Mr. Speaker, I could not agree more. We need to talk about agriculture more in the House. It is one of the base industries in this great country. It is the third-largest contributor to our GDP. Our exports are in the $60-billion range. They have gone up exponentially since we formed government, simply because we have gone out there. The Minister of International Trade, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, a number of other ministers, and I have been on the road. The Prime Minister himself, who is the greatest salesman ever when it comes to agricultural goods, just had a successful trip to China. That is another $1.5 billion of new access to that growing market for our commodities.
That is the nature of agriculture in this country. It is innovative. It is lean, mean, and efficient. It needs this type of cutting-edge legislation to allow farmers to continue to move forward.
It is important that the opposition listen to farmers who want to move ahead, not to those who want to move back to the fifties, when grain was dug out of a bin and stuck in the ground. It should listen to those farmers who are excited about the new varieties out there that give them efficiency, ingenuity, and that edge when it comes to competing with other farmers from the U.S., Australia, Argentina, and Brazil.
We need this legislation. We needed it 20 years ago. We did not get it then, but we will get it today.