The answer to your first question is that issue of value added per dollar of wages has nothing to do with wages or farm prices. It has everything to do with the quality of capital we have to work with. We don't have economies of scale. We have vegetable processing plants in Canada that may have three automatic colour sorters, whereas in the U.S. they have 25. And there's quality control equipment that we're not investing in here in Canada, all of which would increase our ability to add value.
It's the value-adding component of this that we're missing out on, not the other two parts of the coefficient. We're simply falling behind. It goes back to that business of our capital investment having been less than depreciation. So we're losing our capital base. I'm on three boards of directors. I would never allow a company to have that kind of investment performance ever, and here we have a whole sector with that investment performance.
Secondly, with respect to the issue of the loss of market share, I talk to people in California and to the apple growers in Washington, and I can find no evidence of dumping in the absolute sense that it's meant. What I find is that they are doing many things to take the best product and to separate it—to pre-condition it, to post-condition it, and to harvest it.
There is no definition of “tree ripened”, by the way, at all. But there are lots of measures you can use in terms of pressure, sweetness, acidity, and so forth. And those folks down there are doing it. Most of our producers are not. They are not dumping, but are charging premiums and taking away market share because they're producing down there what some consumers want.
That's fundamentally what the problem is. It's an issue of supply chain management and of investment in technology, and so forth. I don't think it has anything to do with the trade agreement, frankly.