Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Tierney, for that enlightening overview.
Clearly this is huge. Supply chain is a mammoth piece. We're talking about starting at the producer level and getting it to my dinner plate. It's a challenge unto itself to actually get good stuff on my dinner plate sometimes, but maybe that's a personal choice rather than what's out in the marketplace.
What I hear locally is that folks are trying to figure out and trying to find a way outside of the local markets, of which we have a lot in the Niagara region. We can go to a market any day in the week in the summer. We're very lucky that way. How do folks in the supply chain recognize what is a local agricultural piece, so they can actually do that?
Let me reference a piece back to a grower who was here—I can't remember if it was last year or the year before—who talked about potatoes because that was his crop. By the time his potatoes came back to the local store, they had actually moved about a thousand kilometres, which doesn't make a lot of sense in a lot of different ways.
If you could speak to the sense of how we help the folks, the consumers out there who are trying to work in this supply chain, which moves in different hands and mysterious ways.... How do we help them help farmers in a lot of ways, and especially Canadian farmers, because the consumers actually want to get Canadian product?
We've had the labelling issue. We all agree that the labelling issue is such that most products can't be labelled product of Canada. So how do you find Canadian product in this supply chain?