Sure. That's a wonderful answer, and a brief one too.
As I'm here at this committee as a visitor, I want to thank you all for letting me be here and have a lunch and everything.
I was wondering if there would be any legal angles at all to this thing, and it strikes me that there's a huge one.
When I was going through law school, we were just going through the era of enacting the Combines Investigation Act, as it was called then. Lawson Hunter, who was from the University of New Brunswick Law School, was the first commissar of the CIA, which has now turned into the Competition Act.
I know a little bit about the Competition Act's not having enough teeth or claws, whatever you want to call it, to intercede in anything that doesn't relate to the price to the end consumer. I know there's been some litigation up the chain with some of your clients or representative companies. It seems to be woefully inadequate in this case. What I'm hearing...and it almost unites the parties, which we shouldn't let out of this room; people might think we're not at loggerheads, the way we see every day. It seems there is a feeling in this room, without any real proof, that there is price fixing or supply restriction with respect to potash worldwide and in Canada, and it affects Canadian farmers. I don't know how you can deny that, when first of all you say that production has been cut back, jobs have been lost, yet you talk about--maybe worldwide--a lack of demand.
Let's put the cards on the table here. I'm not a farming guy and I don't know much about fertilizer, but the free market, which we've talked about here.... Mr. Hoback said it was great that in Saskatchewan the free market reigned and there was more potash mining coming online. Yet he launched into a whole aspect of it that, to me, cries out for at least an investigation into how the free market is working with respect to the price of potash, which I understand is hurting Canadian farmers.
Is there price fixing? Is there supply restriction being mandated by the three or four companies that control this commodity? Yes or no?