I don't think government should ever own land. I think state involvement in any kind of agriculture and food production is fundamentally flawed. I would point to things like Mao's Great Famine, where he managed to kill 25 million people with some social re-engineering, and also to the impact that Stalin had on the Ukraine. All of those are examples of how state involvement in food can lead to very disastrous consequences. I fundamentally think that's the wrong thing.
I think what you need to find is a way of transitioning the ownership from the older generation to that new generation. You do need to have some programs that allow for access to capital for those new immigrants.
Another thing to think about would be that we do see some processing facilities and some processors in value chains for a lot of these ethnic foods already, and it may be a way of linking backwards vertically from those further processing and retail operations through the ethnic communities into a shared responsibility or a shared ownership of that farm. Again, you need to be careful with how the contracts and those arrangements are sorted out to avoid opportunism, but you could certainly imagine a situation where if the appropriate contractor incentive mechanism were designed, you could actually have some shared responsibility in terms of accessing capital and the transfer of the ownership from the old generation to the new.
The one thing I will say is we do see this. I am fortunate enough to teach a large class here at Guelph to all the agricultural students, and every year I get to teach microeconomics to about 120 of these kids. Increasingly you see a lot of kids with Dutch and German names and Dutch and German accents. One of them said to me the other day, the reason why you see so many of us here is because our parents moved here. We have started to see this, not just in Ontario, but we've seen it in Manitoba and we've seen it in other parts of the country. It's not to say that this doesn't happen. It does happen, and I think perhaps it might be worth investigating why some of these other communities seem to be making a go of it in this respect, and how we can learn from those examples in terms of structuring some kind of a program in the future.