Thank you.
I believe, Mr. White, the chair is suggesting what we may ask and what we may not.
In any event, welcome to the committee and welcome to Canada. We do wish you well in your job.
We'll see whether the chair allows this or not, but the reason you were originally requested to appear was because of the concern in the country and by committee members and certainly by myself about the great suspicion around your appointment. I think you've alleviated that in your remarks and in your performance to date at the board, to be honest with you. But there was great suspicion around your appointment that you may be appointed to achieve the Prime Minister's objective, which is to undermine the Canadian Wheat Board. There's a lot of evidence to lead us to that point, the relentless attack on the board.
We've seen directives to the Canadian Wheat Board from the minister's office directing the board to do certain things that we've never seen from previous ministers. We've seen gag orders on the elected board members—and that's one of the questions I will be raising to you—gag orders that were originally placed on the board under threat of two years in jail and huge fines.
I would like to know if those gag orders are still on the board--in other words, that they can't defend themselves and can't promote the board in terms of its policies and really challenge the government. We've seen manipulated elections by one minister, and it seems the other one may follow suit.
The key is that we've seen the firing—