Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right. It is stability and predictability, both in trade and at the actual farm gate, that allow people to make investments and carry on. Dairy farmers are going to have to know exactly what the package is going to be. It is one thing to offer the $250 million to the dairy farmers and $100 million to processors. That is fine and it is all well and good. But at the end of the day how is the cheese going to be distributed? Is it going to come into the country in a rush that would be problematic for the market? Are certain valuable cheeses going to all come in at Christmastime? At the same time, we see our own dairy farmers not being able to fill the market. We have seen supplementary quotas all year long on butter. The first one was 4,000 tons and butter is a valuable commodity. A quarter of the CETA is coming in because our dairy guys cannot produce to keep up.
There is work to be done on both ends, with our own dairy farmers and processors deciding between them what they need to do to maintain the Canadian market but at the same time making allocations for these cheeses that would be coming in here. At the end of the day, the growth rate in Canadian content or Canadian consumption of cheese will more than offset that amount coming in from Europe as it works its way through the system and gets here over a staged period. We looked at all of that before we decided to allow that amount of tonnage to come in.
Of course, when we were negotiating, the Europeans started out wanting 60,000 tons, if I remember the numbers correctly. It was just an astronomical number. They always talk about milk lakes and butter mountains in Europe because of what their subsidies did. We have never hit that level. They just basically wanted to transfer their largesse and their problems to Canada. We said, “None of that.” We were able to negotiate a deal that gave us the beef and pork access as well as letting in that small amount of cheese that would be distributed across Canada.
As I say, there are some hiccups and other lines that the Liberals need to continue working on to make sure this deal transitions in smoothly and does not affect our industries negatively.