I do too.
Let me just turn to your brief on the airing out of the wet blanket. You're basically saying that the Canadian Wheat Board model was built for large exports and that it's preventing sales of high-value crops. Well, Warburtons, which is a company, just announced a little while ago that they'll purchase 250,000 tonnes of high-quality wheat from about 730 farmers, many in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. They will do it in such a way as to not let the lowest seller set the price. That is holding prices up, so I just point out to you that your wet blanket argument doesn't hurt.
Furthermore, I just cannot understand why the opponents of the Wheat Board—and we'll go to your Australian example, Mr. Chair—continue to perpetuate this myth that there can't be any processing or development of pasta plants. The fact of the matter is that western farmers have exactly the same ability domestically. There is the buy-back program for export, but western farmers do have, within their abilities, the same ability to mill their own grain in their own mills and sell that resulting production directly to Canadian consumers from one end of the country to the other. If they sell it outside the country, then they have to do it through the buy-back program.
So you continually perpetuate these myths.
I'll make one last point before I go to answers, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Penner goes to great lengths to talk about the Carter–Lyons–Berwald study, which is a study, Mr. Chair, that I believe you know has been completely discredited by academic people with academic credentials, for one simple reason. It arrived at its conclusion, in terms of Carter–Lyons–Berwald, by comparing farm gate sale prices between the United States and Canada without accounting for the distortion of American subsidies, including the export enhancement program.
Even on spot prices, when you folks get into comparing spot prices of crops, you basically get into comparing a different variety of crops, but not the same grain. The fact of the matter is that I know one variety of grain you're quite enamoured over, Falcon. Yes, the spot price is sometimes higher for it. But what do the Americans do with it? They buy Falcon, a lower-quality grain, and they blend it in with the higher-quality grains and sell the product.
So it's not a fair comparison, Mr. Chairman.
I guess the question is this: where we do have accurate figures? We listened to your figures, and you say probably, probably, probably. I heard the same arguments from many people during the Crow rate fight. Just get rid of the Crow rate, my God, and we'd be wealthy and prosperous in western Canada. Now these very same people are saying the same thing about the Canadian Wheat Board. But you have no concrete studies to prove so, unless it's the discredited Carter–Lyons–Berwald study.
The Wheat Board, though, in response to the task force report that they tabled on their website, claims—and they back it up with documentation, and there is the independent study by Hartley Furtan—that the loss to the industry collectively in western Canada would be between $530 million and $655 million. How are you going to compensate for that loss when we have it? That's my question.