Thank you.
It certainly adds to the complexity. Your outline did it very well. Essentially, when the U.K. Brexited from the EU, the Canadian government adopted.... Let's call it a stop-gap measure, whereby U.K. cheeses were allowed to be imported into Canada under the WTO EU quota. This was for a defined period of time, which expires in about six weeks—December 31, 2023.
The mechanism used to grant this extension is called “the cheese letters”. In essence, it gives importers of U.K. cheese the opportunity to import cheese from the U.K. using the WTO EU quota. Effective January 1, 2024, if we do not get an extension of these cheese letters, the importing model for cheeses from the U.K. will revert to the WTO non-EU quota, which, again—as I mentioned earlier—is the most utilized of all the TRQ quotas. We are now joining the company of the United States, Switzerland and Norway—very large cheese exporters to Canada. Now we have to deal with the U.K. entering that fold. It's going to force companies like mine to make very difficult decisions in the next few months.