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Quebec solidaire calls on government to create an emergency fund for farmers

In response to the current crisis in Quebec's agricultural sector, Quebec solidaire (QS) is calling on the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) government to create an emergency fund for farmers ahead of the harvest season.

At the end of March, Premier François Legault described the difficulties facing farmers as a "crisis," and promised to help them further. However, according to QS co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the government needs to act more quickly.

"We can't wait for the next budget to give agricultural producers some breathing space," said Nadeau-Dubois. "Of course, there are a lot of things to do, there are a lot of programmes to review, and there are issues that won't be resolved in a few days. But one thing the premier must do quickly is to release an emergency fund to provide immediate financial assistance to farmers who need it because last season was catastrophic, and 2024 is shaping up to be difficult too."

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

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