Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Easter raises some issues. Obviously we do at some point need to look at cleaning up the screw-ups by the former Liberal government in 2005. It has created a large problem in our area as well.
First of all, we have this report, which, as Mr. Atamanenko said, shouldn't take that much time if we all get down to it and are willing to cooperate a little bit and get this report on competitiveness done, which is very important to the industry. It also lays out one of the ways forward that our committee feels for the future of agriculture and ways out of some of the problems.
I do agree that we should talk about the hog sector and some of the things going on, but I would personally like to see us deal with the SRM issue and the regulatory disparity between Canada and the United States. I think our committee should take some time to lay out what our vision is moving forward on that and how we're going to address that. Obviously I'm sure Mr. Easter is secretly happy that rather than just talking about it we actually put some money out, $25 million. But now we also have $40 million that are going to be used for innovation, and I think our committee should have a say in which direction we should be going and what kind of innovation we should be getting into to address the disparity and regulatory burden, particularly when it comes to SRMs.
This is something we can have a positive spin on and maybe have a substantive voice in some current issues moving forward. So I think it is something our committee should look at fairly quickly and fairly expeditiously.
Obviously there are a lot of other issues. We had a major drought out in the prairies, and there are some issues there that we'd like to talk about and I have some motions on. We also have Mr. Shipley's motion on the future of agriculture, which encompasses all of this, which we have also agreed to talk about. I think it's important that we don't just get caught up on issues of the day. I think it's important with some of the ones that we are going to tackle that we look at things where we can put forward our voice and hopefully have some impact on things such as the new SRM regulations that are coming out and some of the regulatory disparity that we're currently seeing and the farmers need us to address.
I would think those would be some of our priorities.