Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'll very briefly add on each of the points. I think Mr. Darby's point on value-added is very important in terms of the agriculture component of the answer.
You mentioned the benefit of free markets, and I think that's hugely important. If you look at those two concepts together, and I'll use wheat and barley as an example in western Canada in terms of the way the Wheat Board operates today, the crunch issue for many in the farming community in western Canada is their ability to do what wheat growers in Ontario can do, which is find our market, have an opportunity for a greater value-added contribution to be made in western Canada, and do something positive for the economy there. That doesn't happen today as a result of the single-desk model we have with the Canadian Wheat Board.
On regulation, one of the things I would encourage the committee to do.... I don't think any of us has to start from scratch on this issue. There's been a lot of good work done. Certainly, the external advisory committee report on smart regulation, which I think members would be familiar with, was released in September of 2004. Gaétan Lussier chaired a very good piece of work.
There's a lot of work going on inside government today in terms of implementing that report, work that we think needs to continue because it's going to require a culture change inside the system. But one of the really important things that report did was to give you a sense of...why don't we pick a few targeted examples of things that we can actually try to do something about? You can decide what they are, whether it's in the energy area or in pharmaceuticals or in processed food, as Mr. Darby was saying. There's a bunch of things that you could immediately point to, and we could think about mutual recognition, if we're talking about Canada-U.S., or we could think about how we do the fed-prov component better, where in environmental regulation, for example, we have both levels of government doing the same thing in many cases.
They have already identified a number of things that would be very good starters, as examples of saying let's do some of this. So I would certainly say that's the right way to go--that and coupling it with what you need to do to change the culture, in terms of saying it isn't just regulation because we can do it; it should be because it's the right thing to do.