I'd like to respond to the cost of inspection. We were always told that as soon as the door was cracked open, inspection fees would continue to rise, and we showed how indeed they would, that as inspection fees rise on seed certification and other things, fewer people would participate. It's a proven fact.
Continually, CFIA and Agriculture Canada have worked against us as growers on that. It costs $120 to $150 for a load of potatoes to go across the border. That's a big fee. They've left us at a point where now we're trying to give up something of what we need here in Canada to protect our Canadian growers, in order to get rid of that fee, through negotiating, through ministerial exemptions or marketing orders. It's constant. At Industry Canada and Trade Canada, we've had three, four, or maybe even five people just constantly going there and negotiating something, providing our input, and you'd swear you were at a different place.
I think, Wayne, you used the term “corporate memory” as being almost gone there a few years ago. Well, it's really gone now. We have nobody there to really represent agriculture. We have people coming, people going, people acting all the time. We need some stability in that system. We need some of the on-farm food safety thing. We need funding. That's all green, or orange, or yellow, or whatever you want to call it, where the federal government could help these growers and indeed have no repercussions.
The U.S. are very adept at doing this. They put millions of dollars into their marketing programs for french fries and fresh potatoes. They'll send potatoes from Colorado with free freight into Uruguay.
In our markets, we were major players in 30 countries around the world, and now we're all but starving to death because we have nobody working for us and no consistency, no one fighting for us for the phytosanitary programs, and I could go on and on.
I'm sorry to be so long, but we have a major problem in the federal system with our agricultural programs. Before, when they were preaching $20 billion by the year 2000, at least we had some support. That seems to have disappeared in the last few years.