Thank you very much to both of you for coming here today.
As Mr. Bezan said earlier, I'm also a beef producer. The BSE problems we've had in Canada since 2003 are still not 100% over, although we are getting closer. So I encourage you to keep up endeavours to get the borders fully open.
There's an old saying in my part of the world that talk is cheap, but it takes money to buy whiskey. The bottom line is that we can talk about this, but unless you show the actions, it doesn't mean anything. So I really encourage you to do that.
There's also a perception, especially in the beef-producing areas and amongst the farmers, that a lot of decisions made by the USDA or the U.S. government on products moving there are based more on politics than science. When it came to beef testing in Canada, our consumers knew that our testing was right. We actually increased our consumption through that time by around 8%--somebody correct me if I'm wrong. That tells us something. Nobody got sick in either country and nobody died, because we kept it out of the food chain. So there's the perception that the decision was based more on politics.
I'd like you to comment briefly on that if you could.