With regard to retaining and investing in farms, every one of us invests on a daily basis, regardless of the tax system at play. We have to learn to live with the tax system, including how it's implemented and how the shortcomings of the tax system work. We try to alleviate those through working with the tax system in a fashion that is fruitful for each of the individual entrepreneurs.
Basically, not having those 59,000 people working on the farms where they could potentially be working is a lot more costly, whether they are skilled or low-skilled or unskilled. The cost is exorbitant. As stated in my presentation, $1.5 billion worth of losses could have been earned and could have stayed in the country. Now we import all the product that normally would have been produced within the country. That is where the shortcoming comes in. That is where our tax dollars have to come to work: how can we alleviate that shortcoming of $1.5 billion?
If you as a committee are serious about alleviating this problem in all of Canada, but specifically in Atlantic Canada, I encourage you to find ways to retain the numbers of people we require in Atlantic Canada and in Canada as a whole. If we can keep them here, we can basically then make money with those individuals, and those who have the desire to come can have a future here in Canada for themselves and their children.