Agriculture committee  If you don't mind, I'd like my colleague, C.J. Helie, to comment on that.

Agriculture committee  Without some form of enforcement, which may include some type of penalty, we're not going to make any progress.

Agriculture committee  It needs to be something that sends a message to individual provinces that if they do certain things, there is a cost to it. I mean, ultimately it stops people from investing in markets in Canada, which is damaging to the business fabric and limits growth across the country. Sinc

Agriculture committee  Canada is a trading nation. We exist and our lifestyle and our way of life is based on the fact that we are successful at selling many Canadian products outside of Canada. We only have 30 million people. We need people to think about selling outside the country. If we only look a

Agriculture committee  Internationally, the world has developed very clear rules around trade, and that goes to our first one. You do need to have a clear, independent, and robust dispute mechanism because there are always going to be disputes about whether you're being treated fairly or not. Without t

Agriculture committee  The depressing effect it has is about 5% to 6% of the market in Canada. We interpret this to mean that there is about $150 million annually in gross margin that is unavailable to the spirits industry because we can't take advantage of the opportunities, the real market opportunit

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Jan Westcott, and I'm the president and CEO of Spirits Canada. Joining me, as the chair said, is my colleague C.J. Helie. We're pleased to share our industry's perspective on how to promote domestic trade of agricultural and agrifood products

Agriculture committee  Every company would do different things with it. Some companies would use it to create new export markets. We are on the cusp of going into Colombia. Canada has signed a free trade agreement with Colombia. We have products that are just about to go into Colombia. That's a secre

Agriculture committee  In our business in Canada, our gross margins, all the money we get for every dollar of sales, is about 18¢. If I'm a Scotch whiskey producer in the United Kingdom, my gross margin is around 32%. If I'm a bourbon producer in the United States it would be around 29%. We're a glob

Agriculture committee  It's very good. It's very high end. It leads Canada and probably North America in focusing consumers. We can't lose sight of the fact that Canada is an exporting country. At the end of the day, we're an exporting country. We don't have a big enough population to sustain the lif

Agriculture committee  There's no question. All of our purchases of our inputs, particularly grains, are up fairly significantly. There's no question that in 2008, 2009, 2010, the industry flattened out. We're an export business and our big markets tended to be some of those countries that were the ab

Agriculture committee  There's no question.

Agriculture committee  Approximately, yes.

Agriculture committee  That's all exports.

Agriculture committee  I guess the spirits industry has been a global business for a long time. Spirits are one of the world's oldest traded commodities. In fact, most government revenue prior to the discovery of things like income tax and other forms of taxation was in fact in the form of customs duti