I'd like to echo that and thank you for the opportunity to be here today. Originally we'd thought we might have to wait until the fall, so the fact that you've picked it up. And I credit individual members of this committee as well for pushing that.
We would like to impart that we absolutely want to work as closely as we can with government to do the right thing here. Doing this thoroughly but promptly is probably of greatest concern. We want to pre-empt any potential incident—but not, obviously, at the expense of economic hardship to a sector.
We don't want it to appear that we're whining, either. Some might say there's a cost of doing business here. And no question, we are prepared to bear, as we have over the years, a great deal of the costs. We haven't come to you often saying that the sky is falling. But we're now coming to say that we're at the tipping point. We just can't afford any more regulatory burden. We need some help to get over the hump.
And it's not just our costs. Really, security upgrades don't drive the bottom line. They don't. They're perhaps of safety benefit to Canadians. We do feel there's a stake for the Canadian government to share here. We also do believe industry should share a stake as well. We'd like to see them at the table, for sure, as a solution. Hopefully we don't spend five years dickering about a number; we could instead actually get something done.
We do prefer the idea of a contribution program. It gives the government the ability to approve or disapprove the eligible expenses rather than leaving it to CCRA to determine whether that's an eligible expense, whether it's depreciated, whether it's immediately written off that year. You can understand why depreciating assets wouldn't be a heck of a lot of incentive for us to make a move. The contribution program is by far the preferred method that we would like to propose. It instantly deals with the situation on a rebate basis.
With regard to the question of what the number should be—in other words, if government were a little bit unsure of whether the costs we present are valid—you have the complete authority to approve or disapprove that eligible expense on an application basis, just like the marine contribution security program. We believe it's ideal. It's an amazing precedent that is exactly tailored to the requirements of the agriculture retail sector. If it's working for agricultural retail, if it's working for port security, why can't it work for inland security?