Thanks for being here today. I'm an MP from central Ontario, a riding with a fair amount of agriculture in the southern half of it. I come from the northern half, where the rocks and the hills and the trees are. So I'm not a farmer, but I'm empathetic and sympathetic to the farm community and I'm trying to learn about it. I'm trying to see if there's a path through this somehow so that we can make farming viable, because at the end of the day that's what we're really talking about: creating a situation where farming is viable and you can sell what you produce and make a living at it and cover your costs.
One of the things that keep striking me as I listen in these consultations is the difference between people who are producing basic commodities versus those who have figured out a way, somehow, to increase the value of whatever it is they produce, maybe through further processing, maybe through innovative marketing, maybe through direct marketing.
The example of the eggs in Florida I found interesting. They're still eggs, right? The dozen that were being sold for over $2, and you were getting two and a half dozen for less than $2. And people are paying $2.80. So I say this as a consumer. I stand in front of the milk in the supermarket and I have to decide whether I'm going to pay an extra dollar for that micro-filtered milk. I don't know. I don't know whether that's better or not, but I think there are a lot of consumers who struggle to pay for their groceries every week and there are lots of other consumers whose grocery bill is a relatively small portion of what they spend. They don't think twice about adding $20 to their cable bill to get a bunch of pay channels, so they have the money to spend.
I think somehow we have to figure out a way to make consumers value Canadian farm products more.
Mr. Dykstra, you talked about food standards. When I buy raspberries grown in Canada, I have a sense of the food standards that were applied when those were produced, but if they're from Guatemala, I have no idea what was used there. I know in the past sometimes food standards have been used as a non-tariff barrier, and there are famous cases in Japan and Korea and other places where they just use it basically to keep things out. So I'm not talking about that.
Do you have any ideas in terms of how in Canada we can make that connection with consumers? They're not going to buy it because we browbeat them into buying it, but I think consumers will pay 50¢ more for something if they actually think it's better for them or their families.
From that point of view, perhaps, Mr. Dykstra, you could start. Do you have any ideas of how, as Canadian producers, we can communicate that to consumers so they're prepared to pay more for something that they feel is of higher value, that's produced here in Canada?