Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, I am pleased to be here. There is a cabinet meeting going on at the present time and I will not be able to stay for all of the morning or all of the day, but I can assure hon. members that I will be following today's debate.
There has been a freeze on cost recovery. That commitment was made by my predecessor and by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the department. The approach to cost recovery in the future is another one of those stones that we are not going to leave unturned. We are looking at that.
That is why it is so important that we take a look at absolutely everything. We have these tools. We have to ask: What can we do here and what can we do there? If we could do something more, how would we do it? How would we fund it? Are we prepared to shift resources from here to there in order to do it at the present time? What are the repercussions of doing that?
The bottom line is that whatever we do we have to do it in a different way than the United States. The $6 billion put into agriculture last week by the United States goes to producers whether they individually need the support or not. There will be large producers in the United States who do not need support who will get millions of dollars. That support is not targeted to the producers who need it. I think members opposite will agree with me that whatever we do in our safety net system, the system must target those who need it. It must not be a system in which we simply throw out money on an ad hoc basis, as some people think we should do. That will not do the job. We should invest that money as it should be invested.