Thank you, Chair.
Mr. Mulligan, when I saw you, I flashed back to the 1980s and the show called Good Rockin' Tonight. It's nice to see you. I've moved on to some other noble ventures too.
When you talk about your scenario, I give you credit for what you're doing because it's very similar to what a lot of wheat farmers faced in western Canada for many years, having a government bureaucracy controlling their future and dominating how they marketed their product, which is very similar to the liquor boards, even though they are province by province. So I give you credit.
Also to your comment about how you took a case to the border, we had farmers take a sack of wheat across the line and they got sentenced, went to jail, and sat in cells right next to drug dealers. It's pretty amazing that people grow something legal and end up in jail with drug dealers. It tells me there's definitely a problem here, and it needs to be addressed. I'm just not sure....
I think it's fair to say that the provinces are addicted to the revenues from alcohol, and until you can figure out how to break that provincial addiction, we're always going to have a problem here. I often wonder why we can't go to the grocery store and get our cheese and our bottle of wine and be done, as one can do in the United States or other countries around the world. But here in Canada, of course we can't do that.
You say you talked to a lot of producers off the record. I wonder how a new producer goes about bringing wine to market. How do they go about dealing with the liquor board stores? What's the process of acquiring that shelf space? What are some of the stories they tell you with regard to this?