Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We certainly did not want you to feel that we left you out.
I really want to talk more to Ms. Crichton about the sense of the supply chain. It can be a rather extensive one, from a geographical perspective, as well as very intricate, from all perspectives, because of the different places, the different hands, and the different systems that actually move it from place to place, whether it comes, indeed, from a farmer or a farm somewhere through the processing chain to, eventually, the fork.
To paraphrase Napoleon, he once said that the army marches on its stomach. He ultimately lost the Franco-Prussian War because he basically starved his army to death.
Not to be misunderstood, my sense is that there isn't anyone in the chain, from the farmer to the fork, who is trying to do anything other than provide the best quality food and the safest quality food we possibly can. I want to ensure that folks don't understand from the metaphor that somehow we're trying to do something to folks around the issue of food.
Could you sort of walk us through some intricacies here, in the sense of the food supply chain we now have? It is much different than it was, I would suggest, 30 years ago, and is changing, it seems to me, on an annual basis in terms of how intricate it truly gets when it comes to the things we consume. They literally travel thousands upon thousands of kilometres.
We don't grow papaya in this country, yet you can find it. We don't grow oranges in this country, but you can buy them. There are numerous other products we find on our store shelves that we don't necessarily produce, nor do we grow them here. But things we used to grow here are now disappearing, like canned peaches, for instance. In my neck of the woods, in the Niagara Peninsula, when the last canning factory, CanGro, left, it meant that there were no canneries east of the Rocky Mountains for fresh peaches, or fresh fruit for that matter. That means that the local source of canned fruit for Canadians is now gone. In fact, flip the label, and you'll find that it is probably a product of China. Flip the product of frozen fish over and you may find that it's a product of China. It might be caught in the Grand Banks, mind you, but it might be a product of China.
If you could, and I know you don't have a lot of time, could you try to give us a sense of where you think the system isn't up to snuff? And where you don't have controls that you might want, because clearly you can't be in all places at all times when you're sourcing product far away, how sure are you and how comfortable are you that those regulations we see here for our farmers and our processors are actually being followed there? What is your sense on that?
Ultimately, the subsequent question would be why, if you're not sure they are as good as what we have here, we are selling them. I'll finish with that and let you take the rest of the time.