Thank you, Chair.
I thank all the guests for coming here today.
Mr. Hanson, that was a great presentation. I was a 4-H member, and one thing it helps you with is not only agriculture practice but public speaking. I can see that you were paying attention to your 4-H leaders. Good job.
Mrs. Staniforth, you mentioned generational transfers. That's been brought up quite a bit in the last few meetings. In Europe, some countries have a perpetual mortgage, they call it, and the government has a bit of a stake in the financing of a farm. I'm just going to use a hypothetical situation. Let's say that your farm is worth $800,000. You're 60 to 65 years old already. You're ready to retire. You're ready to be moving on, but you still owe a couple of hundred thousand. You're still making payments. A young farmer, particularly if it is one of your children, would come in. So much money would go to you automatically, and so much would be left that the government would still have owing there. You would have a situation where that young person is not all of a sudden burdened with so much debt. It would be easier for them to pay it off, and you would also have your own nest egg.
Should we have something different in the way it's set up? Maybe it wouldn't be just interest forgiveness for the first couple of years for young farmers. Maybe there would be some sort of mechanism whereby more people would have a stake in that farm than just the individual or that young couple that is striving to make a go of it. That's my first question: Should we be looking at different setups?
My second question goes to Mr. Stokes. We heard from the orchard growers yesterday--and I think we're going to hear a lot of it as we go through this--that the suppliers and retailers are taking a big chunk out of this, mostly because they're getting bigger and bigger. Do you think government should get more involved in keeping a check on that? Should there be more regulations? Should the Competition Bureau--our committee just studied fertilizer companies--be more of a watchdog over how they're gouging the farmers on that end?
My third question would be to you, Mr. Butler. You mentioned very clearly that if the regulations were gone or diminished greatly, you would feel that you'd be able to compete with the Americans on beef. My understanding is that in the U.S., they have their own wildlife act and a waterways act. They have many of the acts and regulations we have here. When we talk to a lot of beef farmers across this country, the number one big problem they see with the Americans is the Farm Bill, which gives an almost $1 per bushel subsidy. My question to you is whether you think your daughter would get in if these regulations went down. Or do you think it would be more helpful if, for instance, that food bill weren't there in the United States?
I know that these are three loaded questions. I think if you go first, and we just keep it tight, we can go from there.