Thank you for inviting me.
I come from a small family farm in the Fraser Valley. We make cheese on the farm, so it's farmstead cheese-making. I know that with the announcement of CETA there was a lot of furor in the dairy sector, and I'm not about to really elucidate on that. I'm just here to give my perspective.
I grew up on a prairie farm in Saskatchewan. In 1803 my ancestors moved from Scotland to Quebec and bashed out a farm in the wilderness on the north shore of the Ottawa River. In 1907 my grandfather and his brothers came west on the train. They got off in Regina, went by horse and cart a couple of hundred miles north, and bashed out another farm in the prairie wilderness. So I'm a pioneer. I come from a pioneer family. This summer we celebrated 100 years—it's actually more than 100 years—of our family's farm in Saskatchewan. My parents are still there.
The difficult or disappointing part is that it's very difficult to hand on farms to the next generation in the landscape we live in, as in the global landscape. It's hard to make a living in agriculture. Many of you may have grown up on your grandpa's farm or have visited, and you know that things are always changing.
We look at the spirit of Canada and.... I'm just speaking off the cuff. I don't have notes, so it's not very political and it's not very technical, but I—