Thank you to all of you for being here. It's refreshing just to hear what you're saying, but it's also very depressing, so obviously we have to do something. It seems to me that everybody has good intentions. Everybody around this table and all governments want to help, yet at the same time we're seeing that something's not working.
Ian, I think you mentioned export at all costs. We're a trading nation. We're trying to open up markets, to the credit of the minister. On the other hand, in the beef industry exports have tripled over the last 20 years, yet the beef producers are making less than half of what they made 20 years ago.
We've signed on to trade agreements with NAFTA. We were just in British Columbia, where we talked to representatives from the fruit industry. Before NAFTA there were in-season tariffs that protected the vegetable and fruit producers in our country, and they could make a living off the land, but most of them are in dire straits now because of the dumping of American produce.
We see that the Canada-European Union trade agreement that is being discussed now is going to hammer our communities and open up contracts so that in municipal governments such as Portage, local workers will have to compete with European workers. We know that supply management and the Wheat Board are on the table. It just seems that rural Canada is constantly being hammered by these trade agreements, but on the other hand, we're a trading nation.
My question to you is this: how do we arrive at a compromise to help strengthen rural Canada so each one of you can make some money, not have to work 90 hours a week, and take some extra time and do what most people take for granted? How can we both maintain our trade and ensure that you get a fair price for what you're doing? It's a philosophical question, but that's the crux of the matter.
We're talking about band-aid solutions. We're going to help with AgriStability and AgriFlexibility. Some programs are working and some are not, but the crux of the matter is that we just keep sliding. We're losing rural Canada and we're losing farms, which are, as one of you mentioned, the basis of this.
What's the answer? Maybe we'll start at Kate and work down.