Thank you very much.
My name is Richard Phillips, and I have a small farm in Saskatchewan. Grain Growers represents over 50,000 grain farmers across Canada.
Before I start, I showed up in my shirt today, and I'm reminded of Roy Atkinson. He was very active in the NDP in Saskatchewan for many years. One time he was asked why he didn't show up in a suit and he said, “You showed up in your working clothes and I showed up in mine.” That'll be my excuse for why I'm wearing a shirt and not a suit today.
In the grain and oilseed sector we're very fortunate. We've had a couple of good years, with good crops and good prices overall in Canada. We're not here today looking for big money. We have seen, in western Canada, massive change with the ending of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly. It's now time to look at the regulatory environment to see how we can be even more successful with the new opportunities available.
The Government of Canada funds research and innovation through Agriculture Canada, universities, agrimarketing programs, and science clusters, where they work with producers. Most of those programs actually work quite well. However, we always feel there's room to improve those. We encourage the government to sit down with us. In the new environment, the opportunity is there to see how we can do even better now that we've worked in these programs for a couple of years.
We'd also like to look at a number of other issues in terms of the regulatory environment that will allow us to be successful. Number one, we need to clean up the Canadian Grain Commission. We need to get regulations in place so that we can continue to export grain the way we need to.
We need a more predictable variety registration process. We have a lot of people interested in breeding wheat in Canada right now and they're prepared to bring dollars in, but our system is still archaic; it was set up for 20, 30, or 40 years ago. There's a lot of modernizing to do there.
Thirdly, there's a rail service review. We spent years and years working on cleaning up the rail service so that shippers have a better opportunity to negotiate with the railways. We understand legislation is coming soon. We ask you and encourage you to support this; don't lose faith. You'll be under a lot of pressure from the railways to back down on things. Stay with the producers. Over 90% of their shippers in Canada are united in that we have to have change: if 90% of your customers aren't happy, then maybe you're the problem.
Last is trade negotiations. I'd like to recognize all three political parties. The Liberals—Mr. Bryson is here, the former trade critic. He's very supportive of trade deals. The NDP have been signalling lately that they're much more open to looking at trade deals if they are good for Canada. The Conservatives, of course, have been very open to trade deals and to leading a lot of our negotiations.
The United States is a big market for us, but so are Morocco, the EU, the trans-Pacific partnership, India, China, and Japan. We can grow great crops—we have lots of land in Canada—we just need markets to sell them to. That's really important.
So work with us to ensure that we do the research and innovation correctly, that we leverage even more money out of the private sector, the public sector, and producers for research. And give us that business environment and market access to be successful. We, as farmers, want to make our living from the marketplace.
Thank you.