Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank the witnesses for coming here this morning. Some of you had other things you could have been doing, but it's very important that you came in to talk to us, because hopefully, after our report, we'll make some recommendations to government.
For the first round of witnesses we had this morning, it was mostly supply management. We heard how well they're doing, or...in the future that should stay there. But I think the panel here is mostly from beef and grain, and I also want to talk about the hogs. In the Maritimes, those three industries seem to be in quite a bit of difficulty.
On the beef issue, I mentioned to the other witnesses that we're probably not going to have supply management or marketing boards for beef, but we had a situation out in British Columbia with the orchard growers. Cheap fruit was coming in and causing them to have a lot of difficulty. They talked about a floor price, a price that shouldn't go below a certain price. Maybe that's something that should be dealt with. Instead of the government of the day having to subsidize to get up to a price, maybe there should be a floor price or a minimum price that processors should be paying for a product. It may be something that some of these commodities should be looking into.
The other thing is the grain industry. In the Maritimes, there's a lot of mixed farming, and one commodity relies on the other. My question deals with the grain farmers. We know that potatoes are a big industry in the Maritimes, but they use barley as a rotation crop, and one of the big consumers of barley is hogs. How is the whole grain industry going to go if the beef and the hogs kind of go by the wayside and the processing plants and so on go down? Where are you going to sell your grain if those two industries do not succeed?
I have another question about the Grains Council when you're finished.