Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. As to the farm food safety program, as in all other sectors of production, we received initial funding to develop the program. When funding is provided for program development only, however, there is a greater risk that production sectors will drop their program subsequently and not get past the first stage, instead of moving on to the second stage and so forth up to final approval of the program.

Agriculture committee  I think the point is that agriculture is our sector. The agriculture department is our home. We need policy support from Agriculture Canada. One of the challenges is that it really does take a whole-of-government approach. We need to work across Finance and Canadian Border Services Agency and CFIA, which is now more under Health Canada where it was Agriculture before.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Chicken Farmers of Canada proudly represents 2,800 chicken farmers. While the number of other farmers may be shrinking, we are up a hundred farmers in the last year. We are a growth industry on farmers even. We have a value chain, and it's a value-added industry.

International Trade committee  I'll give you an example of how we do it in that quota. Every eight weeks we set the production in Canada for chicken. We allocate out to a province and we give them their share, and then they allocate to their farmers, every single eight weeks. They will have a unit of that provincial production.

International Trade committee  It's a similar sense. Our largest farms are actually in Atlantic Canada because they need to be larger. They have cost issues, feed is a big issue, and therefore they have higher feed costs so they need more volume. You see larger farms there as opposed to in the rest of the country, and that's just to maintain a level of profitability.

International Trade committee  I think Cargill as a processor would be the only...but on a farm level? No. Maybe at a breeding level, they might have some, but frankly at a farm level, even at a processing level, we're a Canadian business. I think Cargill is the only company, and it has a wholly owned operating unit in London, Ontario.

International Trade committee  We sit next to the largest poultry producer in the world, which does not have our winter and does not have to have fully insulated barns to carry them through, so our production costs are higher from that perspective. The other thing to understand as well is that the chicken market is two markets.

International Trade committee  We got a letter from Minister MacAulay stating that the government supports, knows that compensation is important, and all that. They're going through a process of determining whether they're going to sign. They're looking at it, they've told us, together. There's no compensation if you don't sign, so—

International Trade committee  The response that we got from Minister Freeland was that if we were to make a decision right now on compensation, it would be as though we'd already made a decision on signing the deal. So you understand where they're at.

International Trade committee  If the compensation and the indemnification package that was there were not supported, it's a hard hit on our industry. It is a package for us. We worked through this deal and we were positive on this. We were trying to find ways to make this deal work because we knew that issues were going to be addressed as part of that.

International Trade committee  This is part of what we call tariff rate quota administration. Really, the importers are grouped as processors, distributors, food service—there are different pools in it. There is a lot of value added that comes in. There is a benefit. To be clear, we're not trying to stop the imports there that are certain, that we know are there, that provide some value-added.

International Trade committee  There are some that go direct to store shelves, absolutely.

International Trade committee  Are you talking about production quota value?

International Trade committee  It's a tough one to get a handle on, mainly because the price of quota varies from province to province from sale to sale. There's not an open exchange where it can happen in the chicken sector. Our point is that our job in supply management is neither to increase or decrease the value of that quota.

International Trade committee  I think it is important that we understand where the chicken comes from. We're doing a branding program in terms of that. We've built a trust level with consumers. Chicken consumption continues to go up because people trust what we're putting out there, and it's a high-value product.