Meet Our Speakers - Don Buckingham
Name: Don Buckingham
Title: Agriculture, Food and Dispute Resolution Consultant
Education: BA (University of Saskatchewan), LLB (University of Saskatchewan), DIL (Cambridge University); LLD (Université de Montpellier jointly with University of Ottawa)
Q: Tell us a bit about your work: what do you practice and how does it relate to or involve the governance of food or food systems?
I am currently working as a consultant in Ottawa and am completing research for a new book, but my whole career of 35 years plus has been in the agricultural and food law and policy space. This has included from-local-to-global issues like defending a farmer raising horses inside the greater Halifax city limits as an associate at a law firm, to being part of the Canadian delegation to the World Food Summit in Rome.
I have always been intrigued by the notion of “Sustainable Agriculture”. What is it really? In the 1990s, I put together a consortium of Canadian and European universities to study sustainable agriculture. I was a professor for 15 years at the University of Saskatchewan, Western University and the University of Ottawa, where I taught a variety of classes relating to agricultural law, food law, trade of agricultural products and the law of sustainable agriculture.
From there, I made the move to go into government. I became a government lawyer, working for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada on the legal implementation of federal-provincial-territorial policy frameworks. The biggest one was the Growing Forward Plan. What the lawyer had to do was be a sage scribe for the agreements that were made between the federal government and all the provinces and territories. I got to travel across this great country to do these negotiations. This was a very interesting look inside how policy is actually turned into regulation. I did the legal drafting for the umbrella agreement and bilateral agreements.
The third period was my work as chair and administrative judge for the Canada Agricultural Review Tribunal. This administrative law work required me to consider and decide the validity of enforcement actions by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the Canada Border Services Agency and the Pest Management Regulatory Agency against producers and importers of food. Whether someone is dealing with farm animals or importing food, producers, transporters and food importers have to follow Canadian agricultural regulations, such as those found in the Health of Animals Act. Violations of the rules lead to hefty fines and if the person receiving the violation wants to challenge it, he or she comes before the Canada Agricultural Review Tribunal. These are formal hearings where I heard all the evidence and then issued a final written decision. I did this for 8 years, hearing over 200 cases. About a dozen or so of my decisions were appealed up to the Federal Court of Appeal where some were upheld, and others were not.
Most recently I just finished as Chief Executive Officer at the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute. I took this job because it was a capstone opportunity to bring all my experience together. CAPI is a think tank that focuses on developing good food and agriculture policy. Developing good policy is pretty difficult with so many moving pieces—it’s a bit like riding a horse standing up—because everyone wants something different and is pushing in different directions. So, I needed to be a good mediator and creative influence to suggest a sweet spot for good policy where peoples’ positions could align. Law plays an important role in informing agriculture and food policy implementation, and as the area of agricultural law is complex from a jurisdictional perspective, occasionally I would need to remind people that we need to “stay in their lanes”.
Now I am working as a consultant and serve on a few not-for-profit boards. One is Food for the Hungry Canada, an international development NGO and another is an international environmental faith-based organization called A Rocha that started in the UK and Portugal in the 1980s and has been in Canada since 2000.
I have been a foodie my entire life. I actually got my chief training certificate a few years back and I enjoy cooking up a storm. The hardest part of the lockdown has been that I can’t host dinner parties. Nor can I contemplate returning to cook for large groups of campers as a did for a few summers at summer camps after getting my training done.
Q: What is your favourite part about your work? Or a highlight of your career?
This is easy—seeing my students take up positions as the next generation of food and agriculture lawyers. A lot of my students have gone on to become university professors who also teach in the food and agriculture law space, one has become an attorney general in Alberta, and a number have become practicing food and agriculture lawyers. This has been a continuous highlight for me.
I only taught for 15 years, but as I have a real love of students, for the other 15 or 20 years of my career, I’ve been bringing students on as articling, research, or summer students. I have probably had 50 or more and they have all done amazing things.
Q: What is an ongoing and/or emerging food law and policy issue that you have come across through your work that you feel is important and/or urgent and why? What is at stake?
The meaning and pursuit of sustainable agriculture — this notion has been on the table for 25 or more years now, but only has become front-and-centre in the last 5-10 years when the issue has taken on a new urgency in law and policy circles. In the 1990s I was working on what sustainable agriculture might look like, but it wasn’t in mode much. However, we are now in a crisis mode due to climate change and trade. The world will always have to eat, but how do we do it sustainably?
Knowing what is and what is not sustainable production is something that people are demanding, with consumers having more knowledge of their food and being less trusting of the food system. Consumers want information, governments want to control greenhouse gas emissions and trading partners may want to use this information to control the flow of products in or out of their countries.
Voilà—a perfect storm. What we need is to develop a common system of transparency for understanding production systems that may be more, or less, sustainable. This transparency will let people better understand what it takes to produce a bushel of wheat, a pound of butter, a quart of almond milk, or a hundredweight of pork anywhere in the world. How do we standardized this measurement so we know if food is sustainably produced? Are we going to start discriminating against inefficient production methods? For example, Canadian beef is many times more efficiently produced than beef coming from southeast Asia or Africa. Cows in the majority world often will take years to get to market, each day emitting methane, whereas here in Canada cows get to market in a 12–16-month cycle. This opens up the question of whether such efficiencies will be good for sustainability or will they lead to the possibility of having new environmental imperialism where western production is being preferred because it is the most efficient. This is going to require a lot of smart people, including not a few lawyers, to figure out how to implement binding commitments to reduce emissions from food production, distribution and trade.
Q: Can you give us a hint of something you will talk about at the conference?
I am going to be probably talking a bit about the challenges presented with current information distribution through “social media” and the use and misuse of the term “science-based evidence” in discussions on the tough issues in agriculture and food today.
Q: What advice would you give to someone interested in practicing in the area of food law and policy?
I would say to them “dive into the world of agriculture and food law”. It is a growth area and will be for years to come. Even if people try to discourage you, remember this is a field for you to make your mark. Most certainly as well, you will have a lot more colleagues than one did 20 years ago. There is such an urgency to find solutions to local-national-global challenges posed by food production and consumption and there is a real need from willing clients to have access to your services and creative solutions.