Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Livingstone, thank you so much for making time to be here.
I'm from Vancouver Island, where we have a lot of small farms like yours. I know how busy it is, especially around this time of year, when the chickens are brooding and the calves are calving and everything is starting to sprout, so thank you for making that time.
Like you, our local farmers also struggle with labour and land costs, processing, transport and bureaucracy, but I want to ask you about a very specific kind of bureaucracy.
I have no idea whether you know this or not, but food is one of those areas that constitutionally is shared between the federal government and the provinces. This means that you often have all levels of government messing in your space, but when it comes time to remove a regulation or when there is something that's existing, something that's a challenge, they often turn around and say, “It's not me.”
We're dealing with this, particularly near my riding right now. We have things like ALRs and regional districts and municipalities and provincial zoning and all kinds of changes that are aimed at building homes. It has created a bit of chaos in the agricultural space.
I'm wondering if you might like to speak to that.