Thank you, Chair. It's always a pleasure. I see you guys are progressing as usual.
I guess with the killing of the Wheat Board and supply management being on the table and getting axed, I started looking at the crystal ball of the future of agriculture. It's inevitable that these small farms are not going to have their marketing clout, and they're going to wither.
We saw it when we visited out west. We saw the orchard growers in the Okanagan. They're just going out of business. I think if these two marketing agencies are gone, you're going to see small farmers and probably dairy farmers in Quebec or grain farmers going out of business.
It's been mentioned that we can be more efficient and have larger-scale operations and that we'll be all right. That concerns me, because who are we going to be competing with? There's nothing like competition if it's fair competition. Are you going to be competing with Brazil where they can have two crops of soybeans? Are you going to be competing with New Zealand for cheese when they don't have to house their animals or cut the forage? Then you also have the U.S. and the European treasury, when we know that there is a near-one-dollar subsidy for every bushel of grain in the U.S. along with all the subsidies in Europe.
We see this. We're going to be more efficient. We're going to be larger. But at the end of the day, are we going to produce more? Are farmers going to make a better living? Are more young people going to say they want to get into that industry since it's so much better now than it was when the other things were in place?
I guess my question is whether we are going to be able to compete. Is it going to be a better environment? Are we going to have young people beating down the doors to be farmers because there's going to be more money? Or are we going to have mega-farms that are going to be beholden to agribusiness and maybe retailers, and be making less money because they will be competing with these areas that have better production and better subsidies?
My question will be first for Bob from the George Morris Centre. Give us a little snapshot of what it will be like when this thing starts going the other way.