Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, MP Maio, for being here today. You certainly give us a lot to think about. It's a minor amendment with major consequences.
This summer I did some consultations with tractor dealers and with the agricultural sector in general with respect to this bill. It's garnered a lot of attention in British Columbia. One of the agricultural dealerships that I was speaking with, Matsqui Ag Repair, is licensed through various tractor manufacturers to repair on their behalf, and one thing they mentioned, which I think is important, is the amount of time, energy and money they have to spend on their staff to keep them up to date with all of the various computer programs to make sure that these modern tractors run. The companies that do tractor repair work invest significantly to do so. I just wanted to put that on the table.
The second point he made is that this bill will have major environmental consequences, negative consequences, because right now fuel costs have gone up substantially for farmers across Canada. He said one thing he's already dealing with under the vehicle manufacturing standards in Canada and maybe under CEPA that still needs to be amended on this front is that farmers are finding ways to cut costs by overriding the computer programs because they can't necessarily afford, or don't want to afford, all of the input costs to harvest their crops.
He gave the example of a carburetor. It's easy in some cases for a farmer to override the software to essentially decrease the efficacy of the carburetor being used.
Have you heard of similar instances in your consultations on the possibly negative environmental consequences of this bill in respect to circumventing computer programs to avoid high input costs?