Thank you, Mr. Des Rosiers, for being here.
I want to focus my area of questions on the valley of death, I guess you'd call it. I'm going to draw my remarks to agriculture just because that's the industry I know quite well. But I think the same premise could be applied to the forestry sector, mining, or oil and gas across the country. The concerns that I hear from contractors or farmers is how does government do a good job in ensuring that a billion dollars of investment in clean technology doesn't just go to the secondary processor or end-user, so that the adaptation of that technology and the funding possibilities going along with it actually trickle down to the primary producer or the source producer if it's in a different commodity?
I'll give two examples. Richard mentioned forestry. The new Ponsse processor would be half a million dollars. Say a forestry producer, a source producer, purchased a new processor two years ago. They're expected to try to adapt that new technology and take that on in order to better their operation. How does that producer reap those benefits as opposed to somebody in the manufacturing business who's taking that wood and turning it into lumber and adding value to it? They can adopt technology a lot more easily because the revenue that's attached to secondary production a lot of times is a lot greater than the revenue attached to the source production.
It's the same in agriculture. When you look at the emissions around agriculture, the majority of the emissions are from the primary production. If John Deere comes out with a new electric tractor—they announced one three or four months ago—it will be $300,000 for a 180-horsepower tractor equivalent. If a producer buys that tractor, how do we ensure that the producer sees some of the benefit from that? If he just adapts the new technology at a higher cost and doesn't see an end benefit from it, then he's at a competitive disadvantage. So how does government help facilitate that and ensure that they're not disadvantaged by the technology, that, in fact, they're able to embrace that new technology and receive their fair share of the positive benefits that come from it?