Good morning to everybody in the room. It's great to be in the middle of the prairie provinces, Saskatchewan. I welcome everybody to the Standing Committee on International Trade, from the House of Commons.
Our committee in Ottawa deals with all trade. We're dealing with the European trade agreement, which we are finishing up. We have softwood lumber issues. There are many issues, but right now the biggest challenge in front of us is the TPP. As many of you in this room know, it's worth $1 trillion. It involves some of the biggest trading partners in the world, and as we hear across the country, it affects everybody. It affects all Canadians. One way or another it will have some impact, whether you're buying goods or selling goods.
We embarked on travelling across this country. We're going to be visiting all 10 provinces over the year. We're probably going to do the territories via Skype. We've already heard quite a few witnesses in Ottawa, and we're going to be hearing more when we go back.
We're also open to public submissions. I think right now there are over 15,000 submissions that have come in. We've extended the deadline until the end of June. Through the summer break, our analysts will be bringing them all together and translating them for us, to be ready when we come back after the summer.
After meeting with Canadians and drafting the report, we're hoping to have it in the House before the end of the year. Then the rest of the MPs will deal with it in the first part of the year, and probably sometime next year there will be a vote in the House.
That being said, we have 10 members of Parliament on our committee from right across the country. Starting from the west coast, we have Mr. Dhaliwal, he's from British Columbia. We have two MPs from Saskatchewan here, Mr. Hoback and Mr. Ritz. From southwestern Ontario, we have Mr. Van Kesteren and Ms. Ramsey. From the Toronto area, we have Mr. Petersen and Mr. Fonseca. From the Atlantic coast, we have Ms. Ludwig and me, Mr. Eyking. She's from New Brunswick and I'm from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
On that note, we'll get going. We have arranged it so that we have four panels an hour and three sets of witnesses. It's worked quite well so far. Today we have witnesses, some of whom I've met.
We have the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers, the Saskatchewan Canola Development Commission, the Saskatchewan Cattlemen’s Association, and the Saskatchewan Barley Development Commission.
There are five minutes for each group, and we're going to start off with the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers.
Mr. Wiens, you have five minutes. Who's with you, sir?