Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Welcome back to the committee, everyone. We're glad to have you here.
Deputy minister, last week I met with a group of young farmers who came to talk to me specifically about the extremely high cost of land.
My riding is on Vancouver Island. It's a very desirable place to live. We sometimes have price stabilization, but the price of land always just seems to be going up and up. They really identified the fact that so many farmers are land rich and cash poor. There's a very real problem with the intergenerational transfer of that land. Often, a farmer who has been working on that land, in order to retire appropriately, has to sell at a high price because all of their assets are locked into the land. This presents a real problem.
You know, I fly with Air Canada a lot, going back and forth. Always on Air Canada there are these advertisements for an investment firm, about investing in farmland. Increasingly, a lot of farmland is being seen as a commodity, as an investment vehicle. It's a vehicle for people to make money, but we're forgetting, I think, the primary purpose, which is to feed local communities.
I understand this is a cross-jurisdictional issue, and often municipalities and provinces have to take the lead. This a pan-Canadian problem, and I think what the young farmers were telling me is that this is a problem that's present in many different provinces.
They asked me what roles the federal government and specifically AAFC can play in working with provincial counterparts to address this problem.
I'll pose that question to you.