Thank you for the invitation to speak on this important issue. I would like to briefly review four issues that are also covered in the brief I submitted.
The first is the legal effect of the current law. Contrary to what you may have heard, the current law entirely stops the direct shipment of wine from one province to another, and the personal transport of wine across a provincial border. In this regard, it's very useful to note that Canada's shipping prohibition is different from the U.S. equivalent law that says that interstate shipments are illegal, only if they violate the laws in the destination state. The absolute prohibition in Canada is problematic because on its face it even creates a problem if a province wants to allow the importation of wine from other provinces. I'll deal with that in more detail later, particularly in reference to the laws in Alberta.
It's important to note also that this matter is a matter of exclusively federal jurisdiction under the constitution. It deals with interprovincial trade, which is exclusively a federal jurisdiction under the constitution.
The second issue that I'm going to cover flows from the first one, and I'd like to illustrate why we need to reform at the federal level by using examples of what—