Thank you very much, gentlemen.
We have met on many occasions and discussed the same subject matter. I'm going to lead off in a little different direction. We're not going to get into details today, because we've worked on them for the 14 years I've been here and I don't think we're one bit closer than we were then.
I'm just wondering if it's time to start thinking about whether we need to have 10 different ministers of agriculture in Canada, and that we need one. That's an idea you might ponder. You might not want to give me the answer today, but think about it.
We know there are different treasuries in this country. We're trying to talk about fiscal imbalance. We're trying to transfer dollars from the rich to the have-nots, and it'll never be enough. Maybe we need to look at food security as a matter of national security. If we looked at it in that context and eliminated the provinces in terms of their responsiveness to agriculture, we would probably have even more money for agriculture, and at least we would know whose ox was being gored, or whose ox should be gored. Right now it's blame, blame, blame. One blames one level of government for it and the other blames the other level of government. I think we're really at a stalemate.
Quebec and Ontario have put forward a concept of business risk management. We had market revenue that provinces enjoyed. I haven't yet had a farmer tell me they didn't think market revenue was a good program. So there was a program designed to mimic the risk management program we had a number of years ago. But we don't find agreement across this country on implementation of that kind of bill.
How do you as farm leaders see it? As your representative politicians, we're hearing the same old story. Now there's a move to get rid of the Wheat Board. What's next? The supply managed sector?
I have to wonder what the farm leadership commitment to agriculture is. I know you have a job to do, but so do we. I think it's time we started wrestling this thing to the ground and saying, listen, this is where we need to go.