Thank you for your testimony.
We are talking about competitiveness in the agrifood industry, and you are obviously a major player. In fact, you are the place where consumers go to buy food. Nonetheless, food can be found at Canadian Tire. Recently, I was impressed to see there was much more there than before. Normally, I go to the drugstore to buy certain kinds of products. Some would say that I obviously need many beauty products and medications, among other things, but nonetheless, I don't go to the drugstore to buy food. Yet there is more and more food to be found at the drugstore. Fortunately, most people still go to grocery stores to buy the food they eat every day. So you are a major player, and your testimony is very useful indeed.
Mr. Scott, you say that people in Quebec are extremely aware of the importance of local purchasing, and that's true, but I would like to make you aware of something that is becoming applicable everywhere. Just recently, in my riding, a honey producer that dealt with local groceries received a very important letter from Loblaws: the letter stated that, if the producer wanted to continue being a Loblaws supplier, it would have to go through their Toronto warehouses. That local producer was selling its honey without going through a middleman. It was a win-win situation. Since the honey didn't come from China, or anywhere else in the world, there was no long distance shipping involved and no greenhouse gas production was associated with transporting the honey.
You can see how ridiculous this is. The producer would have to provide a large quantity of honey, which it cannot do. Many producers who have been affected by this measure will have to ship their products to Toronto from Victoriaville. The products will then leave Toronto and be shipped back to the areas around Victoriaville, my area. The economics of this are absurd. You have to be certified by headquarters in Toronto before you can sell your products locally. What makes everyone so angry is that the grocer can't tell the people in his own chain that he wants a given product because he knows the product and his customers want it. The whole thing is completely ridiculous.
I know that, when you were with the Competition Bureau, you came to speak to us. Today, do you still believe that the Competition Bureau legislation can help us deal with situations like this? When I read how the abuse of a dominant position is defined, I wonder whether the example I have just given you could be qualified as abuse of a dominant position. In my view, it can.