Thank you.
I want to tell you how impressed I've been by the whole panel.
I'll ask some quick questions, because the chairman is fairly quick with the gavel and the time.
You talked about access to credit. That's something that has floated up at just about all of the meetings. I can't ask everybody to respond, because we'll run out of time, but I'd like to know how difficult the access to credit has been. Obviously we have some people who were successful, able to grow, and able to set goals and objectives. Somehow through hard work, education, and being bright, they've been able to get there.
Next, one thing that continually comes up and has been brought up again today is about the import of products from other countries that do or do not meet the standards we have in Canada. They may meet the standards, but our producers here do not have the same access to management tools that our competitors do. It's a consistent one. I have a motion to deal with that, which has support from Parliament. We're hoping to get some changes and regulations to do that.
Becky, you talked about the other key one that you all obviously have to deal with. With the amount of investment that you have, the story we hear is that farmers don't do succession planning very well. You still have dad at 65 years old, my age--well, I'm not quite 65, but I farmed, and I was in supply management and also in the open market--making all the decisions. There has to be that transition. How does it work?
We obviously have young families here who are becoming part of a very intense agriculture. I think succession planning is key. Becky talked about it. It's often for the long term, and we tend to think about it as, “Holy mackerel, I'm at this age and we haven't done anything. How are we going to get our siblings or whoever involved with it?”
I'm interested in the partnerships. I forget whether it was Karl or Richard who talked about it. We tend to forget about partnerships.
We have some young farmers in our family. We actually visited them, but not as part of this tour. They've partnered with some other farmers to sit down and share their financial information. Farmers are not very good at sharing financial stuff, because we don't want to tell the next person about how good it is or how bad it is. We especially don't want to tell them how good things are if we have something that's good.
On succession planning, do you have any comments about how we can help beginning farmers? This is about how we can get beginning farmers into that. It's about access to credit, the imports, and making sure we can be competitive. Succession planning is critical.
I want to caution you about the Ontario policy on energy. It is a disadvantage to farmers. It does not give farmers access to the grids. It doesn't pay them a fee for biogas digesters that comes close to making a profit. We pay 80¢ for solar, but I couldn't tell you how that works.
It's becoming a cash cow in Ontario for investors. Some of the farmers are getting into it, but it does not offer an advantage to farmers. I'd be cautious about the program before getting on the bandwagon about it.
Those are my three comments.
Richard.