I will say it makes sense, Mr. Chair.
Havey is right. Is there enough room in the sensitive product category? The problem right now is that Canada's position on sensitive products is not on the table any more. That left with Andy Mitchell, and that's a huge problem.
Looking at the overall structure of how we do agriculture policy, I sometimes wonder if we're trapped, to a certain extent, by our history. I do think the Canadian farm bill proposed by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture makes a lot of sense. I quite honestly don't know how we can structure that in Canada, because of the way we're structured as governments, federally and provincially and everything else. It's a complicated way to go.
Whether we can or whether we can't, would it not be better if we learned some lessons from the United States? They're much more strategic in how they do their farm policy. They've got all kinds of programming in green programs that, for whatever reason, we don't want to even consider. I mean, CFIA costs could be paid for by the Government of Canada, and they're green. Environmental programming we could have coming out our ears, and it would be green; it wouldn't be considered a subsidy, and we wouldn't be seeing headlines in The Globe and Mail about farmers being subsidized again. Re-think this thing out of the box somewhat and see what we can do at those ends. Lots could be done there, rather than on specific commodity support as such. Maybe we have to look at those areas.
The bottom line is that we've got to support our Canadian farmers. Our main competition is the United States, and if they're supporting them dollar for dollar, we've got to meet them dollar for dollar. I don't see any question about that.
And how are we going to convince not only their party but our own party and the others as well? When we talk assistance for farmers, it's not necessarily partisan politics; it's our own centres, in terms of how do we get there, dollar for dollar?