Yes.
Thank you for that, Darcy. I've always wondered that, and I've never asked you before.
A key point that I think you've all made is that the United States and the EU are certainly financing their primary producers far more than we are.
I don't disagree with you on your trade position--although I do disagree with you some on supply management--in that we have to get to a trade position where we have the playing field a lot more level than it currently is. However, if you look at the record over the last 20 years, and we're seeing that here, you can see that while exports have gone up on a plane of about 30 or 45 degrees, farm income has gone down.
The figures are just absolutely dramatic when you put them in constant numbers. The fact of the matter is, we've lost 3,600 farmers a year over the last five years. Farm debt is four times higher per farm in Canada than it is in the United States, hitting $54 billion.
While the objectives may be good in getting to that level playing field, what are we going to do in the meantime? I mean, we cannot sit back and let our industry go broke, folks. We just can't do it. What are you suggesting we do in the meantime?
I know I'm going to run out of time, but to the Grain Growers, I don't know which one said it, but perhaps you could be a little more specific on the public research front where the federal government needs to step up to the plate. I agree 100%. But our research now seems to be short term. We're still living off the benefits of the public research that was done in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a shot in the dark, often, but it was paid for by the public.
Those are the two questions. What do we do in the meantime for our farmers? The U.S. will put farmers number one and trade number two. Canada, whether it's a Conservative government or a Liberal government, tradition has shown, has put trade number one and farmers number two. It can't go on that way any longer.