Thank you.
Thank you, lady and gentlemen, for coming here and making some good presentations.
I might say, to begin, that I'm pleased to see that in Quebec you recognize the marketing power of marketing through a single desk. There are some people around this table opposed to that kind of system of marketing power for producers. Certainly not me; I support it strongly.
In the previous discussion, Mr. Vincent's answer was “if” the EU respected the rules. Somebody else said “if” the United States would respect the rules. There are a lot of “ifs” out there. While we're waiting for all these ifs to happen in the theoretical world of free trade, whenever we're going to have a level playing field down the road, we're going to have no producers left. We're caught in the industry's consolidating. We're losing producers each and every day. The government is sitting on its hands, just increasing the loan portfolios and not really doing anything at the producer level to keep these producers in business.
I'm hearing horror stories every day. I sat on a plane last week with a guy who sold 250 cows. I talked to another fellow on the phone a few minutes ago, after the meeting started. He sold off 180. We're losing an industry. One way to put it, I guess, is that Rome is burning while we sit here and watch.
Let me ask you some specific questions. First, about specified risk material removal, should the Government of Canada be covering the full cost of that, at least to the minimal level that they are in the United States, to make us cost-competitive?
Any response to that? It's not a trade violation.