Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the opportunity to come before you today, particularly as chair of the task force on implementing marketing choice for wheat and barley. In addition to the two members of the task force here, the other members are Brenda Brindle, Mike Bast, John Groenewegen, and Bruce Johnson.
Our task, Mr. Chair, was to recommend options on how best to implement marketing choice. We were asked to identify and propose how to address certain technical issues and transition issues, both for a voluntary Canadian Wheat Board and for the Canadian grain industry.
Our report was released on Monday of this week by Minister Strahl.
In the report we used the name CWB II as the transformed Canadian Wheat Board, which would be owned by farmers and operated on a voluntary basis, without any government regulatory powers.
Paul Orsak will speak for four minutes or so on the proposed business model for CWB II and preparing for change in forming CWB II, and then Rob Davies will speak again for about four minutes on the launch of CWB II with transition measures and how a competitive grain industry would operate with marketing choice, and then we'd be pleased to answer question. So in total we think it will be about ten minutes maximum.
Let me turn it over to Paul to go over the first part of the report.