Agriculture committee  Certainly you could, if we can find ways that farmers can generate energy. I'm very much involved in a similar kind of a thing in Guelph, as a matter of fact. If we could let farmers generate energy and get paid for it, that's a great idea. Part of the problem has been, again, th

Agriculture committee  It's interesting. I just got the most recent data. In fact, for the first time in quite a while we actually, in the last year, 2008, had investment slightly higher than depreciation. Something might be helping. When I talk to food processors, especially in Ontario, what they say

Agriculture committee  To the same inputs.

Agriculture committee  Right.

Agriculture committee  I know that time is limited, so I want to say just two quick things. One is that I've heard lots of farm organizations say “If you would give us fair trade on the regulatory side, we wouldn't ever ask for a subsidy again”. I hear that a fair amount in the vegetable and horticultu

Agriculture committee  I don't understand why that's inconsistent. If we have lower productivity in Canada than the U.S. does, and they have cheaper labour, those are two reasons why they have an advantage over us, not one. They may have cheaper labour. That depends on the industry, whether they have c

Agriculture committee  Actually, I don't think I know enough about that to be able to answer it.

Agriculture committee  No, they're practising farmers. The youngest one is a young woman whose parents were killed in Alberta recently. She's taken over a large farm. She was 21. I think the oldest is about 56 years old. They're all farmers. Eleven of them, by the way, are from Saskatchewan.

Agriculture committee  Yes, we have them in different classes. They're from every province.

Agriculture committee  No, they're not telling me that at all. What they're telling me is that we need to get rid of the U.S. Farm Bill.

Agriculture committee  I think we should be developing an agrifood policy that is very strategic. I think the day of the farm bill type of legislation has passed. If you look around the world, the U.S. now is spending most of its money on green subsidies that are WTO-green as well as the other kind of

Agriculture committee  It was a long time ago, but it was during the period when the barley market was open, as I recall. We did a study trying to show what happened to prices during that brief period of time. My recollection is that they rose relative to U.S. prices during that period of time, and the

Agriculture committee  I've forgotten all your questions. Let me start with the last one first. I believe that theU.S. Farm Bill, as it's structured, had that impact in the past. At the moment it doesn't because the grain prices are so much higher than the support prices. I would not say that about e

Agriculture committee  I'm not going to make any kind of generalized statement like that, because we'd need to know the situation. I would never suggest that we give complete open-market access at all.

Agriculture committee  The answer to your first question is that issue of value added per dollar of wages has nothing to do with wages or farm prices. It has everything to do with the quality of capital we have to work with. We don't have economies of scale. We have vegetable processing plants in Canad