Thank you for asking those questions.
First of all, we talked about it initially in the context of having a rapid response tariff mechanism. Perhaps it's better if we do have a minimum price, in the sense that it's less on the retaliatory side and more on the side of maintaining market stability. For those purposes, because there are so many other situations in which reference prices are used to comply with certain obligations in international trade, we go back in history and use a reference period to print and put out agricultural payments--general payments to the farming community--because you can't use last year's figures to comply with trade rules. In that sense, using a historical average would make more sense to arrive at this thing.
I didn't get a chance to answer the previous question about whether this is trying to manage supply. It is absolutely not. We fully realize we're importing 50% of the apple needs for this country, so we're never going to be able to establish supply management in that sense. We just want to bring some stability; we want some proactive mechanism. That could be as simple as having a reference price at the border. Canada Border Services Agency monitors the price of imports coming in all the time. If there are any anomalies, they can take some quick corrective measures to say the product will not be allowed to come in because it is below this reference price.
Where is this right now? Our resolution was passed at the AGMs of both the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and the Canadian Horticultural Council. We've said that we've already contacted the CFA recently; their policy analysts will be looking at this, and we hope to develop something further with them.
Ultimately maybe this is not an issue for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, but more of an issue for the trade minister. I think that's eventually where it's going to end up--in the trade minister's department.
I imagine the words “emergency tariff” have more clout, but we're looking for something that's going to work.