there's a health part of it that everybody's kind of buying into. I also noted that you talk about how you used to take $6 away, now you're asking for $16. To me, it raises a question because there's a lot of opportunities there; there is a lot of room for growth. I see potential for seasonal employment.

I guess I'm getting back in a roundabout way to the question of potential growth areas and it does look like this industry is centrally located in the central portions of Nova Scotia and, excuse me for this, but I've always promoted the Southwest Shore as the banana belt of Nova Scotia but unfortunately, Mother Nature has thrown a curve ball at South West Nova in the last three weeks and we've had a heavy snowfall so I'm not going to use that line for another three weeks.

[2:15 p.m.]

The point I'm trying to make here is that I think there are some climates that we can have some of this industry in southwest Nova Scotia, in the central portions of Shelburne and Yarmouth Counties; there is some activity there now around Kentville. Is it just because we haven't done it? Is there potential? I'll get back to your question, your comment about how our product is basically sold by Christmas and there is a big gap between then and July, when they come on line again. Is there room for extra growth in this particular industry, getting more crops out there?

MR. MACPHEE: Well, I guess Case Van Dyk, he's down in your area, Caledonia, Queens - I guess you're Shelburne but sometimes the hindrance of developing land may be that it's really rough and rocky and it would be cost prohibitive to develop an acre, compared to what you would get out of it.

Talking about supply, five years ago they put me on the Promotion Committee and our chairperson was always saying she couldn't find frozen blueberries in the stores. That was true that first year because she had me running into every Sobeys and Superstore in Halifax, trying to find blueberries, and I couldn't find them. A year later, they were there for a while but then they disappeared and I can't tell you in the last year or so, or whether they're there now but I'm quite sure they're there now but going back five or six years, they were not there, like you say, early winter.

I think maybe one of the problems back in those days was the containers they put them in; probably Oxford Frozen Foods wasn't geared up to put them in those containers, like you see in the Superstores, but then they do have them now in the stores. I believe Sobeys have them and the Superstores have them, too - I forget what they call them - no brand, but the blueberries are there. So I don't know if I answered your question or not but yes, there's a problem there. There's a period of time during the season that you can't get blueberries unless you go out and buy quite a bit, August or September, and put them in your own deep freeze.

MR. BELLIVEAU: I guess the point I was trying to make is that our parents had a technique of preserving these berries and they stewed them or whatever - a recipe.

MR. MACPHEE: I think we've lost that.

MR. BELLIVEAU: Well that's the point I'm trying to make here. Is there something that we need to promote this way of life or diet for Nova Scotians? Is that something that we need to do some research on, trying to get blueberries in that six months in the wintertime?

MR. SANGSTER: Well, I did mention that we were sold out at Christmastime and that's a fact. That hasn't always been the case, obviously, but that's the case recently, which is good for the market because it creates strong markets and strong demand and better prices. and that's what makes an industry sustainable. So that's the good part about it.

Maybe this comes back to a value-added product that we need to develop and have available 12 months of the year to address the health issues and the consumer, while at the same time providing on a 12-month basis for Nova Scotians. It is, in fact, on the frozen end; it's there, if you could buy frozen berries all year-round. You can put them in smoothies, and that's the other thing, the minute you start altering or heating them or cooking with them, you do lose some of the antioxidant value, and that's been proven.

But if you take them frozen, it's the next best thing to fresh, in terms of high antioxidant content. So when you make a smoothie in the morning and you put the blueberries in there and the yogurt and the orange juice and whatever, and you turn on the blender, you have a pretty rich antioxidant mix because you haven't altered it, you haven't cooked it, you haven't heated it. So that's one way of doing it. Maybe if we just had more frozen blueberries available to us all year-round, and then let the consumer run with that, or maybe we need to develop some of these stewed blueberry recipes and so on that existed previously that we don't seem to enjoy now as much as we do the frozen.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Theriault.

MR. HAROLD THERIAULT: Thank you for your presentation. I, too, enjoy blueberries. The Minister of Health Promotion and Protection spoke a while ago about looking for ways for better health promotion in Nova Scotia. A study has just found that if

we had a half-hour nap in the afternoon, we could reduce our heart attacks, our heart disease by 30 per cent. Maybe with a bowl of blueberries, and having that, we could reduce it by 50 per cent. That might be worth looking into for this province. I'd enjoy that. I think a lot of people would.

I would like to touch on this industry for a minute. I didn't know too much about the blueberry industry until today. It sounds like quite a good industry, a lot of million dollars for this province, and you're sitting here today promoting it. I can remember back in the fishery, years back, the fisheries was starting to be promoted, we were all free and wild berry pickers then, too. Today, we're not wild berry pickers anymore, because we over-promoted it, and I guess we lost our way with it or the management lost its way with it.

Is anything set up with the government for any regulation in this industry? Are we just going ahead here, looking for markets and clearing the land off, going to plant blueberries everywhere we can in Nova Scotia? It's something we have to be careful of, isn't it? Or, you have to be careful of?

MR. SANGSTER: The industry, in a sense, regulates itself, in terms of supply and demand. Yes, we've reached out to the international community, worldwide, and created this interest in our wild blueberry. That has basically accelerated it. If we didn't have that market, then we would be talking a lot of different directions here. Nova Scotia would have to be consuming, as well as Canadians, many more blueberries, and perhaps we would even be more aggressive in the American market, with their 300 people that they have.

I think the thing is, it's not a supply-management program; it's not like dairy or poultry where the supply of the product is managed. It's free enterprise. It's driven by demand, worldwide and domestically. You can't just plant them. It takes a long time to get into this. We couldn't double our acreage in the next two or three years, we couldn't do that. It's a long-term thing. Ken, Neil and I have had these discussions, and probably if you're looking at a piece of blueberry land, you should look at it in 10 years' time, saying can I get that land to do what it should be doing in 10 years. In some cases you can, in some cases you can't, it's going to take longer. I don't know how many years you've been at some of your fields, but a long time, maybe 15, 20 years. I think it's going to regulate itself that way.

At one point we thought we could collect the seed from these blueberries; we'd grow these little seedlings and we'd plant them. Well, we did a great job growing the little seedlings and the greenhouse part of it. When we put them in the field, we lost total control. It is just amazing that this thing is that hardy, grows all over Nova Scotia and we don't have the - we just can't make it work.

The first thought was, in some fields there are bare spots so why don't we take this seed, grow these seedlings and plant them in those bare spots. We would fill our fields in and that makes the field more efficient for all kinds of different reasons. We struggled with that and we still struggle with that. Today it is not the technique you would use, we'd sooner go

in there and use mulchers or something and allow the plants under these underground rhizomes to move into these areas and so on.

So it's not an easy thing to do, to get the acreage increased and the production increased in the immediate future.

MR. THERIAULT: So you don't see that you'll ever overgrow the demand?

MR. SANGSTER: I think the bigger factor will be the competitive products that we're competing against. Highbush blueberries are right in there because if the Chinese decided to grow highbush blueberries - and that's just one country, it could be others as well - and get into that aggressively and master that, then that highbush blueberry would increase its volume and could become a more competitive product, particularly if they can do it most cost-effectively.

So I think that's the bigger problem here, the competition from other products. We have to be price sensitive because if you get the price too high for wild blueberries and you can make a pie with highbush blueberries or sour cherries or something else, I mean you know what is going to happen - consumers are consumer-driven but yet we do have some advantages with the wild blueberry and the health benefits is one part of it, so that is certainly driving the agenda.

MR. THERIAULT: You said wild blueberries only grow in Atlantic Canada, in some parts, and some parts of Quebec and in Maine. How come - I mean there are other climates around where the earth and the soil must have the same acidity? How come, do you know that, do you know why?

MR. SANGSTER: There's a good question. Saskatchewan, for example, northern Saskatchewan, I know, has blueberries grow there and for some reason they haven't just been able to move in and commercially develop these fields and this wild blueberry product in those areas and yet we know it grows there.

We know it grows in Quebec and in northern Quebec, in Tracadie, and we know they're making great strides and we also know that there are temperature variations there, up and down, so that some years of the temperatures, if they don't have a spring frost during bloom, they are probably going to have a good crop and they did last year, but we also know they have a track record of when the weather is against them the temperatures are low, it can regulate that crop and drop it dramatically. I can show you figures in Quebec where it has gone from probably 20 million pounds of berries to 60 to 70 million pounds and that's a big, big variation. We haven't experienced that much variation in this province.

MR. THERIAULT: You would think though, in Europe - below the 65 degree line in Europe - pretty much the same climate, the same land, the same temperatures. Isn't it weird that it would just be in this area?

MR. ERB: Actually over in Russia there, in certain parts of Europe, there is a berry that is quite similar to the blueberry, the bilberry, but different.

In Newfoundland, speaking about berries that are only grown in certain parts, in Newfoundland they have the bakeapple berry and as far as I know, that's the only place that it grows, over there, so I guess there are certain fruits that are only grown in specific areas, for some reasons - climate, soil conditions or whatever.

MR. THERIAULT: Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay. Well thank you, Mr. Theriault. Before we start the second round I think I'm going to let the Chair ask a few questions.

I want to say thanks very much for your presentation, I really enjoyed it. I certainly am aware of Rainbow Farms and the Blois' in Gore and my brother has a small acreage in Cape Breton in Glencoe, so I probably know maybe more than I might otherwise have known if I didn't have a brother doing that. I have to say when the member for Clare, Mr. Gaudet, talked about the 20 per cent, 25 per cent consumed locally, is that an accurate number for our production, 25 per cent consumed locally? (Interruption) It's 10 per cent. If you had 40 million pounds, it's 10 per cent of 40 million pounds. That seems like a lot of blueberries to me.

[2:30 p.m.]

I have a small flock of Suffolk sheep. I think last year there were somewhere like 6,800 lambs killed in the province. So, at 1 million people, at 100 pounds a lamb, and if you took out the bone and whatever you could actually eat, and there's not much bone in blueberries, but it would work out to about 500,000 pounds a lamb, I figure, roughly. So 500,000 pounds of lamb is half a pound per person in Nova Scotia. I think blueberries are doing quite a bit better per person than lamb.

MR. BARNET: That's because of me, I eat no lamb and lots of blueberries. (Laughter)

MR. CHAIRMAN: This also brings me to the honourable minister's comments. There's nothing handicapping the province from putting some money into research and development of blueberries and lots of other things. We have an excellent research facility at the Agricultural College in Truro, and it is partnered with Dalhousie University now. I would say that certainly anybody wanting to try to promote or investigate the health benefits and how to market that - that's definitely a place the province has access to.

In talking with one of the people in the blueberry industry in my area, he kind of indicated that he thought that as far as the market was concerned, there really wasn't much difference between a highbush and a wild blueberry. That when people were looking - and

certainly this may be more in terms of the Japanese market or other markets - but if they're looking for blueberries, basically in their view they're all blueberries. I'm just wondering, the 85 cents a pound, is that basically what the highbush people would accept because that's where the market stands, or would there actually be a decisive difference in price? Would they not get that, because they're not wild, or would it be better?

I know last winter was particularly good for highbush blueberry plants. They really had a good yield this year. But this Spring wasn't great for lowbush or wild blueberries. In the blueberry world, as far as people buying blueberries, they've pretty well lumped them together?

MR. SANGSTER: There are a lot of people who don't know the difference between a wild blueberry and a cultivated, highbush blueberry - you'd be amazed - but they do know that blueberries are good for you. So, there's more work to be done, I think, there. Maybe we've been more successful internationally in creating that awareness of the wild blueberry, because perhaps we're more aggressive there, although there are highbush blueberries that are sold in Japan, too. My sense is that they're probably more aware of the wild blueberry, and maybe that's because of our marketing and our promotion, our promotional-type programs, I don't know.

Price-wise, you're dealing with two different approaches here. A lot of those blueberries that are grown in the Annapolis Valley on highbush are packaged in smaller consumer containers, clam packs, you can see through, those sorts of packs. Then they're put into master cartons, and then those master cartons are put on a truck and they're trucked into Boston or New York and into the Eastern Seaboard, and a lot of them are sold there.

So there are different costs involved and more costs, I'd suggest, so they would need to demand a pretty good price, a premium price, and that's dealing with it on a fresh basis.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I'm curious about the slide you had on the research budget, and you had $40,000 would leverage $4 million. I was wondering who the partners were or what represents the $4 million, where does that come from?

MR. SANGSTER: We have a number of projects. There was one big one there I mentioned at $1.5 million, so we would have something like $20,000 a year, roughly, into that for five years. So we think that being a partner in there, as industry money on the table from our producers, drives that $1.5 million and gets all the research done under that money. Then we would also have research chairs that we've developed at the Agricultural College. In some cases we put money into the research project, in some cases we are the direct applicant. We have an entomology research chair, we want to hire an entomologist to bring them in and to work on wild blueberries and to deal with all of the insect challenges that we have, and to create new products and different ways of controlling the insects other than using pesticides - moving away from that as fast as we can, but realizing the speed bumps or the barriers along the way.

So that project, I think, is - and I don't have the figures right in front of me here, but it's something like almost $500,000 over a period of five years and we have money on the table for that. We've also been able to get money through Agri-Futures, which is run by the Federation of Agriculture, a committee, some of the Department of Agriculture assistance programs, Technology Development is one. Then there's one called ACAAF now, and it always challenges me to come up with the names behind that (Interruption) Yes.

It's the family of those Agri-Futures. We call it Agri-Futures in Nova Scotia - P.E.I. calls it something else - and it's money that has been allocated to the provinces. We've been able to - wild blueberries - go into Quebec and get some of their ACAAF money on the table, Nova Scotia has put ACAAF money on the table, New Brunswick has put ACAAF money on the table, P.E.I., and Nova Scotia. I guess those are the partners - anybody that's in the wild blueberry business, growing wild blueberries.

So all that money has come in, but it has been the direct result of our seed money on that front application to do that. There's another $500,000, so now we're at $2 million. Then we have a number of other examples there, too, that I could go on.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Is some of it private money that comes in that you can lever through this program, or is it all federal-provincial?

MR. SANGSTER: Well, the private money would be the money that comes through our association from our members, so that's the dues structure that we have.

MR. CHAIRMAN: That would still be your $40,000 basically that's levering . . .

MR. SANGSTER: That's part of the $40,000, yes.

MR. CHAIRMAN: The questions around the bees, I think when you're coming across the Tantramar Marsh or when you're entering Nova Scotia, there's a sign there about importing bees into Nova Scotia. It would seem to me that there are - certainly if people want to expand their hives, they're going to need queens to do that. So where do you get them? My impression is that you can't get them out of the States, so are they European? How is it that bee producers can expand their hives and get queens?

MR. SANGSTER: Well, for quite a number of years the queens were imported and the packaged bees were imported from Australia and New Zealand for many years, and I guess there's still - I'm not right up on this right now, but I know that they still do some of that. So probably that's where they're bringing the majority of the queens in, rather than from an area where there's risk of contamination.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Now you mentioned something about an entomology chair, I think. So is that your only access to an entomologist? The province doesn't have an

entomologist with the Department of Agriculture anymore, I don't think. Would that be the only way or the simplest way to get expertise in that regard?

MR. SANGSTER: I think what we have found ourselves in is the province has certainly stepped back in terms of the research and extension, and I'm fully aware of that one. Agriculture Canada, we're losing some positions, research scientist positions there. So we've had to take the lead here and basically create these research chairs and establish them at the Agricultural College. At the present time, we have an entomology research chair, a machinery systems chair - I think we call it - and then we have another post-doc on plant diseases, and so on. Then we have one on general plant physiology at the Agricultural College. So our success has been to build those, and those people would become the key people in their respective areas to do the research and to do the extension - some of the extension - but to get their results into the industry. The association has to play a key role in that, to make sure that happens, the tech transfer part of it.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. I don't want the members of the committee to think the chairman is hogging the Chair. I have quite a short second list. I want the members to know we still have a few minutes if they have questions, but the first person on the second go-round is Mr. MacKinnon.

MR. MACKINNON: I appreciate the second shot here. If I could have two relatively quick questions. A comment was made about northern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. I'd like to zero in on that in relationship to Crown land and the difficulties in obtaining Crown land. I look at Stora Enso, Scandinavian-owned, and Neenah Paper, owned by United States interests - I'm not taking a shot at them whatsoever - and then small producers of wild blueberries having difficulty getting Crown land. I'm the Natural Resources Critic for the Official Opposition, and I'd like to hear a little bit more about the chronological efforts that have been made, or how aggressive have your overtures been to get this Crown land that you speak of having difficulty with?

MR. MACPHEE: In eastern Nova Scotia, in Cape Breton, Stora Enso supposedly has the lease on all these Crown lands, so I guess you go to the Department of Natural Resources and then they have to go back to Stora, so we're told, and have to get their permission to lease these lands. I can understand, maybe, if they have a 1,000-acre block, why they wouldn't like a 20-acre or 30-acre blueberry grower in the middle of their forest. I don't know how aggressive - I can speak for myself. I've listened to some of the other growers in my area and I don't know how aggressive they've been, but I know they're pretty - well, I better watch my words here - they're not very happy with the reception they're getting.

I've dealt with Stora Enso myself, trying to trade land, even offered them as high as 30 acres for one acre, and it's just no go. It's very difficult. I guess it comes to the point after awhile, it's so frustrating, you just walk away from it. We shouldn't be, because if you harvest the old cat spruce every 50 or 60 years and you get 20 cord to the acre - and I don't know what the stumpage fee is, it's $15 maybe - that's $300 the Crown gets for 60 years of

service. If you turned around and made a blueberry field, after five or six years you'd get 3,000 pounds to the acre, and if you got 50 cents a pound, that would be $1,500. If the Crown wants 5 per cent or 10 per cent, and you get that every second year, it's about 1,500 per cent more after a 50- or 60-year span.

MR. MACKINNON: I think maybe we can make a case for this at a later date, but one final question, if I may. Certainly the situation in relationship to, say, lobsters, I know that maybe one or two lobsters may be sold off a wharf somewhere without being recorded - and I think the Department of Fisheries and Oceans actually makes a little bit of an allowance in their statistics - but how accurate are the total production figures? There is a levy involved, and I'm sure that almost all blueberry operators are as honest as the lobster fish harvesters and so on, so I'm just wondering, are there field-level purchases that may not be recorded for your levy purposes and may not show up in your production figures?

[2:45 p.m.]

MR. MACPHEE: They're very minimal. This is something that we discuss at the board level. We get numbers from CFIA, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. They have numbers. We always compare their numbers to ours, and they're very close. We might be out, I don't know, 1 per cent or 2 per cent. That's about all we're ever out. We don't know if their numbers are correct either, because we have no way of verifying their numbers. We feel that our numbers are 98 per cent to 99.9 per cent accurate. I'd be happy to discuss that issue at a later date.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Glavine.

MR. GLAVINE: In 2003, Nova Scotia produced about 57 million pounds and about half of that this year. When you produced the 57 million, there was no problem with markets during that year. When I take a look over the past seven or eight years, around 200 million has been that total figure, if you wish, for the eastern provinces. Is Maine included in that as well?

MR. SANGSTER: Yes.

MR. GLAVINE: Do you have any kind of collaborative market - for example, Nova Scotia was down this year because of weather conditions, but obviously the figure went up in other areas. Do you have any kind of working relationship that if one part of the eastern States or provinces can't provide, the others will fill in? How does that work out?

MR. SANGSTER: I think that's where WBANA plays a role. Around the WBANA table, you have all the processors sitting around that table. Processors are the ones that are freezing and selling the berries on the world market. Now, with the new structure, you also have the associations, the primary producers that are sitting around the table, as well. Yes, you can actually have a high year in Nova Scotia on that 57.3 million and a low year

elsewhere. It's all weather related, really. We're so dependent - we have all this technology, and we're doing a tremendous job, but the weather can override technology pretty quickly if you don't get the right conditions. I think that's why there are variations there. The 200 million is clearly a target now, and even when somebody is off or down from their expected five-year averages and another area is up, we still seem to arrive at 200 million.

Now, the question is, the day that everybody has the big bumper crop, how much pressure can the system stand? It's like anything, we don't want to double - we don't want to go from 200 million to 400 million in one year, or we're going to have a lot of blueberries. The question is, could we ever sell that many? It would be more realistic to go from 200 million maybe to 240 million, 250 million, and then to build those markets and go from 240 million or 250 million to 260 million or 270 million, that kind of thing. I think that's what we've been doing, actually, through the promotional efforts.

MR. GLAVINE: Very quickly, certainly it has been an industry that has been a bright spot in Nova Scotia agriculture, there's no question about that, and along with that potential bumper crop from every province. What would be your biggest concern of going forward and looking down the road 10 years for this industry?

MR. SANGSTER: That's an excellent question. I should let my colleagues - I have my own thoughts on it, but I should let my own colleagues jump in a bit.

MR. ERB: I think one of the biggest challenges would be competing fruits, the highbush blueberry, as well as some other fruits, as well as the cherry and so on. That's going to be one of the challenges, because the highbush blueberries can be planted and grown around the world. So with a strong demand, a worldwide demand for blueberries, private enterprise is going to dictate, there are going to be more growers jumping on the bandwagon around the world, the United States and so on. So if the highbush blueberry is grown extensively and the yield increases drastically over the next few years, it's going to create downward pressures on the price of the blueberries in general. So that could probably be one of the biggest challenges.

MR. GLAVINE: Thank you very much.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Barnet, you wanted a question?

MR. BARNET: Just a quick comment and then a question, I guess. First of all, with respect to the chairman's concerns or assertions about research funding, the Nova Scotia Research and Innovation Trust is a well-funded trust that is available to Nova Scotia universities for projects like this. I know there are millions of dollars that sit in that trust that are to be expended for this type of stuff.

In addition to that, though, I guess the big one is the Canadian Research Foundation, which is funded nationally and is now in its 10^th year, which is expected to be renewed again

for an additional 10 years, which I believe is $1 billion, or maybe even more, in terms of research money, nationally, I think. These are opportunities that the industry and government can work together and along with our university partners, to see if we can flush out those benefits that we can turn into real profit and money for blueberry growers here in Nova Scotia.

My question, though, and it may sound like a bit of an odd one, is around bears and the bear population. I don't know what the bears are like in rural Nova Scotia, but I know what they're like in urban Nova Scotia and we had a real problem this year. Is that a problem for blueberry growers and is it a problem in the operations you're involved with?

MR. ERB: It is, it's becoming an increasing problem. I think the bear population is way up, is increasing. We did have a bear project on the go the last couple of years, to try to - trying some different bear bait or whatever. It's almost something like peanut butter that's put out around the fields. I guess if the bears eat it, it's very distasteful for them and it discourages them.

The bears not only eat the blueberries, but they also do extensive damage to the beehives as well. They are a real problem for the growers. A lot of these blueberry fields are anywhere from a few acres to upwards of 100 acres, so you really can't put fences around the fields to keep the bears and the wild animals out.

MR. BARNET: When they're not getting your beehives and blueberries, they're getting our green bins, so I guess we have to do something about those bears. Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Mr. Barnet. I'm going to give you a minute to sum up whatever comments you may want. I want to make a correction. When I spoke about the 6,800 lambs at 100 pounds, that's a live lamb - we don't eat the wool and everything else, too - so we're looking at 40 to 50 pounds dressed weight, so that would bring people's consumption down to about one-quarter of a pound per person in Nova Scotia. So I envy you with the volume of berries that people eat.

Anyway, if you'd like to have some closing comments, we'd be really pleased to hear them and just to tell the committee, we have at least one item to deal with before you leave today.

MR. MACPHEE: Well, I guess I'd like to thank you for the opportunity of coming and promoting our industry. It's nice to hear the questions that people who aren't involved in our business ask, instead of listening to a griping bunch of farmers. (Laughter)

MR. THERIAULT: You've got a few there.

MR. MACPHEE: Yes. Well, I'm one, too. Other than that, I guess I just want to thank you for the opportunity of coming.

MR. ERB: Just a few things. One thing is the provincial government has been friendly to the blueberry growers and there are different assistance programs for land-levelling assistance and we really appreciate that and we hope that the provincial government will continue with the various assistance programs to encourage production and improve the technology of the blueberry industry.

There's also the Crop Insurance Program and we would certainly like to see that continued, as well, for the blueberry farmers. So that's about it for me. Dave.

MR. SANGSTER: Well, I just think the wild blueberry industry is a very positive story. I mean we've got a number of parameters there that provide a lot of strength to our industry, not only today but to the future. So this industry has potential to grow and we've talked about the different areas in which it can grow here, whether it addresses the health side of it, more in that direction, the biotechnology aspects of it. So we're going to move down the road pretty aggressively. We're conscious always of our other partners. I mean I think Quebec will be a driving force in the very near future; they're expanding their acreage big time. But the way the markets are going, no one is raising any of the alarm bells. I think it's more from the competitive products that Neil mentioned that we would have to be aware of.

One of the things that we really have to be conscious of as we go down the road, because we have international customers that are demanding a product that is pesticide-free in the future - and that's a tough combination in agriculture, to grow something economically and to maintain it in a sustainable way, and that means making enough money off it to keep going. So we're going to have to make some major progress there.

We have national representation now at the federal level, through the Canadian Horticultural Council, through the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, and we've had these people in our offices and in our doors saying, let's work together and let's get some of these products that are reduced-risk products, bio-pesticide products, and let's move in that direction as aggressively as we can.

Also, you have to realize that there are some limitations in just changing overnight, you can't do that. So I think that's one of the challenges we have before us, but there are so many positives. I think we're in this business to stay in business and I'm personally delighted at this stage in my career to have the opportunity to work with the blueberry growers, because it is a bright spot in agriculture. We do have some challenges and some speed bumps, I'll admit that, but there are so many other good things that we can make this industry do and grow, so it's a very positive story.

MR. MACPHEE: Mr. Chairman, I have one more comment that I forgot to make. Back in the year 2000, the Department of Agriculture terminated a lot of the extension workers and I don't know how many were allocated to the blueberry industry, but I know I dealt with two who were pretty knowledgeable people. Last year the Honourable Brooke Taylor said that he was going to create eight to 10 more positions in the extension work of

the department, and we have written him and asked that one of those extension people get allocated to the wild blueberry industry. I just wanted to put that plug in.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, thank you. I'm sure that with the members here, we'll see that the minister gets that message. So you haven't heard a response back, is that what you're saying?

MR. MACPHEE: Well, they acknowledged our letter.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, that's step number one.

I want to say thank you, it is nice for us to hear a good-news story in agriculture. Times have been tough for other sectors, but certainly I think the positive side of the wild blueberry industry can be credited to the people who had the vision to get into it and move it when probably other people shook their heads and said, why are you doing that?

All of that early groundwork by the early pioneers in this industry has brought the industry to where it is today, so a credit to them and to you for your efforts and your energy and your vision to something that's locally grown and locally consumed, to a good extent. I always say we should start with the resources we have at home and when it comes to agriculture, we probably shouldn't be growing bananas and pineapples, but wild blueberries are something we can grow. So thank you very much, we really appreciate your time and effort.

MR. SANGSTER: Just before we break, I think the president and the vice-president would like to share a few gifts with you and leave you some memoirs so that you will remember the wild blueberry industry.

MR. CHAIRMAN: We'll take a break just for a minute.

[3:01 p.m. The committee recessed.]

[3:05 p.m. The committee reconvened.]

MR. CHAIRMAN: Can we call the committee back to order for two minutes, please.

The issue that we have to get an answer to, I guess, and maybe Mora could explain better the position we are in.

MS. MORA STEVENS (Legislative Committee Clerk): The motion or the proposal on the table is from the Subcommittee on Fisheries, concerning the possibility of a forum on the new Fisheries Act. A tentative date for that would be Tuesday, March 6th, just because it would be before the House sits but it is only a proposal to this committee. Also, it won't exist unless we have a member from each Party on the committee.

No subcommittee has ever existed without at least one member from each committee, but it was getting together with the possibility of the industry people, as well as the fisheries people, to discuss the impacts of this new Fisheries Act, then move it forward, bring recommendations forward to the committee, eventually to the House, with hopefully our Department of Fisheries onside and maybe put those forward to Ottawa, whether it be through the Standing Committee on Fisheries that they have to express and have something on paper of what is happening in Nova Scotia and the viewpoint of Nova Scotians in the fishing community on this new Fisheries Act.

I think I have summed that up but if not, certainly Sterling and Harold know it better.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, the first issue is that we need to have a name for a Conservative member on the subcommittee.

MR. BARNET: The problem is that I don't know if I can give you a name because I do know that Pat is out of town, representing me, and I am out of town representing me and I don't even know who our third member is now because we had . . .

MS. STEVENS: Chuck Porter has been . . .

MR. BARNET: Chuck is not our third member, he's just been sitting in.

MS. STEVENS: Exactly. I don't think he's been named officially to be . . .

MR. BARNET: He's on every other committee, so in fairness to him, we're not going to put him on this committee. We have to find someone else, so we don't have a third member at this point in time.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, thank you. Mr. Gaudet.

MR. GAUDET: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Maybe what would be in order is to ask the government caucus members to bring this back to their caucus and hopefully they can either report directly to you or back to the committee, when the committee sits next.

MR. BARNET: It's got to be back to him because we won't sit next between now and this, right?

MR. CHAIRMAN: So my concern is on our timeline because as it was raised to me, we needed a name today or this wouldn't go forward.

MS. STEVENS: Not for that date.

MR. BARNET: We can't do that today.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, how much time do we have, Mora, if it's not today?

MS. STEVENS: The problem would be getting that date. The subcommittee could certainly meet after that date but then again you've got the House going in and all of those things so it might not be an all-day forum, it would have to be two meetings per se. In order to go forward for March 6th, we would have to have that third name today. If not, another suitable date could be found.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, I think what we need then is at some point soon from the Tory caucus, as Mr. Gaudet has indicated, that you go back to your caucus. As soon as we have a name then we'll have to start re-planning this for a point that's available either while the House sits or after the House sits but we'll have to work it around whatever is available.

MR. THERIAULT: This is very, very important. This new Fisheries Act has been changed - the first time in 130 years that this Act has been changed. We hear a lot, I hear a lot of talk about it out in the community but these people that we can bring in to this committee, I believe can give us the true gist of what they feel about this new Act. I feel if we don't get this before this Act goes down, that it might be one of our biggest mistakes that Nova Scotia ever made.

Now I don't know how important that is to your government here in Nova Scotia, but I know how important it is to the people that I represent down there. So surely, guys, in the next day or two, you can find a member to sit on this committee that day, the 6^th of March. Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Barnet, do you want to respond?

MR. BARNET: If I can, in response, I agree that it probably is important and I don't know when the federal government intends to bring forward the new Fisheries Act but if it was critically important we should have been notified earlier than today that this was going to happen today. I know I wasn't, maybe other members were, but I wasn't aware of the fact that this was on the agenda.

It is not an issue of whether it is critical or important, it's just an issue of whether I'm able to get a name from our caucus. Unfortunately, both the member for Pictou Centre and myself are out of town and because of circumstances, we don't have a third member on this committee. So it's not about whether it is important or not important, it's just about the circumstances we find ourselves in.

MR. CHAIRMAN: What would be the soonest available time you think you would meet and could have a name?

MR. BARNET: Our caucus meets tomorrow but whether or not I'm able to get a name out of them at that point in time, because I'll be doing the same thing that has happened right here, I'll be asking them without any advance notice.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Sure, okay. Mr. MacKinnon.

MR. MACKINNON: Mr. Chairman, almost on the opposite side of the scale from this is the fact that there was some interest on my part on serving on the committee as well. I've spent over 30 years in the private and public sector of the fisheries and held a part-time licence for a number of years. We discussed, in the formation of this, the possibility of perhaps one or two others being willing to sit on that as well. I just raise that in passing - not that we're trying to stack the committee but I have a personal interest in serving.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, according to our committee staff, all members were notified as to the need for a member, actually on February 5^th.

MR. BELLIVEAU: Mr. Chairman, I think this is important, I do - if my memory serves me correct, I think everybody was notified. I was going to try to address that. I think that the timeline here is crucial. I think that everybody has to bear witness to what we're dealing with here. We're dealing with a new Fisheries Act that has been proposed to the industry and I emphasize the timeline and I would suggest that the honourable member take this back to his caucus tomorrow. I think it has been suggested that they should have a member on this and I think this needs to go forward again with the timeline so some of these recommendations can go back while the House is in session, hopefully this coming March.

That's crucial and I have to emphasize, I want to go on record, that this subcommittee is going to have a very major role to discuss and make recommendations for people regarding the fisheries. I'm anxiously waiting for some news out of your caucus meeting tomorrow because I think that this particular Party was given ample opportunity to have a member here and I think the coastal communities are looking forward to this going forward.

MR. MACKINNON: Mr. Chairman, I've got a 3:00 o'clock meeting at the caucus office.

[3:15 p.m.]

MR. CHAIRMAN: All we can do is ask the members of the Conservative caucus if they can give us a name as soon as possible. I don't think there's any avenue for arm-twisting. The way the subcommittee was proposed had support from the Conservative caucus as well, so we expect that we'll get a name and we could have used that yesterday. So if the minister could do as he said, bring it to caucus tomorrow and whether that provides a name tomorrow, but as soon as possible would be appreciated by the committee.

MR. GAUDET: Can I just raise one point. Just on a point of information - has this proposed bill or law been tabled in the House? I've heard that - you know we're talking about a new bill, a new Fisheries Bill . . .

MR. BELLIVEAU: It has been tabled.

MR. GAUDET: It has been tabled in the House?

MS. STEVENS: December 13^th.

MR. GAUDET: December 13^th. Do we know if the federal government, DFO - if the provincial Department of Fisheries, is someone planning to get out in our communities to do some field work, some consultation?

MR. THERIAULT: That's what we're trying to do.

MR. GAUDET: Yes, but I'm just curious, is someone planning to do this? Or basically, it's just something that the subcommittee is looking at doing? I'm just curious.

MR. BELLIVEAU: Could I try to address that point? This is the part, the concern that I think has been picked up. This particular bill was introduced the 12^th or 13^th day of December 2006, the first reading.

My understanding is that there's very little consultation with the industry on developing this particular new Fisheries Act. This is the problem and the industry is sensing a lot of concerns throughout this large document. This is a crucial time in history to have this subcommittee come in and scrutinize this particular document and make some suggestions. I'll leave that up for that exercise to unfold, but I think it's critical that we have this forum and have the public be involved in that.

To me, the fear is - if I can just conclude - the fear right now is that there are so many concerns, so many amendments that we have to put the brakes on this particular bill in the House, some input from these coastal communities.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I think we'll stand adjourned and wait to hear from the Tory caucus.

[The committee adjourned at 3:18 p.m.]