Mr. Speaker, that really is not hard to explain. He is saying that his people do not understand farming, and so be it, but they have the safest, most secure food supply in the world, bar none. During and even before the crisis our grocery bill is still one of the cheapest in the world.
There are reasons that we did not see a change in beef and other livestock products over the counter. For one, we still have our NAFTA imports and in southern Ontario, and Toronto especially, a lot of American beef is coming in. It is not western beef. It is not even Ontario beef because it goes south to be processed. We have that inventory in the mix, roughly two months, at all times.
The problem we had was with the supplementary quotas, the Oceanic beef, Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, the grass fed beef that feeds into the fast food chains. Again, that is in play and there is two months booking ahead of time. We have that kind of inventory in the cycle before we can start to see savings from domestic raised beef.
On top of that, the packers during the summer cycle were into the hamburger and barbecue cuts, so they could use about 25% of the carcass, that is all. The rest of it is sitting in freezers from coast to coast to coast until we finally get a lot of this offshore stuff going.
The minister talked about 10 million pounds crossing the American border. That market is usually 880 million pounds a year. Ten million is a drop in the bucket. We are starting to roll but not to the degree that we need to do.
We do not have Mexico on board yet. It takes some of the lesser cuts, which will relieve some of the strain back to the packers. That is, in a nutshell, why we did not see a lot of change over the counter.
We also have the argument that if they lowered beef, pork would suffer, lamb would suffer, chicken, turkey and so on would suffer. There are always those arguments. The retail associations that came before the committee did a great job of outlining that. They print their flyers with pricing in them two and three months ahead of time. A lot of those things go into the mix.
We are seeing some cuts where prices have been lowered, such as hamburger. I know Rick Paskal from Alberta brought six semi-trailer loads of hamburger into Toronto. He was practically giving the stuff away just to prove that the product could be moved.
The right things were done without a plan from the government.