Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
From my point of view, this is kind of a fine line when you ask, “How do we get tough?”
We've talked for a long time, for example, about American farmers being allowed to use carbadox and we aren't. We're not allowed to use it, yet the meat that's grown with carbadox in the U.S. comes into Canada and we decide that it's safe. That's a grey area for us. We're hesitant to go down that road because we obviously have products that may be unavailable in other countries. We play by the rules; in Canada, that tends to be the way we do it, and I'm proud to be a Canadian. But I would go farther than that and say that we do very much need to start to get a little more tough.
Several of the other speakers have mentioned a lot of the cost-recovery fees and that we need to make the effort to level the playing field, and we need to get tough. That's going to cost us a little bit of money, but it's just not justified to be charging us the cost-recovery fees that our direct competitor doesn't have to pay.
We need to get tough on things like the Canada-Korea free trade agreement. The Americans have an advantage in Korea that we don't have, and we need to get a little tougher with some of those things. We need to get a little tougher with our access into Russia, for example. Americans, again, have access into Russia and into the free trade. You guys can explain this better than I can, but I know it's a real issue.
We need to get a little tougher on some of those things. We need to just work hard at some of those things.