CCGA Recognized a Manitoba Top Employer for a Third Time

Mar 24, 2023

Winnipeg, MB—Canadian Canola Growers Association (CCGA) has been recognized as an exceptional place to work by Manitoba's Top Employers for the third time. Earlier today, the winners of the 2023 competition were announced by the organizers of the annual Canada's Top 100 Employers project and showcased online and in a special magazine featured in the Winnipeg Free Press.

"This award recognizes the commitment that we have made to creating a vibrant workplace that supports people, and we're proud to be a recipient for a third time," says Rick White, President & CEO at CCGA. "Receiving the award also highlights the excellent career opportunities that agriculture can offer Manitobans. We have a team with expertise in many different disciplines and from many different backgrounds, all who have found success in the agriculture sector."

To achieve recognition through Manitoba's Top Employer, CCGA was assessed on eight criteria including 1) workplace, 2) work atmosphere, 3) benefits, 4) vacation and time off, 5) employee communications, 6) performance management, 7) training and development, and 8) community involvement.

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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