News

More than 40 speakers shared their expertise at the recent The Future of Food Law & Policy in Canada conference, which Dal hosted (click here to read the Dal News story about it). In total, nearly a dozen Dal faculty members spoke at the conference, spanning seven different academic faculties.

The inaugural conference was co-organized by Schulich School of Law Professor Jamie Baxter, who conducts research on agricultural lands and sustainable food production, along with law school alumnus Glenford Jameson, a lawyer at Toronto-based G.S. Jameson & Co. specializing in food-sector issues, third-year law student Jessica Rose, and law school alumna Shannon Paine, an associate at G.S. Jameson & Co.

A cluster of enterprising Schulich Law grads are working on the cusp of this emerging field, including Jameson, Paine, Daniel Coles, and Malcolm Kept.

Here are some notable quotes from a few of the speakers:

• Professor Jamie Baxter, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie: “Canadian farmers are aging – more than half of current farmers will retire in the next decade or two. We can expect a fundamental shift in who will own their land, because traditional succession is breaking down – their children don’t want to farm. This will lead to reshaping of property rights and ownership, and possibly a move into multi-ownership land use by farmers and non-farmers. We need to think more deeply about these emerging trends. We have a long way to go in the research.”

• Professor Greg Cameron, Department of Business and Social Studies, Dalhousie: “In spite of 40 years of best efforts to save it, Canada is still losing prime farmland. Things like climate change, deforestation, land-use changes, and population growth are putting stress on our farmland. There’s a critical gap in national policy – farmland protection shouldn’t be an afterthought. Current provincial legislative frameworks are moderate to weak. The federal government should make a clear statement to protect farmland now and in the future.”

• Ron Doering, Counsel, Gowling WLG and former president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency: “Food law and policy is so interwoven that you can’t really separate them. Food law is dynamic – it’s growing in importance but not yet recognized as a separate discipline.”

• Michael Roberts, executive director, Resnick Food Law and Policy Program, UCLA: “Food law touches on administrative law, international law, environmental law, health law, torts, constitutional law, intellectual property law, real property law, water law, animal law, and civil rights law. The question is, is food law a discipline in and of itself or a subsection of other forms of law? Yes, it is a discipline that warrants its own legal field to facilitate improvements. Whether this expanded field of food law is coherent and distinctive enough to evolve into a permanent discipline of law is a question that only time can answer.”

• Dr. Robert Strang, Nova Scotia’s Chief Medical Officer of Health: “We have to understand how complex it is to develop a national food policy. In my role in public health, I start with food safety. How safe does our food supply need to be, and at what cost? How does our food-production system tie into environmental sustainability? And how can a local food movement tie into a national policy? We have to ask ourselves how we can bring all of those threads together.”

• Professor Peter Tyedmers, School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie: “We know that how we produce, handle and use food has enormous effects on global resources. I’m going to be the contrarian and say that we shouldn’t have a national food policy unless it reflects food consumption and environmental impact. If it’s just about delivering cheap food, we have a problem. We have massive issues of inequitable access to nutrition and affordable food in Canada – a national food policy must recognize that.”

• Professor Patricia Williams, Tier II Canada Research Chair in Food Security and Policy Change, Department of Applied Human Nutrition, Mount Saint Vincent University: “It’s critical and exciting that we’re seeing movement in the direction of having a national food policy, but we need to achieve a healthy, just, and sustainable policy. We need a strong socio-economic foundation to have a strong food policy. We’re seeing widening gaps between rich and poor, and the impacts of that. There’s a strong food movement in Canada, but there are gaps around what’s being proposed.”