Thank you and good afternoon. I appreciate this opportunity to appear before the committee and make some very brief remarks.
I am a lawyer in Winnipeg. Yesterday in Regina you heard from two of my client groups, Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board and the Canadian Wheat Board Alliance. They made very substantive comments to you at that time. I simply want to echo those comments, as they apply in full measure to Manitoba's agricultural situation. There is no change in environment at the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border, so the comments apply here.
There is one additional point I'd like to make. The Canadian Grain Commission is located in Winnipeg. It employs about 1,000 people. Its mandate historically, since it was set up around 1910, was to ensure that farmers were paid fairly for the quality of grain they delivered and to ensure that Canadian grain was a high-quality product being delivered to our export buyers. This issue is becoming far more important today than it was in the past. No major grain-producing location in the world is further from tidewater than the Canadian prairies. At the westernmost part of Alberta, it's 1,000 kilometres to Vancouver. Going east from the easternmost region, it's 700 kilometres to Thunder Bay and then a trip down the lakes.
Ukraine can sell wheat into Montreal more cheaply than prairie farmers can. That's how crucial that transportation difficulty is. It is so much cheaper if you can ship by ocean vessel and you don't have very many on-land costs, either by railway or trucking. Australia, Argentina, the Ukraine, and the U.S. are the primary grain-producing areas that export substantial quantities. Every single one of those areas has a far shorter distance, two or three times shorter, than Canada has. We're in a difficult position, because the costs of transportation end up all flowing back to the farmer.
The only way to overcome that historic cost disadvantage has been to deliver a high-quality product that can earn a premium. It's rather like Germany; German salaries are such that they cannot afford to make cheap cars. They have to make the Mercedes-Benz and BMW. It's essential for them to maintain their society by producing quality and earning that higher income. Our farmers are facing the same situation. They can't produce wheat that sells for $3 a bushel and that has to be shipped to Vancouver and not go broke. Quality is the driving engine here. If it's maintained, then you can get into markets like Japan, the U.K., and other high-priced markets.
I have two final points. The Canada-China canola issue that seemed to be an annoyance at the beginning of the Prime Minister's visit to China at the beginning of September was an entirely avoidable one. Canada has a habit of adding dockage to its canola. It's valuable for the trade. It's not valuable to the buyer. It's not a good thing for the customer. It's not a good thing for the farmer, either, who is maybe seen to be selling a lower-quality product.
My last point is on Churchill. You've heard everything you need to hear about Churchill from Ms. Ashton.