Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I appreciate my colleagues' support of the motion.
I'd first like to address a couple of things. One is that I'm glad to hear Mr. Easter give our government credit for making changes that we've been calling for for 10 years.
Second, I think they're two very different motions in the sense that mine is going to be very detailed, as Wayne said, very in-depth on the Competition Act. I believe Randy's talking about things like SRMs and some of these regulatory burdens our farmers have been placed with that they're paying for and other farmers aren't necessarily. That's not to put words in Randy's mouth, but I believe that's where he's going. I think those are two significantly different issues, and I think we need to devote time to them both.
The reason I'm moving this forward now is that I'm a little concerned to see this from the report, and that's why I wanted this motion because I wanted you guys to discuss it. We're talking about potentially 15 meetings down the road when we may get to this, if there's not some other issue of the day come up that we're going to want to discuss, or some other estimates, or whatever. You're talking about potentially 20 meetings away. That's 10 weeks; that's a long time. I'm hoping Mr. Easter will support me in moving this forward more quickly. I'm not saying this needs to be at the top of the list, but I would like to see it moved forward more quickly.
I noticed under Mr. Easter's document “Empowering Canadian Farmers in the Marketplace”, July 2005, he has a whole section of recommendations on this that he could really sink his teeth into and look at some of the changes he wasn't able to get done when he was in government.
I would really like to see us move forward with this as quickly as possible. I think these are very serious changes that our farmers have been calling for for a long time.