In my experience, you're right, there are some good plants there, and abattoirs. We talk about abattoirs and processors. I'm a further processor, which is a little bit different—I cook, I ferment—and there's a lot of regulation on that part. In Quebec we have small businesses where they sell locally dried products. They don't have the same rules as federal plants, I can guarantee you that. I bought a provincial plant and shifted all my production to my federal plants. It was a lot less costly to do that than make up the buildings that the business was in.
Simply, yes, with the abattoirs, it's slaughter. I've seen some good plants that are provincially run, but when we get into the further processing, for example, for E. coli, in federal regulations we have to have traceability programs; we need to provide, in my case, for some of my customers, in 48 hours. For example, with a batch of salt, if the salt company calls us and says there might be glass in the salt, I need to be able to trace that salt all the way to the end user. We trace boxes. That is in the federal system.
We're not against interprovincial, but for food safety reasons there has to be one regulatory body. Now you're talking about 10 regulatory bodies that are all different. Even in the federal system, when I travelled the country I saw irregularities from one side of the country to the other side of the country, and that's with one regulatory regime. This is because rules are interpreted. This is my fear. I ship 20% of a pre-cooked product, beef, into the United States. Take the mad cow incident we had recently: that's one. We have a few more, and I stop shipping to the United States.
One of the things we've been very proud of is that we traditionally make products that are usually sold to us from Americans. We've been able to develop our business so that we supply the Canadian market to a lot of the American chains. Food safety is essential. I've been on the Meat Council for three or four years now.
In terms of our partners and how they perceive our system, it doesn't take much—