International Trade committee  You've got me. I think it comes down to the issue of the differential tariff. That's one thing. A 5% tariff is not insurmountable, but when you are a 5% tariff and your competitor is free, it makes a difference.

International Trade committee  You have the testimony.

International Trade committee  The contract...basically the understanding is there's leveraging. The industry has to put in matching funds to go along with that. I believe it's a 75-25 split.

International Trade committee  I don't know what that ratio is.

International Trade committee  Basically, what our ask is...and the reason I have this number is that while I don't participate directly in the marketing efforts, I thought I would sit in on this meeting and listen to it. Every year this money is allocated, directed, in cooperation. It's a partnership among the federal government, the Province of Alberta, and the industry, and in the industry it's through our various marketing agencies--through BIC for the U.S. market, through CBEF for the rest of the world, and through the Canadian Beef Breeds Council for the beef genetics.

International Trade committee  Right. So I think if there was.... We'll always take more and we will always spend it if there's more, but I think--

International Trade committee  I think what we're looking at is that with what we have for funding compared to what other Canadian industries have, I don't think it's realistic for us to expect that we're going to continue to outpace the other industries.

International Trade committee  On the first part, does that seem normal, it doesn't seem abnormal to me in terms of how things work. Normally, if there's going to be a trade mission, at the planning stage we have our money and we know what the mission is going to be. Usually some of the people who go or the companies that go have to make a bit of an investment.

International Trade committee  I think the difference would be that we probably do not expect to ship live cattle to Europe. If we have a requirement to label our beef as Canadian when we ship it to Europe, we're fine with that.

International Trade committee  They didn't tell us where it came from; we just know it was Canadian.

International Trade committee  I think the last time we had this conversation you gave some numbers that I had to assume would be correct.

International Trade committee  That also suggested you might even want to take the opportunity at some point to have the Canadian Beef Export Federation in, and they could go into greater detail of their budget, where their budget comes from, and who they compete against. I was at a meeting over the last couple of days--and I hope I'm going to read this chart correctly, because I knew this question would probably come up and I wanted to make sure I looked at it correctly.

International Trade committee  I think so. We'd want to look at it from both the beef genetics and dairy genetics angles. I know the organizations that concentrate on those. There's the Canadian Livestock Genetics Association, which focuses on dairy as well as small ruminants, such as sheep and goats. There may be opportunities for some of those other species as well.

International Trade committee  Right. The problem we have with the U.S. legislation is not a philosophical objection to origin labelling. In fact, we have origin labelling in Canada. We support the origin labelling that we have in Canada. When we ship beef to the United States, we're glad to label it as Canadian and market it as Canadian.

International Trade committee  Sure thing. We haven't been part of that process in the past. We haven't been the beneficiary, so I probably couldn't give you all the nuances of how it works. But I imagine how it works is probably similar to the way our government officials consult. They go to the industry in their member states.