Thanks, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to everyone for the great presentations.
Last Friday I was at the Ontario Agri-Food Technologies semi-annual meeting. Each of your organizations from Ontario was presenting, and there were some very consistent messages coming through.
We talked a lot about the “Calgary Statement”, and in particular the public trust piece of it. We also talked about the science research and innovation. Something coming out of the “Calgary Statement” that's new is the part on value-added and agri-food processing. I wanted to dwell on that just a little bit. There's a massive business opportunity for Canada here. We know the planet is growing in population, and we know we can supply food if we can get our innovation funding together properly.
Could you comment, each of you, on innovation funding? For me, as a newcomer to politics, I'm trying to sort out Community Futures, where funding goes up to $250,000. We have the federal regional development agencies, and we have the AgriInvest programs. How does a farmer figure this out? Is it better to get this centralized, to go to the federal development agency that can get you to CF, or could get you to innovation funding in other ways? How does a farmer figure out innovation?