Thank you for the question.
Mr. Chairman, I briefly answered the question of the meat code earlier. There's a whole segment of history that I did not mention. In fact you will agree that I'm not the youngest guy on this panel, so I've been around for some time. I can tell you that before the agency was created at the Department of Agriculture we started to work on a national meat code in the late 1970s. With the agreement of all the provinces, we came up with a draft meat code that was to be adopted by the provinces. Unfortunately the difficulty has always been how this meat code is going to be interpreted and implemented. The major difficulty so far has been that maybe provinces are not eager to implement the standard in a way that would be acceptable to their neighbours. Basically what this means is that if Ontario agrees to a Quebec meat inspection standard, as an example, then a product that is inspected by either Quebec or Ontario would move freely between the two provinces on that basis.
Over the years there has been a certain reluctance, I must admit, by the provinces to agree to the implementation of the standard. That's one part of it. The other difficulty has been related to international trade. We have to be very careful in terms of how we set that standard, because there is a danger that whatever standard we have as an interprovincial standard becomes a norm for imported products. I think the agency has always been conscious of that.
On the deadstock situation, with your permission, I'll ask Krista or Cameron to provide comments.