Thank you, Chair.
Let me just say thank you to our witnesses for being here.
I must say I was quite frankly just hoping to learn more about innovation in your opening remarks. I heard a lot about funding and I heard a lot about regulations and processes, but what I actually want to hear about is innovation and how innovation is helping the agriculture sector.
Just to give an example, a few weeks ago I was standing in Maple Leaf Foods' production plant. We were announcing a repayable contribution of $5 million. They're bringing in top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art, first-in-the-world technology to improve their production speeds, to improve shelf life on their products, to improve food safety.
I would have liked to have heard of other innovation like that, which is actually affecting the food industry. I was in Skotidakis maybe a month ago announcing another $4.5 million for them to update their production line. They are a top-producing dairy product producer and they're working with machinery that will better mix goat milk with cow's milk to make their cheese products. This is innovative, and it's actually going to allow them to penetrate markets that they've been unable to penetrate and more efficiently because right now the machinery they use is optimized for cow's milk and it doesn't work well with goat's milk. But they're doing the best that they can.
So I was hoping to hear a lot more on the technologies and all of these different sectors and how innovation is actually making us more competitive so that we can sell our products at a more competitive rate in Canada, which I think is what the Canadian consumer wants. My read is the Canadian consumer is worried about price, but they actually naturally gravitate to Canadian products. If we have innovation embedded in our agricultural sector and our food processing sector here in Canada, to offer that competitive price, the consumer will gravitate to Canadian products. So I think it's a win-win.
Anyway, that's what I was hoping to hear more of.
I want to thank Mr. Payne because I think in the questions he asked we actually got some of that from the sugar beet side and from the fertilizer side. We got, in the answers, the innovation that I wanted to hear about in the opening comments.
So let me just turn to Carla and say, Carla, can you tell us about some of the innovation that's in the food and consumer product sector that's actually strengthening our economy, creating jobs, strengthening our competitiveness either here at home or in our ability to penetrate? CETA is coming up. How is our food and consumer product sector going to penetrate CETA based on innovation?