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This is for the Canadian Horticultural Council.
I've been on the agriculture committee since 2012, and back in the last Parliament we talked a lot about PACA. We haven't talked about it today, but I'm going to talk about PACA again, because this is still an issue.
In this Parliament, the 42nd Parliament, the agriculture committee has written two letters. We wrote a letter to the Minister of Agriculture in June 2016. We wrote another letter to the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Innovation before we finished for the summer break, and we never got a response, not even, “Hey, you know, I got that letter. We will get back to you.” It was total silence. We got absolutely nothing.
This is an issue I brought up when you guys were in government, and now we're working together, and even during the election campaign ,a lot of you guys promised that we would have a PACA-like system. It's even more important now, because as was mentioned earlier, we are renegotiating NAFTA. We have TPP 11. We have so much going on, and we don't have payment protection for Canadian farmers who are sending their produce to the United States. This is something in which I thought we would have the Minister of Agriculture be our cheerleader. I thought he was going to bring this forward, but last year we found out it is going to be the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development who is going to take this on.
I was wondering if you could explain to the committee what PACA is and the importance of having that done as soon as possible. Maybe you have some kind of insight on why this has taken so long, because I don't understand why. This seems like low-hanging fruit.