Good afternoon. Thank you for coming.
I'm going to start with the statement that often we can see that those primary producers in Canada are suffering, and many would say it's because of a direct result of U.S. government and European Union policies of subsidies. I think a lot of us often will agree with that.
Many will ask, then, why is the federal government not standing up for farmers vis-à-vis...within the ramifications of WTO, but still not standing up for farmers to be stronger to maybe counteract what they're doing south of us to have something more substantial here?
I want to use an example, and the example I want to use is the fruit growing industry. Maybe I can get some feedback here, starting with Darrin and down the table. I'll try to be brief.
Currently the B.C. fruit growers, I believe with endorsement from the horticulture association, have said that they would like the federal government to undertake a rapid response mechanism to combat the dumping of Washington State apples in British Columbia and the rest of Canada. In other words, if the dumping occurs today, well, then, tomorrow we have trade action taken to stop this--in other words, we increase the tariffs.
They see this as one way of not using federal money but using federal clout and using federal teeth to stop this until this problem is regulated. The history of this in the past has been that when this type of trade action happened, by the time we got things going, months later, the prices would have increased. It would be too late. Plus it would be costly.
This could be considered as a disaster response. It could be considered as a cost of production. What is your feedback? These folks have come out with this, and I'm just wondering what your thinking is on this.
Darrin, maybe we could start with you.