The importance of Bill C-294: right to repair
House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology
Carlo Dade, Director of Trade and Trade Infrastructure
March 8, 2023
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I’m going to skip my introduction about the Canada West Foundation and start directly with my testimony. I hope everyone is already familiar with our foundation. We are a policy research centre for the four western provinces of Canada.
From Western Canada we’ve spent years—over a decade—working on the issue of right to repair. Given the importance of agriculture for Western Canada and for our export-based economy that supports the west and Canada, it has been an issue of obvious concern.
Based on that work, about five years ago we received a call out of the blue from Frontier, Saskatchewan on an issue that’s related to right to repair, a manifestation of the work we’ve been doing on guaranteeing the rights of farmers to access their equipment. That issue is important not just to the west; it’s important to Canada. It’s a national issue.
What I’d like to do today is skip over the technical briefing—you have Anthony, a much better expert than I, to go over the technical aspects—and talk about why this issue is important to the nation. There are five reasons in terms of context.
Number one is a phrase that all of you have used frequently and it is a national priority: good middle-class jobs. This company and others like it across the west and in Ontario and elsewhere are producing good middle-class jobs. Since the last time Honey Bee was here, they’ve added 20 of these jobs.
That may not seem like a lot, but if you drive south from the Trans-Canada to the U.S. border and go through Gull Lake, Shaunavon and other communities and rural areas that have been hollowed out, you see boarded-up buildings. You’ll see them in down town Shaunavon. A company that has 200 good middle-class jobs supports not just the town of Frontier but the southwest corner of Saskatchewan. Keeping these jobs is important. It’s something that we’ve made a national priority, and it’s something that this industry is doing out of the headlines, in rural and remote areas where you don’t expect this.
Number two is private diversification. Everyone tells the western provinces: Stop hewing water and drawing wood. Yes, I do that backwards, because we’re sick of hearing it. We’re sick of hearing it because we’re doing that: We are building on our capacity to do things like difficult dry land farming and building new products. We are building on our strengths. We are diversifying, yet it’s getting missed.
Third is market diversification. You hear this time and time again. Our entire Indo-Pacific strategy is about trying to get to new markets. If you’re making new products, you’re going to new markets. The figures on the growth of this industry, and the growth into new markets without help from the government and without massive subsidies…. People are coming to Canada because of our unique ability to make products that the OEMs won’t and to solve problems that others won’t.
The fourth reason is innovation. I don’t know how much the government just spent on the new innovation program, but you want to see innovation. Innovation is in the DNA. It’s the origin story for these companies. They solve problems because they have to.
Out in the middle of nowhere, no one is going to make a head or a seeder to fit your particular landscape for your needs. Farmers stepped up to make the innovations. They did it so well that others from around the globe came to us to fill the niche that Deere and others wouldn’t, because their header was good enough, so why did it have to fit your particular needs? It’s a niche, but this is innovation. This is what we say we want Canadian companies to do. These are things we have as national priorities, yet in our rush to fund new things and in a rush to fund new programs, we forget about the successes we already have.
We’re chasing the bird in the hand and forgetting about the one in the bush. That’s detrimental to our national objectives of private diversification, market diversification and innovation.
The other issue here is bipartisanship. This is an issue that is not just in Western Canada. When we first started working with Honey Bee and others like Anthony and the agricultural equipment groups that came on board, we reached out to the government, based on the work that we had done and that MP Patzer, in particular, had done at the grassroots level. We reached out to Minister Bains, and he listened. He opened the door, he sat down and he talked with us. He had his political staff talk to us, and they responded. We talked to industry, and they responded. This has been a rare glimmer of bipartisanship, I think, on the national front.
In conclusion, this leaves four questions for you:
- Do good, middle-class jobs apply to everyone in Canada, or only those in certain parts of Canada?
- On innovation, are we willing to do what’s necessary to save the innovation we already have, and not just rush off to try to fund new things?
- Do we reward those who have done everything we have asked in terms of product diversification and market diversification, or do we ignore them?
- On bipartisanship, is there any hope that we can come together as a nation on some issues?
If we can’t come together on this issue, I will tell you from Western Canada that I don’t know if we can find any issue that we can come together on.
To conclude, these are stories that write themselves, all sorts of stories that write themselves for all sorts of media going forward.
That’s a bit of context. I will leave the technical definitions to the experts.
Thank you very much.
I look forward to your questions.