I want to talk about that, because it's what I did every day for many decades. What drives the price of food? There are a lot of factors.
The first one is the commodity itself: what the product is and how it's grown. Mother Nature changes every year. That's probably the first aspect of the cost of a product.
The second is that there are variables. There's our Canadian dollar. Often we have to buy those commodities in another currency. That also has an effect on the cost of goods. There's the price of transportation and the price of labour—we saw high inflation in the price of labour. When you add all of these things up, it's a big part of the inflation that you've seen lately.
However, there's also deflation in some categories. I'll give you some examples, if these may be pertinent to the committee. Two years ago, we saw the price of olive oil skyrocket, and this year it's plummeting. It's the same thing with canola oil. With a bad crop, the price goes up. With a good crop, the price comes down. It has nothing to do with any committee. It's just that, sometimes, Mother Nature just does its work.
Look at the price of chocolate. When you go to shop for chocolate this fall, you're going to see that it's more expensive than last year. It has nothing to do with any policies: It's just a bad crop in the country producing the cocoa bean. The price of coffee is through the roof these days. The price will come down eventually, but that's a lot of...the aspect of pricing in our food world. I could talk also about small producers. For a good crop, there's pressure on pricing—it goes down—and for a bad crop, prices go up. There are a lot of variables. Mother Nature plays a certain role.
Also, in prepared or processed foods, sugar, flour and all of those ingredients come into play. More than policies, more than everything, I think the commodity market itself.... That's why, every day, we follow those prices very closely, up or down.