Mr. Speaker, when the member for Timmins—James Bay and I were first elected, we served on the agriculture committee together. The member is right. We do not have enough regional capacity across this country. Do we have surplus capacity on good days? Yes, we do. When everyone is operating at full steam, we have enough capacity within the country.
However, when we start seeing reductions in shifts, or shutdowns of plants in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, we will ultimately see impacts in other areas of the country. The farther away those facilities are, the harder it is to get animals to market, and the bigger the discounts they will take.
We need to look at our overall food security and how processing, along with production, is part of that. We also need to maintain the ability to export our high-quality food products around the world.