Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank everybody for coming today. This is a very interesting debate we've been having at this committee. I believe this is a great piece of legislation that's going to bring a lot of benefits, not only to our farm families and our small farm families but also to our environment.
I'd like to talk a little bit about the fact that this is a new industry in Canada. Any time you have a new industry you start out with a base, but inevitably it always gets better. Your technology always advances to far more than what it was when you first started. Oftentimes the advances that you end up with at the end of the day are things that you couldn't even conceive of at the beginning.
So I understand if you don't have all the answers to my question, but a perfect example of this is the oil sands. What we started with in northern Alberta, where I'm from, almost looks archaic compared with what we have today, the advances that we have.
I would like to start out, Mr. Thomson, by asking about some of the research and development that you see coming out of this and some of the advantages that you see coming out of these initiatives.