Thank you, Chair.
Thank you all for coming out this morning. I know you're all very busy this time of year, and it's appreciated. I hope you understand that in Saskatchewan calving season starts in February, and last year harvest went to the end of November. It's hard for a committee to figure out the best time to travel, so that's how we ended up here today.
There's one thing I was going to maybe touch on a little bit. A lot of you talked about some sort of risk or cost protection program. In the 1980s we had a program called GRIP.
Wayne, you'll remember GRIP.
I was farming. I still have a farm, but at the time I was starting in farming, and it was there. I thought it was great that I could predict that next year I was going to make this much money, and the year after that I was guaranteed to make this. There was bank flow, and I could see it.
The problem was that four years later we had a government change in Saskatchewan, and all of a sudden it was all gone. In the meantime, based on our projections of what GRIP was going to pay us for the next ten years, we hadn't expanded our farm, and we just kind of stayed put. But a lot of our neighbours did expand, and we saw the land values go up dramatically during that period--probably artificially--and all of a sudden these guys, four years later, were sitting there saying, “Okay, now what?” because all of a sudden that revenue stream, which they had forecasted on, wasn't there.
That's the problem I have with any type of program in which you say we should have government contributing here and contributing there. Governments change, and priorities of governments change, and all of a sudden you could be in a situation like that again where all of a sudden it's not good for anybody.
I know you referred to the ASRA program, but I think the ASRA program in Quebec--a lot of people don't remember this--has about a $5 billion deficit right now. So sooner or later something is going to happen there, and that's going to change, and where those Quebec farmers will be, I don't know.
That's the caution I have there.
The other thing that Mike mentioned was that there should have been an Atlantic solution or a western Canada solution. It's really tough for a national government to pick winners and losers on regions. Basically all we can do is say, “Okay, across Canada we can do this”. That doesn't prevent your provincial government from stepping in and saying, “We're going to top this up to make sure that in P.E.I. we're going to do this”.
Alberta did that. I know that the guys in Saskatchewan complained about it, because--and I'll use the beef industry--Alberta came out with a hundred bucks a head, and Saskatchewan came in with forty bucks a head, and the guys in Saskatchewan felt they were out by sixty bucks a head.
So when you look at it at the federal level, you try to be fair and balanced right across Canada. But then if the market is going to dictate what happens....
You said you didn't contribute to the hog problem, and that could possibly be true. But in the macro sense, there were too many hogs throughout the world, and that contributed to the hog problem. So how do you say “they didn't contribute, but how do we federally give them more money or more sustainability?” versus the situation in a province like Saskatchewan, where I come from, where the cost of production could be substantially less? Those are the issues you face at the macro level.
Five years ago I was sitting at the table with the farm association, just like you guys, trying to figure out how we could get more money into farmers' pockets. And that's the thing I want to learn from these committee meetings. I'm looking at things that will give you more money in your pocket from the marketplace, or reduce your costs, because there are two sides to the equation: either you increase your revenue or you decrease your costs.
I really like the idea about the imports. There is no reason, to my mind, if we're going to import beef from Brazil or Argentina, that the producers there shouldn't meet the same standards or requirements we have for our beef producers here. That's a no-brainer. That should be fairly simple. I think everybody around this table agrees with that.
But are there other things we can do on the regulatory side or the cost side for young farmers, to get them started, that will make them a stable entity at the start until they get their equity base to a level at which they can survive in the marketplace? Those are the types of solutions I'm looking at.
Raymond, you did some great stuff in going overseas. I did a lot of that too. It's great. I'd like to know the name of that company you said Dave had a problem with, the Canadian brand. If you wouldn't mind giving that to me later, I'd appreciate it.