With regard to your first question, and the subsidies and the amount that we've been spending based on what the Americans are spending, I think it's a clear indication of what a strategy can do for you. What they basically put their money into, those five commodities, we probably spend per capita very close to, but we blast it out over a large number of commodities—200—and hope it sticks to somebody. We just continue to do that time after time, instead of doing it by a strategic method to ensure that money goes into the industry.
They've decided their producers will be profitable, and then they, in turn, will supply a commodity so that the infrastructure above them can take advantage of that product and become profitable, as the next level above them becomes profitable because they also have a cheap commodity to work from. It's indicative of what a planned concerted strategy can do for an industry.
Now, do we need to have a war room? My understanding is that's not the Canadian way. But we need to become more proactive in recognizing what is happening in other jurisdictions and how it's affecting our producers, and become more proactive in ensuring that our producers have the competitive tools to be able to compete in the marketplace. We, as producers, are very good at producing. We need the competitive tools to ensure that we have that competitive advantage with other jurisdictions.
Now, the second part of your question talked about how other types of product come into Canada based on a regulation that is probably totally different from our own. There are a number of them. We talk about the supplemental beef imports coming in. That beef is probably produced under totally different regulation from what we have in our own country, yet it is allowed to come into this country and compete with the beef we have here.
Mr. Wildeman talked about the fact that we export a tremendous amount of beef out of this country, yet we also bring a certain amount of beef into this country on an over-tariff. And simply, our producers here have our Canadian costs to work with to produce that beef, yet they have to compete against a product that doesn't have the same regulation they have. So I think there are things that we need to do to recognize regulation in other countries and harmonize.