This is an extremely challenging and clearly difficult task to undertake. I have just a few comments. Again, I can't claim to be an expert in agricultural regulation, but I could make a couple of comments.
One, whereas health and safety and the environment are obviously critical, and there are, I imagine, potentially going to be some effects to the use of some not such safe products in some of the countries you mention, I think what we need to move toward in the regulatory framework is at least an acknowledgement that there are also economic costs to the regulations and that we can't necessarily assume that the health or environmental costs or benefits are infinite. We need to do some kind of net accounting on the regulations.
In general, it's often the case that the economic costs are never taken under consideration. If the regulation is seen to have any kind of protection of health or the environment, then it's adopted on that basis, without any accounting of what it might mean in terms of lower efficiency, higher costs, or a burden to industry. Those costs are difficult to measure. It's very difficult to do that kind of net accounting, but it is really something we need to start looking at very carefully.
Second—and Mr. Murphy may have something to say on this as well—one of the goals for the agricultural sector in Canada would be to make an effort to move up the value-added chain; in other words, do our best to move away as much as possible from simply producing raw material and then shipping the raw material abroad. That will always be an important part of our trade activity in Canada. But we need to really also consider to what extent we can encourage moving away from the production simply of raw material to processing that raw material in Canada using some of the latest technology and then exporting at a more finished or more processed level in terms of the industrial supply chain.
There are great challenges to doing this. Part of it has to do with our scale. In agricultural production, a tenth of a cent per unit is a fortune in terms of your competitiveness often. On a can of soup, if you're a tenth of a cent more expensive than your competitor, you're not selling. It's a tough business, and scale is important. But again, if we can do something about some of our interprovincial barriers to trade, we may be able to get the scale up to the point where we can become a lot more efficient with respect to some of our processed food industry, which is a very important manufacturing sector in Canada today. I sense it could be far more important if we were to take some of the barriers away.
Another issue for the processed food industry is the shortage of labour. Often there are skilled trades involved in, for example, meat processing, in meat packing. Butchering is actually a skilled trade. There are many other skilled trades in the processing of foods in Canada where we're facing great shortages and where we really have to try to do some work if we're going to move up that value-added chain in food processing.