Barlow pleased to see Bill C-234 moving forward

Nov 17, 2022

Bill C-234 is headed back to the House of Common's (HoC) for third and final reading.

The private members bill put forward by Conservative MP Ben Lobb would exempt farm use of propane and natural gas used in grain drying and barns.

John Barlow, the Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Agri-Food says the bill moved through the House Standing Committee on Agriculture last week.

"Really good news on Wednesday to have C-234 the carbon tax exemption bill get through committee with the support of the opposition parties. You know the liberals voted against us, not surprised,
showing that they are not there to advocate for Canadian agriculture. But this is great news for farmers across the country we're another step closer to having propane and natural gas exempt from the carbon tax on farms. "

The committee amended the bill to make it clear that the exemption applies to farm use only for grain dryers and buildings used to raise animals or grow crops.

Barlow says now it goes back to the house for for another couple hours of debate, third reading and then on to the Senate.

"So we're really confident that we'll get this done and offer some relief to farmers who are seeing crippling input costs. This just gives them another pillar to be economically sustainable."

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids