Thanks, Mr. Chair.
In the interest of time, I'll ask my questions off the top and go from there.
Mr. Weber, in the emerging renewable fuels proposal, you raised some concerns, and I do have the same concern. I'm a little worried that we may end up setting up a profit centre for the oil companies here rather than a profit centre for the rural communities and farmers. Basically what you're suggesting is that there be government intervention in the marketplace, as there is in the United States, in order to accomplish that. I wonder if you could expand on that further.
With regard to the other points that were raised, mainly by APAS, Ken mentioned the accumulated debt. What George Brinkman has written in terms of his numbers with regard to comparing Canada and U.S. debt is absolutely startling. He blames the per capita farm debt to a great extent for the problem we're having in income. He says this:
As a percentage of income, Canadian government subsidies represent 116% of farm incomes, but U.S. government subsidies represent only 37% of U.S. farm income.
Now, I would add that those at least are the subsidies we can see in the United States. There are a lot of subsidies down there we can't see in terms of health and safety and some of those you mentioned.
In your proposal, you basically said that Canada has refused to implement policies that challenge other governments' actions. Can you expand on that a little bit? Do we need basically quick-response war rooms in this country, as we have during elections?
Your 17,000-square-foot building is going to be available, I understand, James.
Do we need to have something like that in place, a quick-response war room to challenge the dumping of products, etc., in Canada?
Secondly, on quality and health, it baffles me how we allow products into this country that are growing from the herbicides or whatever that we're not allowed to use. How do you propose to deal with that? Ian's proposals, I think, were pretty self-explanatory.
Perhaps you could answer those couple of questions.