Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Happy new year to all. Thank you to the witnesses.
Welcome, Monsieur Lemire. You're sitting on this side of the table. As Mr. Perron found, you know, staying with this side of the table always works well, so we'll go with that.
I'm going to make three statements, and I think we share the goal of these three statements. Please challenge me if you find these mutually exclusive.
First of all, we all want lower prices for consumers, lower food prices. That's a challenge for everyone.
Second, we want transparency and fairness in the value chain, and one of the ways of getting that is the third statement is that we want as open as possible if not free trade, particularly between our counterparts in the U.S. I'm going to leave the Chinese tariff issues aside. My colleague Monsieur Gourde has already tackled that.
Our meat industry is highly integrated in North America, and I hear you saying we want a separate or a Canadian price discovery system for the producer here in Canada. I believe I understand why, yet our markets are so integrated.
Can you comment—and I'll start with Mr. Roy—both on the relative returns to producers and at the grocery shelves? I hate asking a question I don't know the answer to, but has anyone done retail price comparisons between Canada and the U.S. and what the U.S. consumers are paying for pork and beef? We'll keep it to pork for now. If it's different, why is it different, given the situation we find ourselves in?