Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to give my last minute to Mr. Turnbull.
First, it is International Women's Day. I want to thank all the women who work for your businesses. I know they work hard. I get to meet them almost every day in your stores.
I think the issue we're talking about, here, is public trust, or how we provide public trust to consumers, overall. When we deal with food, we deal with it on the agricultural level.
I want to start by saying that everybody deserves to make a reasonable profit, from the farm level to the retailers.
Where we face some issues—it's been mentioned by some of my colleagues—is here: A few years back, I know, some of you worked with the Competition Bureau. There was the whole issue of bread price-fixing between 2001 and 2015. That caused a breach in public trust. I think this is part of the reason why we're here today. My goal here is not to point the finger at anyone. I just want to find solutions. I don't think our committee is equipped to determine whether you're making an okay profit on a certain product. I think the Competition Bureau is the right place for this to happen.
That being said, some of you stated you provided financial statements. It's been said publicly by all of you, I believe, that most of the profit has been on non-food products. Some of you testified today that financial statements were provided to the Competition Bureau on a voluntary basis. I believe the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, back in May 2022, wrote a letter to some of you to ask the Competition Bureau to look at this.
In terms of the statements you provided, is the Competition Bureau going to be able to determine the difference between profits on food items versus profits on non-food items?
I'm going to start with Mr. Weston, Mr. Medline
and Mr. La Flèche, one after the other.