Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for being here, and department officials.
One of the things I want to talk about has to do with transition costs with regard to the Canadian Wheat Board. Looking at table 2, we see that the Canadian Wheat Board transition costs program is at $30 million. Of course, what we had done, or what had taken place, was front-end loading as far as the costs were concerned and then reducing the expenditures. Since then, of course, we've also seen that the Canadian Wheat Board has been purchasing physical assets, such as grain terminals and so on, throughout.
I'm just wondering if you can comment on some of the things you've seen and whether or not this is what was anticipated. As a farmer myself, thinking back to when my dad started farming, he had grain that was free and then was marketed into a program where he no longer owned it. Finally we were able to turn that around.
Perhaps you could talk a little bit about what you saw and where things are going, and then add something about these transitional costs.