Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I thank all the presenters for their presentations. I think there's something we can take away from each and every one.
Bev, I just want to make a point of this. You mentioned that you now ship cattle one and a half hours. When we look at the country as a whole, in my neck of the woods, other than 350 cattle that are killed at a small local plant, federally inspected, we had to ship our cattle either to the United States or to Ontario—18 hours. We don't have a hog plant left in Atlantic Canada. It's gone. We had to ship to Quebec.
That's what's happening. We're seriously losing that strong mixed economy. It's going to happen here, too, if we stay on this same trend.
Larry, you mentioned the report Empowering Canadian Farmers in the Marketplace. That was drafted as a sitting member of government. It was a considerable challenge to our own government, as it is to these guys. But the bottom line is that what is in that report is what farmers recommended. And I agree with you; it needs to be dusted off. We need to bring it up to date and we need to move forward with some of those recommendations.
This leads me to the point that I think most people made, and that's the Competition Bureau. We've done a study on competition. We can't talk about it yet, but I think there are some decent recommendations in that report and we certainly need to deal with the Competition Bureau. The problem is that it doesn't end there. We're not the only country in the world losing farmers. Every country is. The European Union is now really starting to massively lose farmers.
Is the solution even bigger than us? I can tell you that we announced, as a party, a national food policy last Monday. There's a lot of work to be done on it yet, but you're always up against people who say, “No, we can't do that. No, we can't do this.” I'm in favour of fair trade, but we in the farm sector always seem to be up against something because it's breaking a trade rule or because we can't do this in Canada or whatever.
I will ask each of you this: what one thing do you see as a priority in terms of being able to build the agriculture industry from a standpoint of profitability and/or allowing young farmers a stake in the industry and giving them a leg up to get in the industry and maintain it and stay there?
In addition, Gwen made a good point earlier in terms of the silos. I don't know if she said “silos” or not, but I know from being on the government side--and those guys would agree if they'd admit it--that Agriculture Canada....
Finance runs Ottawa. We're implemented by about 11 different departments in Agriculture. Agriculture has no say. The deputy minister--he's just there passing through until the next fellow comes along. We haven't had a deputy minister who made any sense and worked for farmers since Sid Williams in the 1970s.
Anyway, to my question. Sorry.