Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I have six minutes, so I'm going to split the two questions, one for Mr. Reaman and one for Madame Brisebois.
My first question would be to you, Mr. Reaman, and I have about three minutes. It's on your comments about supply management.
Being a past farmer and a member of the trade and agriculture committees, and having been to Geneva, I often hear from other countries that we're the envy of the world with our food system—and supply management is a big part of that.
It does various things. It keeps stability with a constant supply of food. Many of our farmers have to maintain a higher standard than those in other countries, whether from HACCP programs or other things. For example, many of our dairy farmers cannot use growth hormones, which are used in the States. If you take a cow in the States, they use hormones for it, making the cow produce more milk that's cheaper, but it burns out the cow. So there are all these different factors in play, which our supply management maintains—and our farmers maintain that quality of product.
There are other factors, of course. Our farmers live in a northern climate, where it costs more to produce our product. We can only have our cows on the grass for four or five months. So you can get this cheap cheese out of New Zealand, where they don't have the same costs. The concern is that if you let all these cheap cheeses come in, it's really going to devastate our dairy farmers, because a certain part of their milk is for industrial uses and goes into the cheese market, and if they don't have that market, it's going to really cause a devastating effect. That's my pitch from the farmers' point of view.
Also, there have been studies done on this, and there's no doubt that when you go to Washington or Detroit, there is some cheaper milk and cheeses. A lot of them are loss leaders, but if you take a basket of dairy and poultry products in Boston compared with Montreal, there's only about a 10% difference.
So that's my statement, but my question is, shouldn't the restaurant and food service organizations be concerned if they are pushing for eliminating supply management? Aren't they concerned about what they're doing to our rural economy and farmers, and about their future food supply--because there have been studies done lately showing that the first thing that matters to consumers is not price. They want to buy local food; they want to buy safe food; they want to feel they're supporting their local farmers. Just recently I was in Quebec City, and it's nice to know that all these products we have in our country we can eat right here.
So I'm just concerned about the food service industry pushing that way. Is there a concern from their side about how they could devastate our rural economy and our farmers?