When you speak to some of the people at the small and medium-sized abattoirs and ask why they are being shut down, they will tell you the following. For example, I spoke to one fellow who has a considerable abattoir down south of Owen Sound, and he basically said that every week there were inspectors coming in and finding something wrong every week. It's just continuous. If one inspector doesn't find something wrong, the next one will. He said he's just constantly putting money in trying to play catch-up. When he tells me about some of the things that must be done because there's been a complaint about something, it's totally ridiculous. It's little things that border on harassment. A lot of these places have just closed up.
I spoke to a young farmer this week, telling him that I was coming here today, and asked him what he thought, and he said he had thought he would start farming, thinking he'd start trying to sell some meat directly to the consumers, but it's just impossible to do it. He really can't find a place that will kill his beef at a reasonable rate, for him to make a go of it. If you go to an abattoir, the rate they charge seems astronomical.
But at the same time, when the farmers explain it to you, a lot of it is just this constant harassment from these inspectors. I know these are not all federal plants; some of them are provincial plants, with provincial inspectors, which you people aren't responsible for. At the same time, something needs to be addressed, I think, all the way across.