Presentation on Parliament Hill
AIC’s CEO was a witness at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food today. The presentation focused on Bill C-234, providing an exemption to certain type of farming activities from the Carbon Pollution Pricing Act (commonly called the “carbon tax”).
AIC’s position is that until alternative solutions (i.e., clean energy) are readily available to farmers, they should not be penalized to produce food – especially in a world where food security is increasingly important. Therefore, they should be exempted from the “carbon tax”.
AIC also advocated for:
- Increased research capacity for proof-of-concept projects,
- Support designed for the scalability of some of these new technologies,
- Extension programs to explain to the farming community the technologies and its benefits.
While the tax is called an “incentive” by some, AIC indicated that incentives should more likely be direct funding to farmers adopting new technologies – regardless of how small or large they are.