Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Not being someone who has a lot of background in agriculture, I would be interested to know a bit more about the range of services that your cooperatives are providing and what the difference would be....
This is one of the things I'm struggling with too. I was in the property management business before I became a member of Parliament. I worked for an organization that was a collective of landlords or owners of rental apartment buildings. We could never get government to understand whether we were a business or a residence, because we were housing people. When I used to lobby municipal and provincial governments—I never lobbied the federal government in my previous life—it was often difficult for government officials to understand whether we were a business or were providing a residential service to people and managing their homes.
How do you look at cooperatives? You talk about their being a business, but you say they are different. What are the differences between being involved with a co-op versus being a traditional private sector company? For instance, what is the difference if you're a dairy farmer doing it on your own and not being part of a cooperative versus being in one? What would you say are the fundamental differences between operating as a co-op versus being a regular private business operating with a traditional private business model?