We’ve said all along that there was value in the Canadian Wheat Board. The Rolodex they have of buyers around the world, and the capacity they have to do analysis, was worth keeping. We gave everybody the best of both worlds. We gave farmers the option to either market their own product at the time, place, and price of their choosing or to continue to use a pool or cash sales through the Canadian Wheat Board.
The Canadian Wheat Board has handling agreements with every elevator company in western Canada, that I'm aware of. They continue to sell outside of their original mandate. As I mentioned earlier, some two boatloads of canola have gone to a market in Japan that we hadn't had before. That's good news. That's the value of their Rolodex. They continue to be seen as providing a safe, secure product. They've got some markets in China and Japan that no one else will probably ever have access to. There's value in maintaining it. We've done that. They needed some help from a taxpayer perspective to maintain what they had while they downsized. There are workforce adjustments. They had a computer system that was no longer required that needed to be taken off the asset list, and so on. Things needed to be paid out.
There was a misconception somewhere out there that there was this huge asset value that farmers were somehow missing, that the building, the rail cars, and those types of things, were worth a lot of money. At the end of the day, they weren't. There were liens against every one of them that more than stripped their value. That had to be cleaned up. That's what we did as a government. We put forward a package of dollars that the Wheat Board will be working through over the next two to three years as it builds a plan to take themselves into the private sector. They've had a number of suitors, as I said. They're working on some strategic partnerships right now. They're looking at how best to continue to serve farmers across Canada now, not just in western Canada, and the role they can play in the exciting new opportunities.