Good morning. I'd like to thank you guys for giving us a chance to talk.
I guess I'm here to represent the beef industry--unfortunately. My cousin and I and my 73-year-old grandfather, we own a 2,000-head beef feedlot about an hour from here. It's a dying industry if we continue to let things go the way they're going.
One of the biggest problems we have is our labelling. We're bringing in millions and millions of pounds of offshore stuff. It gets processed in Canada, reboxed, and then it gets a “Product of Canada” label put on it. How misinformative is that to the consumer when they see “Product of Canada” and it didn't even originate in Canada, yet it got processed here?
On the other thing we have allowed--I guess it's our own fault--when we look at exports, 70% of the cattle in Canada are U.S.-owned. We have allowed cartels to come here, such as Cargill, IBP, and Tyson. They not only have the largest killing plants, but they've contracted and own the cattle. It's smart on their part. With high fuel costs, it's a lot cheaper to kill it here, box it here, and send it down in larger quantities.
What I would like to suggest, or what I have thought about, is something to make it fair for us who own cattle. Today my Ontario price is $1.49 for dressed beef. If I need $2 a pound to meet my costs of production, I would like to see the government step in and top me up to my $2 a pound. If the killing plants are offering $1.80, you would throw in 20¢ to top me up. Unless we do this, we are just failing.
We do have some assistance programs; however, they just seem to stop the bleeding for a short period of time. Yes, we do need immediate assistance to get the bank pressure off, but it's not the long-term solution that we need. Until we take a serious look at importing the large quantities we do, we are never going to get any better.
With regard to the consumers of our products, I feel that with each generation we're getting further and further from the farm generation. At one time everybody had an uncle, a cousin, or somebody who had a farm. Now I'll bet that most people you talk to wouldn't even know what a farm really looked like.
I also want to touch on local markets. The local markets are a great idea, as Cedric has said, for smaller venues, but we're in the commodity market. We're going large-scale. How much room is there for these little markets? Until we get this labelling thing under control to prove that a product was grown, raised, and produced in Canada, and put it in the large-scale chains like Loblaws and other large grocery stores, we're never going to make it.
I guess that is my major point for today. We have to eliminate this labelling problem. For something to be labelled as a Canadian product, it has to be a Canadian product. It can't be imported from somewheres, repackaged, recut or whatever, and have a “Product of Canada” label put on it.
That's pretty well all I wanted to say.