Thanks.
I'd like to follow up on that same line of questioning.
My riding is in central east Ontario, the former Victoria County, now Kawartha Lakes. I was speaking yesterday with a dairy farmer who also sits on the Ontario board. He told me that in my riding there are about 70 dairy producers and that in the past month, four of them decided to pack it in. He had spoken to them, and it wasn't my sense that they had made a business decision in a stable market, but a decision under duress, and that people had lost hope and were leaving the industry.
So I go back to the question I asked really quickly at the end of the last round, that I feel as though we're hearing two very different stories, one from you here today that dairy is a relatively stable industry and that things are generally okay, other than for some manageable issues. Yet I hear an entirely different story when I'm in my riding and I talk to dairy farmers, including some who have been in the business for 30 or 40 years, who are saying that the combination of the long-term threat from the WTO talks and the impact of changes to MPCs and their growth, and where they see that going, is making them feel very pessimistic about the future.
So when we heard from the Dairy Farmers recently, their point was that:
Unrestricted protein imports could increase non-fat solids surpluses beyond 100 million kilograms. This is more than the system can bear and will lead to the collapse of the domestic price structure for non-fat solids, putting a very quick end to supply management in Canadian dairy production.
To me, that falls under the category of crying wolf. I guess often when you cry wolf there is no wolf there, but sometimes you cry wolf because there actually is a wolf there.
So my question is, how is it that the Dairy Farmers of Canada and the Dairy Farmers of Ontario are, in your opinion, so far off the mark in terms of their very real fears about the near future?