Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thank the guests for coming here today. We've had quite the trip across the country. I think a lot of my colleagues here have their eyes a lot more open now to the reality of what's happening out there. It's easier to ask the questions, I guess, after coming off the tour.
I was talking to my father. He said he's getting the same for a steer now as he was 30 years ago. I don't know if he's very far off. My mother says she pays three times as much for beef in the store as we did 30 years ago. So there's something happening out there. A farmer's union came in here with figures. Once, I think, they said that they're only getting 20% of what's on the retail shelf.
Mr. Lake talked about supply management. When you look at milk, you see that the farmer gets almost 60% of the retail value. That will tell you how things can change. When you look at the three big retailers and the big packers, you can see that they are getting more efficient. They have distribution centres, and with the way they store their stuff, the efficiencies are there, so one has to wonder what's going on with the cattle industry.
We've visited a feedlot out in Alberta. We got asking the question, “Whose cattle are these?” We found out that a lot of the cattle there were not owned by the feedlot. A lot of them were owned by the packer we had just visited an hour earlier.
Now, it's my understanding that there's a law in the United States that came out of Texas. The law is that the packers are allowed to own cattle for only a very short time. I don't know if it's for a couple days or a week. We don't have that same law here in Canada, so my number one question is whether we should have the same law in Canada, whereby packers can own cattle for a very short time, a minimum amount, which helps, of course, in not going with the prices....
My second question is, what is going on in the United States? Are consumers paying less for beef down there? Maybe there's more competition. Are cattlemen getting more for their cattle, then? Those are my three questions.
I guess I'll ask you, Travis.