Thank you.
Monsieur Charlebois, you said earlier that you think Canada needs a much better.... In fact, if I could put words in your mouth, we need any food strategy at all. It seems to me that we don't really have any kind of meaningful public policy—at least, not something we could call a strategy—when it comes to food. You talked about needing to emphasize more processing here at home. I'm wondering if you can speak to what that looks like.
Often, debates around food policy in Canada are dominated by discussion of international trade agreements. Usually, the thrust there, even by producers, is to liberalize trade, to have less of a presence of public policy in the sector, and to try to deregulate international markets and expand access based on fewer rules overall and therefore less direction in terms of what kind of work would be done in Canada: for instance, value-added processing versus initial production of food resources.
How do you think Canada, which for such a long time under Liberal and Conservative governments has really pushed a free trade agenda on food, could bring us into a space where we have a meaningful national food strategy?