Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all of you for being here.
It's fascinating to see the thread tying together the story of the farms, especially the family farms, in this country, all of which do not seem to be doing well, if I can use that term.
I hear what you're saying, Ms. Simmons, when it comes to P.E.I. potatoes in Ontario.
I also know, Mr. Norton, what's happened to cherry farmers in southern Ontario, on the Niagara peninsula, where I come from. They're pulling them out there; they don't keep them. They're not even going to bother staying in the business any more. There are some very large producers who have been in the business of cherry farming for as long as I can remember, from the time I was a kid growing up in that neck of the woods. They're out of business, as well as the clingstone peach growers, who lost CanGro.
I was in a grocery store not long ago, probably a couple of weeks ago--though I don't go to it too often, but I happened to be there at that particular time--and there was a can of peaches. “Product of CanGro”, it said, the producer in St. David's that used to take those peaches. The peaches were in exactly the same container the manager had shown me as one of their pièces de resistance. “This is our new marketing tool,” he said. Yet you flip it around, and it says, “Product of China”. Every clingstone peach grower basically in the Niagara peninsula is out of business.
When you talk about the family farm and cherry producers in British Columbia, and when Ms. Simmons was talking about family farms in P.E.I. making potatoes, and we talk about buying local, the folks who I live close to, when they think of buying local, they think of buying local in season, in the sense that if tomatoes are grown in the peninsula, where they are; or fruits or vegetables are grown in the peninsula, where they are. They buy local. They're thinking basically about the market stand and that time of year. Then when they think of buying local after that fact, they're thinking about Canadian product.
In my area, at least, the folks are saying they don't want to buy P.E.I. or British Columbia produce. What they're saying is they want to buy from a local producer first, who might be up the street. In some cases, they are. It's not a very far drive in our neck of the woods, which some of you probably know.
From that perspective, why at this point, Mr. Norton, is the cherry industry in British Columbia coming to a head now? From what I've seen in the peninsula, they basically just said to heck with it. They simply pulled them out. I watched them pull out acre after acre after acre.