Thank you, Mr. Chair, and Madam Findlay.
I have a question about agriculture. I think it's safe to say that the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today is in Afghanistan. Mr. Baker was talking about the impact of the war in Ukraine, one of the world's great breadbaskets, on global food production and on the situation in Afghanistan.
Canada is one of the great food or breadbaskets of the world. Half of our global food production, many argue, comes from natural gas through the Haber-Bosch process, which produces the synthetic nitrogen that has allowed for significant increase in crop yields in recent decades.
A lot of the fertilizer we use in Ontario is Russian fertilizer produced through natural gas. The department is responsible for the tariffs that were recently announced, the sanctions on Russian fertilizer, of 35%. This is causing a lot of Ontario's farmers to raise alarm bells about the spring crop going into the ground. Many of these farmers purchased the fertilizer last year before the war in Ukraine broke out and they are asking the Canadian government to waive the implementation of the tariff on nitrogen fertilizers that were purchased before March of this year in particular.
I have two questions. First, are there plans by the department to waive the tariffs on fertilizer purchased before March of this year? That is an urgent question considering that spring planting is taking place as we speak. Secondly, what is the government doing to ensure that going forward, we have a replacement for synthetic nitrogen fertilizer from sources other than Russia?