Yes, you're correct, Mr. Chair.
I appeared before the HUMA committee in May on the temporary foreign worker program, and we made a submission to that committee. We stressed the importance of agriculture continuing to serve its role as a gateway into Canada.
I speak from experience. I am the son of Dutch immigrants. My father was an electrician in the coal mines in the Netherlands after World War II. He had a very important job there, a good job, that he left behind to come to Canada and hoe beets. The price of entry into Canada was a two-year commitment as a farm labourer, which he happily did. Afterwards he proceeded to establish his own business and the rest is history, so to speak.
Yes, labour is very much on our agenda. We know the recommendations of that committee have been tabled with Parliament. I've communicated to Brian May, the chair of that committee, that we're happily pleased with what we see in those recommendations. We've communicated that to the minister as well. I was in Ottawa last week, and we communicated to Minister Mihychuk our support for those recommendations. We sincerely hope they go forward.
The labour is not the only thing. It's infrastructure as well. It's ensuring that those trade agreements that we've negotiated can be passed, and we can free up trade and agricultural products. Therein lies the potential for Canadian agriculture, I believe.
I would end with this one thought. There has been a lot of talk about urban and rural. Conceptually I think that's how we look at the world. I'm now in urban Alberta. I'm going to be going back to another part of urban Alberta in about 15 minutes, and I'm going to be travelling through rural Alberta as I do that, but it's still one nation. It's still one country. It's still one economy.
The urban and the rural places of this country are connected with roads, bridges, and rail and air transportation. All those things move people, move products, and move goods to serve the domestic market and to serve the international market.
We need to ensure that connectivity stays there. A lot of the primary economic activity in Canada is in the rural areas, whether it's mining, forestry, fishing, agriculture, or oil and gas, you name it. It happens in rural Canada, but rural Canada needs to connect to urban Canada to get those products out to the ports and get them out to the world. We need that connectivity, and that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about rural infrastructure. Let's get this system and keep it robust, and in that way we can do a lot to secure our economic future in this country.