I think one of the important things is that people don't realize that we are solely dependent on a market for our vines from another country. We need to be able to grow our own rootstock in this country based on the climate we have.
As I think I emphasized right in the beginning, a bottle of wine grown in this country brings a lot more value than a bottle of wine that's brought into this country. That's not to say that we're against imports; we're prepared to compete with them. But at the end of the day, when we can have a reliance on a marketplace and a market for our own product here in Canada, and have rootstock that we're growing here....
That was one of the things we wanted to see addressed in here, obviously, in Growing Forward 2. We actually applied for funding to develop a national rootstock program with our four regions of Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and B.C. We were turned down. The other component is that we went to FedDev, and we were turned down.
So what we want to be able to say is open up the parameters for this Growing Forward so that it actually means what it says: growing forward. We believe the Ontario and Canadian grape and wine industry will have huge benefits for everybody, and growing it at home is important to us.
Innovation, obviously, and research in new varieties are both key. It's the same issue: lots of people are retiring—it's the demographics today—and we need researchers in this sector as well.