2019 CAFLP Annual Conference Panel Recap: “Updates in Canadian Food Law and Policy”
Photo by Edgar Castrejon on Unsplash
The opening panel on Friday, November 8th brought together a wide variety of voices across the food law and policy landscape. Nadia Lambek commented on this later in the conference – “Though all of the speakers come from seemingly disparate areas of law, when you see them all on one stage on a panel, it becomes immediately obvious that they are all connected.”
Tom Rosser, the Assistant Deputy Minister from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada was the first to speak. This idea of the interconnected nature of the food system was something Tom focused on. He discussed this in his overview of the federal government’s launch of “A Food Policy for Canada” on June 17th of this year.
The process and publication of the policy, he said, was “fundamentally, a way of looking at the food system and recognizing the system as a network rather than its constituent parts.” He noted that prior to the work put into this policy, there had been no previous interconnection between the federal government’s food-related projects and departments.
Lyzette Lamondin of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency recently led the initial development, drafting and engagement for the Safe Food for Canadians Act and regulations. The Safe Food for Canadians Act came into force on January 15th of this year. The approach for the Act and regulations, she said, was to ask: “If Canada were a brand-new country, what would our [food] regulations look like? So, we started from scratch!” She spoke about the process of consultation and engagement that shaped the consolidation of three acts and fourteen different sets of regulations into one single act and one set of regulations.
Glenford Jameson of G. S. Jameson and Co. also discussed the Safe Food for Canadians Act and how the new legislation has been hugely impactful on lawyers who represent clients in the food space. Glenford said the Act represents a shift away from regulatory or quasi-criminal laws to a licensing system, where breaching the Act risks these licences. “As lawyers, this hugely changes how we will advise clients,” said Glenford.
Glenford also discussed Bill S-228, regarding advertisements to children. Though the bill did not pass before the election of the most recent federal government, Glenford said it represented a “sign of things to come.”
Carmen Francis of McCarthy Tétrault discussed the impact of trade regulations on food, and how the proliferation of free trade agreements impacts food producers. She touched on the “supply chain opportunities” that exist in areas where there may be multiple free trade agreements in place. Clients then have the opportunity to figure out “which one of these [agreements] do they want to leverage, and which one suits their business purposes.” She said having multiple trade agreements to choose from also allows for more flexibility with respect to dispute resolutions and where those are mandated to occur.
Melana Roberts from Food Secure Canada spoke next, and shared that food insecurity is “in a dire place in Canada right now.” She said, “dismantling racism and systemic structures of oppression is one of the root ways to address food insecurity,” and focusing on food from a rights-based perspective is an approach that could be taken to tackle these issues. Melana shared some statistics on food insecurity being more prevalent among racialized Canadians, and that a recent Globe and Mail report showed that half of Indigenous households in Canada have experienced food insecurity at some point. Melana said that with the recent federal election of a minority government, it may create new opportunities “for advocacy, and for challenging the implementation of the new Food Policy.”
Darcy Lindberg from the University of Alberta Faculty of Law provided some further context to Melana’s discussion of food insecurity in Indigenous communities. Darcy said that the protection of “foodscape sovereignty,” is the key to the “reclamation, revitalization and resurgence of Indigenous legal traditions regarding foodscapes,” and shared recent examples of legal efforts being made in this area. He also touched on projects launched by Indigenous communities to reclaim human relationships to their food sources, and also on work being done to combat climate change. However, Darcy said colonialism still impacts Indigenous food sovereignty and security, and this can be clearly seen in the slow government response to Indigenous versus non-Indigenous food and water emergencies in Canada.
Camille Labchuk from Animal Justice spoke about the new animal transportation laws that will be coming into force next year. “We have lagged far behind other developed nations [on transport],” she said, as until this recent bill, Canada’s transport regulations on animals had not been updated since 1977. These laws would limit the amount of time animals may be in transit between the producer and the slaughterhouse. Camille shared statistics on the high number of “spent hens” (egg-laying chickens who are then used for meat) who die in transport due to the length of exposure to extreme heat and cold while on trucks heading for slaughter.
Camille also discussed the new trend of “humane labelling” on animal products, and that “consumers should be able to rely on what the label tells us,” but often the words used are just industry terms with no regulation attached.
Ryan White from Cavalluzzo LLP spoke on food workers’ rights, and how the rise of our reliance on app-based food delivery services has had a significant impact on the number of people working in the “gig economy.” But, “it’s a grind, and wages are all over the place,” Ryan said. The companies who run these apps have also made “a purposeful classification of [delivery] workers as independent contractors.” Ryan discussed two very recent developments in this area – both cases heard on November 6th. One case at the Ontario Labour Relations Board centred around Foodora delivery workers attempting to unionize. The other was heard at the Supreme Court of Canada on Uber’s mandatory arbitration clauses for drivers in their standard form contracts. These decisions will make a huge impact on the rights of food delivery workers, and Ryan said that they are “uniquely Canadian” in how far they have even gone, where American delivery workers have not been so successful in the courts there.
Shane Martinez from Martinez Law also focused on food workers’ rights, but his talk focused on Canada’s “Seasonal Agricultural Worker” program. These workers “essentially keep our agricultural industry alive,” Shane said. Many of these workers spend eight months of the year in Canada, coming back for sometimes twenty years or more, and they end up spending more time in Canada than in their home country, but these workers cannot apply for permanent residency. They are also at the whim of employers in terms of being sent home, and conditions on the farms they work on can be poor. If a worker wishes to file a complaint though, they have to do so online or through an immigration board office, but sometimes these workers are living in extremely rural areas in bunk houses with no electricity or running water, let alone internet access.
Shane shared some positive developments for these workers though – for example the recent BC Temporary Foreign Worker Protection Act expanded enforcement tools and prohibits employers from a variety of actions, including seizing workers’ passports or threatening deportation without lawful cause.
At the end of the panelists’ individual talks, moderator Jessica Cytryn from McCarthy Tétrault asked of all of them: “If you were each giving this talk five years from now, what do you hope you would be talking about?”
Answers were as varied as the panelists, but themes that came out of their responses included more collaboration between the various stakeholders in the food system, “bringing divergent voices together,” improving relationships between government and industry, and addressing the challenges of food security for all Canadians.