I would agree with you, but it seems to me your industry is suffering an identity crisis because people think beekeepers are involved in honey alone and don't understand the nature of the business bees do, which is pollinating the vast majority of crops we need to harvest that we wouldn't otherwise be able to. So I think that perhaps is a public awareness program that needs to happen so we can identify things.
But I appreciate your input on what it takes to get your research and development done, because if the bee colonies collapse across this country, we're going to be in one heck of a state. I thank you for that.
Getting back to Mr. Légaré and Mr. Pellerin, we talked earlier, and I believe on this side as well, Mr. Richard, about the sense of food safety, food security, which brings me to try to weave a tapestry, if you will, around when we talk about buying local and finding places on the shelf. The area I live in, the Niagara Peninsula, is clearly an agricultural area, not only for the tender fruit and wine-growing industries, but just over a year and a half ago we witnessed the closure of a company called CanGro, which was the last tender fruit processing and canning plant east of the Rocky Mountains. This meant clingstone peach growers had no market; they had nowhere to put it and no one to take it. Suggestions were made that they try taking it to the United States. The reality in the Niagara region is that they pulled them out. So there are very few clingstone orchards left for peaches because that canner is gone.
If you could speak to this whole sense of the food security and the food sovereignty issues around the need, and there is a need out there to get placement of food, because there is a demand from folks who are saying they want to buy local.... They do buy local as much as they can, but they have a hard time identifying what is local when they don't buy at a market. They can go to the market or to the farm gate, they know what that is, but when they go to the supermarket or a larger store, they don't always know where it's from because of the way the product is placed.
Why is it when the demand is clearly there to buy local...? And a couple of things are self-evident: first, we're helping the producer who lives in our neighbourhood, or perhaps very close to it in some cases; and second, traceability is extremely easy. It's a lot harder to trace spinach and lettuce that's just travelled 8,000 kilometres to get to the table or to the store than it is to trace that lettuce that perhaps was picked this summer and travelled fewer than 50 kilometres to get to the store. Why is it that we seem to have such huge difficulties with that sort of supply?
I'll allow either or both sides to comment, whoever wants to take it up first.