Thanks for the question, Alex.
It's a huge kettle of fish, it really is, and it's a complex business, but at the same time, I think our federal government, along with our farm leaders, have to take the blinkers of naiveté off. When we have a negotiator sitting around an international table at an international forum, we have to come out as strongly as possible to defend our producers, to defend our farm families across the country who are trying to supply food to local markets and balance that with the export markets.
To me, it's more of a balance. Right now, we're so skewed to the position of trade policy, not agricultural policy. We have to get back to a more balanced position where we have a domestic agricultural policy where feeding our own people by our own producers is equally important and as relevant as exporting any of the product.
Just because we can do something doesn't make it right—and Mr. Harding, no offence intended here, but I'm going to pick on the hog industry just a little bit as a rhetorical question. Just because corn and grain can be grown in Brazil at an extremely low cost of production, and then the Brazilians can transport that corn or grain to China and allow the Chinese to finish their hogs, and just because those hogs can then be transported back into Canada at a much cheaper price to the consumer, does that make sense? Just because it can be done, does it make sense to do it, given the fact also of the transportation costs in there and that cumulative effect to global warming?
Just because something can be done, is it right, or are there other issues that we should look at, such as sustaining our own rural communities, such as trying to reduce transportation? The 1,500-mile Caesar salad that we're all so well-acquainted with...just because we can do it, does it make it right?
As our president, Stewart Wells, says, there's a reason that the WTO was called the World Trade Organization and not the World Income Protection Organization.