Agriculture committee  What we would do is create a separate pool for them, and whatever they pay on that domestic human consumption price would be pooled together and delivered back to them. They would still get it later in the year, although we could look at some kind of fixed price contract. We have

Agriculture committee  I'll start with the second part, contingency planning. What we have looked at over many years and many sessions is losing the single desk on wheat, or losing the single desk on barley, or losing the domestic market—just a whole bunch of iterations here to say that these are the p

Agriculture committee  I might just touch on a couple of the other questions—very quickly, because I know we're moving on here. Concerning the conclusion of the CWB—whether it'll exist in this open market environment—again respectful of the order here, I agree in my personal opinion with Dr. Fulton a

Agriculture committee  Respectfully, I disagree with those comments, and I would like an opportunity to respond to each one of them. We do do it differently from the competition. We do provide better service and better technical support. I hear it from customers on a regular basis. It's not something

Agriculture committee  Again, I am going to be careful here, because there is a director in place, and I respect that. So I am going to answer with my personal opinion, which I think is acceptable, and that is based on my experience at the Canadian Wheat Board. In my personal opinion, it is not going

Agriculture committee  That's the other concern, and that's what we hear from buyers who buy from different systems. They're not able to get the quality of product and the quality control that they get from Canada when they buy in the U.S., European, or Argentine marketplace. That's a very important

Agriculture committee  I'll start and maybe just answer the first couple of questions there. Certainly the brand, what buyers expect from the Canadian Wheat Board, from western Canadian farmers when they buy their product, is consistency. They expect long-term reliability. There's no question about th

Agriculture committee  Thank you to members of the committee for this invitation to appear before you today. As Ken mentioned in his comments, the minister has initiated a process that will result in the termination of my position as president and CEO of the CWB. In the four years that I have held th

Agriculture committee  He can deliver to a processor or sell to a processor, but he receives the CWB initial price and subsequent prices, or one of our fixed or basic program prices. So he doesn't actually do the transaction directly with the malt plant or with the mill, but he can deliver directly to

Agriculture committee  I think we're saying the same thing: the farmer can sell to a processing plant, but it flows through the Canadian Wheat Board into the pool account. So he will get the CWB initial price for that delivery, then the subsequent payments would come to the farmer. So it's not a direct

Agriculture committee  I'm going to start a bit earlier, Mr. Chairman. I want to comment on the seller-buyer issue. We are a single-desk seller, not a buyer; I disagree with that statement. Basically, we are competing in a very focused international environment. On the wheat side, we're a small playe

Agriculture committee  It's very similar. A lot of that canola is marketed by those large multinationals, so they are in that environment and those multinationals are doing a lot of that marketing. The canola market, the bulk of it, goes to one market, Japan, and there are relationships there. There ar

Agriculture committee  Our view on creating an open market is that the Canadian Wheat Board would not exist in that environment. As we have this debate and that discussion, I think that's very important. It's a very focused, concentrated marketplace. There are five or six companies that actually domina

Agriculture committee  Just to follow up on that, there have been a number of independent studies done over the years that have looked at single-desk selling versus the competition, and comparing prices in those two environments. The first one was by Kraft, Tyrchniewicz, and Furtan, who are university