Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses.
My riding of Mississauga East—Cooksville probably hasn't seen a farm in just over 30 years, when there were a bunch of apple orchards in the area right by the Pearson airport. We have a lot of industry. We have automotive, medical devices, a lot of manufacturing, including advanced manufacturing, and aerospace, but we don't have any farms.
When I speak to the businesses, they're quite concerned about the tweaking or the modernization of NAFTA, etc. They talk about most of their business being with the United States, not so much with Mexico, although yours is quite intertwined.
Because you're all in the agriculture sector, I want to ask whether you have had the opportunity to visit farms in the United States or Mexico.
Has everybody had the opportunity to do that?
We hear a lot of criticism about not having a level playing field when it comes to the three countries. You have Canada and the United States with pretty high standards, and then in Mexico....
Can you—and this is open to the panel—inform us maybe, so that we have an understanding, what those farms are like? Do they have the same health and safety standards? What kind of labour wages are they providing? What kind of standards do they have?
What we heard during the election down in the United States is that they're undercutting American workers and syphoning off jobs, not necessarily in agriculture but in all industry. Because NAFTA is being looked at as a whole, I'm asking you, being experts in the field.