Thanks for the question.
It's one of those considerations that businesses always have in front of them, part of the risks and uncertainty that they're always facing. In an environment of financial situations in which currency is going up and down and the supply chain and energy has been shocked so much, with about $23 billion taken out of it, we don't need to have more layered on. There's policy around this issue that the chamber has put forward.
As to messages I would reinforce, I think we need to do service delivery a little differently to assist manufacturers, and I would include food processors in that; some of those are chamber members as well. There's a need to do more. The ratio of food processing in Alberta is 1:1 vis-à-vis primary production, whereas in Ontario it's 3:1 and in Quebec it's probably 3:1 as well. You have to wonder why that is. After 150 or so years in Canada, why can't we do more?
Some of this relates to regulations that prevent scale-up. For example, to go from being a provincial-level food processing plant that only sells within a province to a federally inspected plant requires a fivefold or tenfold kind of investment and is very much more complicated. There's a need to look at hybridizing or meshing federal and provincial regulations, somehow, to allow people to grow up.
That's one of the problems in the beef industry, for example. It's the same issue as in the oil industry. There's one price supplier—the U.S. is the only buyer—and so there's one price taker. That's an issue.
There is a need to better deploy, I think, information on innovation centres and so on.