Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'd also like to extend my thanks to all of our witnesses for appearing before our committee today and for helping to guide us through this important study.
I think it was mentioned in the opening comments that this is a very sensitive issue. I think Mr. Drouin mentioned that we are hearing from our constituents. Food is a necessary item for their families to get by, week by week. That's the thing that unites us all: Everybody eats. For people in my area on Vancouver Island, it's a painful experience every time they go to the grocery store.
One of our previous witnesses was Dr. Jim Stanford. He very helpfully provided the committee with a brief that showed the doubling of food retail profit since before the pandemic. That would have been in 2019. The fact is that food retail margins have soared, and both of these things are happening at a time when real supermarket sales volumes have actually been declining.
I just saw his Twitter feed. He saw that the Q4 information for last year was just reported, and the food retail margins for the grocers went up yet again.
Mr. Vanderpol, I'd like to start with you and DPAC. You did mention that for processors, the average profitability has been lagging behind other sectors.
Given the nature of Canada's concentrated grocery retail sector and the fact that three companies—Empire, Loblaws and Metro—control so much of it, we have definitely heard a lot of testimony about the need for a grocery code of conduct. I want to get a bit more of a sense of what it's been like for some of your smaller and medium-sized enterprises and the hurdles they face when they are trying to negotiate with a company that has so much market dominance and power that it can bring to bear. I think that's the crux of the matter. It's the inequality that exists between the two sectors here.