Okay.
I speak strongly in favour of the motion, Mr. Chair. You have—as we had in a letter of October 27, 2009—all the key players in the beef industry, who came before this committee, all agreeing on the need for this $31.70 per head, which is a competitiveness gap between us and the United States. This letter—the industry totally coming together—was signed by the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, the Dairy Farmers of Canada, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, the Canadian Meat Council, the Canadian Renderers Association, la Fédération des producteurs de bovins du Québec, Levinoff-Colbex, XL Foods, Atlantic Beef Products, and Beef Value Chain Roundtable. Now, that's a pretty impressive representation of the industry. When they come together and all agree on basically what André's motion is, then I think we have to support it.
We've seen one plant in our beef industry in Ontario go under basically because of the SRM removal fees and the non-competitive position that put them in.
This is not a lot of money. For anyone going to vote against this, Mr. Chair, let me tell them that in December 2007 this standing committee, then under the chairmanship of James Bezan, made a recommendation on this very issue. I'll just quote what it said in that report of two years ago:
Finally, it has come to the Standing Committee's attention that government officials may have underestimated the cost burden associated with the specified risk material ban compliance for meat processors. Although a joint federal-provincial initiative does exist to provide assistance for processing plants to invest in new capital requirements, this program does nothing to alleviate the effects of increasing disposal costs resulting from the SRM ban, which contrary to the situation in the United States, automatically brought the value of SRM down to nothing. Therefore
--and I'll read the recommendation--
Recommendation 6: The Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food recommends that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada review program funding available to beef producers, processors and renderers to help them with the disposal and storage costs of ruminant specified risk material.
Well, that was two years ago. Nothing has happened. As a result, we're seeing the decimation of a lot of small cow-calf operators in the country. If you go to any stockyard in western Canada or eastern Canada, you'll see pregnant animals going through for slaughter because people are leaving the industry. Our industry is non-competitive, and as I said earlier, never have we seen the beef and hog industries in as much distress, never. And never have we seen a government do less. It certainly hasn't done anything on these recommendations that are here.
For all those reasons, Mr. Chair, I think this motion is of critical importance. And we could go back to what the witnesses said before this committee on November 3, though I'll not bother going back and going through all the evidence presented. I congratulate André for bringing it forward for us to pass here. If the government could act on it, it might—it might—help in the survival of some beef producers in this country. In terms of the cost to the government, it's about $24 million per year.
We already know, as Pierre and I debated in the House last night, that the Government of Canada this year has spent $961 million, $400,000 less in business risk management, when they could have reprofiled the money to the beef and hog industry and didn't do it. So that hurt the industry. We know as well that they've lapsed, under Agriculture and Agri-Food, about $150 million under various grants and contributions on environment, food safety, competitive initiatives, etc. So $24 million, given what the government has lapsed and failed to put towards the industry, is not a lot of money.
Given that the industry is united in this request to come before this committee--the committee itself recommended action some two years ago--I would call on the committee, with the greatest urgency, to pass this motion and to get this money through government and to make them more competitive in the hands of the processing industry and primary producers.