--I can afford the luxury of paying extra for food, because I know the value of it. But I have to tell you honestly, when we were paying off the mortgage and raising four kids, if we were going to have tomatoes in the winter, they couldn't be Ontario tomatoes. So let's just be realistic here. You will never have all consumers able to buy what they would like to buy.
By the same token, there are consumers out there who value the environment, the labour standards, and the whole standard of living we have in this country, to say nothing of our food safety standards. They value that enough to pay for it. I'm lucky enough on our farm that we have a small farm market. I've always said that I can educate about 1,000 people a summer, and that's about it. So over the last 30 years, I've hit quite a few.
If the government would come into that and spin this whole thing out to the consumer, or else work with us in a program we can actually market.... We used to have the Agricultural Adaptation Council in Ontario--we still have it--and that program used to let us market our local food. That's now become a provincial responsibility, and I must say that in Ontario, the province has come out fairly strongly on that and is doing well. But if there were some federal dollars, even through that program, that could go to food safety communication initiatives so that the consumer was aware of the differences....
Consumers assume that the government is looking after them. They assume that everything coming across the border is as good as what we produce here. That's where the communication is needed. It is to get that through to them.