I think you raise a good point about the challenges that Canadian agriculture faces. A number of us are farmers ourselves, so we understand that.
As we've seen agriculture policy develop around the world and in Canada, we've seen these...I'll call them weapons used by different countries to see them support their domestic industries or push aside any exports that come into their countries. As the WTO has developed, it's always been kind of blamed. It's been put forward that because of the WTO we can't support our farmers. It's always been my belief that we didn't go far enough in the Uruguay Round. If we had put proper things in place to stop the domestic subsidies in other countries and the export subsidies, it would have created that level playing field that you're talking about. I think that's what the Doha Round was aimed at doing. When you try to take the U.S. from a support of $50 billion and get them down to $14 billion, or even less, in what they can do through the Farm Bill, you're effectively making us more competitive.
Our competitiveness is a lens we have to look at everything through, whether it's our domestic supports or our farm programs and how they deal with other farm programs. I think what happened--and history will tell different tales--is we had a low currency and a number of other things going for us, and we used that to our advantage. When those things changed, we didn't see that coming. We needed to have the things in place so that other countries understood that they can't go beyond certain levels of support or export subsidies. That's where we're seeing backsliding now.
We're seeing a pork export subsidy in the EU that's hampering our industry internationally. We're seeing country-of-origin labelling and those things. You see those kinds of things that can be looked after in trade deals. That's the problem with bilaterals. If we have a bilateral with the EU, I hope it reflects somewhat on domestic supports. Bilaterals don't generally do that. But we need that kind of enforcement worldwide so that we can be competitive.