Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My family farm is in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, so I know the Maritimes challenges quite well. I really think that the farmers in the Maritimes have to have Maritimes solutions.
Cedric, you mentioned the possibility of the federations working together as a unified force. We see that Loblaws and Sobeys, and Co-op Atlantic to a certain extent, have their central buying now. All the stuff is bought from the Maritimes, but it's central buying. For farmers in the Maritimes, I think it's very important to work together, whether in dealing with these buyers or dealing with the federal government. When you see the Quebec government coming to Ottawa, it comes as a united voice. I think this is so much better than having various provinces coming.
As to the future of agriculture in the Maritimes, pork and beef are definitely in big trouble. It's hard, looking at the context of our country, to have supply management of pork and beef, because we're such big exporters—but not in the Maritimes, technically. I don't think we produce enough beef or pork to consume in the Maritimes, so it would work well for us, but we can't really go there, because it would have to be a national program.
To go back to the types of farms we're going to have in the Maritimes, it looks as though it will be similar to the situation in Quebec and other areas where you'll have large or efficient farms, and the farms of supply management people will be getting a little bigger and more efficient; then you'll have the smaller farms. We see this in Nova Scotia, where you might be farming part-time and you would go to the farmers market or sell on your farm. It seems that it's going that way. Maybe that's the way it has to be, because it's going to be hard for a medium-sized farm to operate with 20 cows. It's just equipment and things like that.
Should we be looking for policies within our provinces or in the Maritimes to say, okay, not separate them but look at them differently? You have so-called commercial farms that sell to the processors and big retailers, and then you look at the niche farmers and kind of treat them differently, whether it's processing their product or....
We had that problem yesterday in Quebec, where a small producer was making cheese. He found he was looped in with the big guys, and it just didn't make sense.
I guess those are my questions. Are there solutions for the Maritimes? And should we be looking at different models, treating farms a little differently in maybe different categories?