Thank you for attending today and taking time from your busy farm schedules and commitments to be here.
I'm perplexed. We keep hearing about this suite of solutions. We've heard it over the last year, and we continue to hear it. It's tweak AgriStability. It's harmonize regulations between countries so we're not disadvantaged by long waiting times for approval of inputs we can use in Canada so we can be competing effectively with the states with access to those inputs and freer trade or better markets. All of those things are understood.
My fear is--and it's based on a couple of comments that were made over the last couple of days and earlier, and I think maybe Dixie may have said the same thing--that the small farm is going to disappear. The only way to make these farms work is to grow.
Somebody said the other day at one of the hearings that if we lose the family farm, “rural Canada”--and I'm quoting--“will become a ghost town”. We'll have a huge migration of people from rural areas into urban areas, and I don't think that's where we want to go. In response to that, somebody else said we have to make some enormous changes.
I'm more and more convinced that tweaking these things might help some of you, but it's not going to help the whole agricultural industry. I think we need to think beyond the box--way outside the box.
I'm wondering if maybe Brad and Ajay could help me on the issue of support for farm transition from one generation to the next. You may not be able to effectively do that with somebody in your own family; they may not be interested. Or there may be one who is interested and you do it at the expense of fairly dividing your estate with the other children.
I'm wondering, should succession planning and the incentives given to it through tax laws and other laws help in transitioning your farm to the next generation, even if they're not related to you, and should we not introduce those kinds of incentives as well?