Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, Mr. Louis. You're taking a different seat at the committee this time.
As Mr. Carr mentioned, petition e-4190 received 36,175 signatures. It certainly did generate a lot of interest in my office, too, given that I'm the NDP's agriculture critic. We are receiving a considerable amount of correspondence on this bill and this measure. It is clear that there is a considerable amount of interest among the Canadian population in this measure.
I'm curious, though. When we started this parliament, we did have a different Minister of Agriculture, the Honourable Marie-Claude Bibeau, and her mandate letter had a clear direction from the Prime Minister to enact this kind of policy. During the times she had appeared before our committee to defend the estimates of her departmental spending, I took that opportunity to ask her a number of times how she and her department were progressing on that mandate letter from the Prime Minister. Her constant refrain was that they were working on it and that more consultations were needed.
Similar to Mr. Carr's question on the journey that led you to developing this PMB, I'd like to know a little bit more about that and what kind of collaboration have you had with the department. Have they offered you access to the consultations they provided? I know there's a considerable difference between the resources of a member of Parliament and those of an entire department.
Have you been able to piggyback on AAFC's consultations on this particular policy item?