Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's great to be back at the agriculture committee, visiting with some friends and some foes, who've been hailed to look at this important issue that is of great concern right across this country, but especially in my riding of Selkirk—Interlake.
I'm one who's still involved in the cattle industry. I have a brother who's ranching in Saskatchewan and another brother ranching with my father in western Manitoba. There's no question that the hurt is real and substantial, and we have to address it.
I do appreciate everybody taking their time out of their busy schedules to be here and presenting to us today. In the NFU presentation, there's actually some stuff in here that I agree with. I do have a concern about packer-controlled cattle, and packer ownership specifically, but I don't want to see us get too carried away and forego some of the risk management tools that are out there, like foreign contracting. As a producer, and I know lots of producers, I want to have access to those tools to manage the risk. So we have to make sure we don't get carried away with some of these comments.
The one thing I was hoping to hear from NFU today, though, was an apology. I was kind of hoping that Neil Peacock would be here to talk about what he was doing down at a meeting with R-CALF in Montana. I look at the press releases from the 13th, from the 19th, letters to the editor from Stewart Wells. There's no question, not once does it denounce R-CALF and their behaviour as it relates to COOL and how that is causing significant injury to the cattlemen, taking dollars out of our pockets today because of that support they have for Mr. Vilsack and everything they're doing in the U.S. to stem the flow of Canadian goods, Canadian cattle, and Canadian beef into that marketplace.
You do talk about what R-CALF did on BSE. I can tell you that the chair of this committee and I have been in the courtrooms in Seattle, in Portland, in Sioux Falls to make sure the Canadian position was carried forward in those courtrooms. I see CCA is at all those hearings, so it's nice that NFU has finally come onside and said that the BSE challenge by R-CALF is bad. But they don't denounce what they're doing to our market today and how they're injuring our producers on COOL. So I was kind of hoping you guys would say, “We're sorry we were there. We're sorry that we betrayed the Canadian farmers, sorry that we actually went there and gave legitimacy to an organization that doesn't have any ground to stand on within the more progressive cattle circles within North America.”
Now the one thing we have to realize is that when you talk about country-of-origin labelling, as a producer—and I know when I chaired this committee, and the committee travelled down to Washington to meet with our counterparts, we challenged the Americans that what they're doing is in complete violation of trade law—I'm not scared to label my product as Canadian. We know it's good. We know we can go out there and sell it, and that when consumers eat it, they will love it.
The problem is that it's adding cost to the overall production system, and it's being used as a hammer to decrease the value of our product rather than increase it and allow us to get more out of the marketplace. So this is a problem, because it's mandatory. This letter that Vilsack sent out to the industry has even created more concern out there, and it's leading prices to fall farther. So rather than talk about embracing country-of-origin labelling, we need to be talking about getting rid of the mandatory side of this, and if we can make some value-added opportunities through labelling, I think it's a better route to go.
You also talked about, and I also heard Mr. Jeffrey talk about, the better balance of production and consumption. I have a great concern. I agree with Mr. Fossen and Mr. Rosing in what they're saying, that we'd have to lose 60% of our producers; 60% of the cowherd has to disappear. That's not even taking into consideration the amount of dairy beef that we have in the industry that's not going to disappear because it's in the supply management system. So the question becomes, who leaves? Who do we take down to the average levels? Where does that number stand at, and what is that going to do to our rural communities?
Mr. Rosing said that in Selkirk—Interlake, in the riding that we have there, all we can do is run cattle. There isn't any other opportunity. If we have to cut down our numbers by 50% or more, we'll lose every small town. We'll lose our schools, we'll lose our hospitals, and the socio-economic impact will be too great to even be able to deal with it.
I want to turn my questions over to Mr. Fossen and Mr. Rosing to talk about how they think we should be moving ahead to stimulate our rural economies rather than have our ranching communities decimated.
