In your comment you were talking about leveling the playing field there. As I understand it, 40% of the food we eat now is imported. I was recently at a meeting in Moncton. There were discussions on trade negotiations and there were a couple of civil servants from Ottawa talking about negotiating with other countries and the importation of food. This question was asked: When these negotiations take place, is food safety one of the primary topics that you talk about when you're talking about these agreements? They said no, and that was really surprising to me.
That's what's killing our industry here. If the government can't regulate the safety of the food that's coming into Canada and we have to adhere to all those regulations that we have now, then the government should be paying us, as farmers, for the costs that we inherit with all those regulations that we have to abide by here. It's killing our industry. With 40% of our food coming in...it's just going to keep increasing, because we're going to be losing more farmers.
If they can't control what Uruguay does to their beef.... As a beef farmer, all the inspection fees that I have to pay, or whatever I have to do on my farm, it's costing me money, and it's killing us.