International Trade committee  Not for beef.

International Trade committee  In Europe right now, the access we have into the European Union is a small quota of 11,500 tonnes, which we share with the United States, at a 20% duty. Beyond that 11,500 tonnes, the tariff is prohibitively high. It's so many euros per tonne, and it works out to about 140%. Basically we would like to see unlimited, quota-free, duty-free access into Europe.

International Trade committee  Yes, but I guess I would make a distinction. I just want to make sure about what we mean when we talk about the Europe trade agreement. There's the EFTA free trade agreement, already working its way through Parliament, which, as far as we're concerned, was a disaster. It's a good example of how not to negotiate a trade agreement.

International Trade committee  I was going to add that there are messages for the administration versus messages for Congress. The administration has to implement the law that Congress has given them, and so many of our fundamental problems are with the law itself. For the administration, I think you can try to move them to understanding what this law is, that it is a marketing initiative and not a food safety issue.

International Trade committee  I would definitely say that when you are in the U.S., there are allies there who realize that this law is bad for them. The companies that buy these cattle, if they are packing companies--

International Trade committee  Yes, certainly. The packing companies that buy the finished cattle are paying less for them because there is additional cost for them. There is nothing to pass on. It's just all lost value in the system. They certainly don't want to have those costs. They don't want to discount the prices, but that's what they're forced to do.

International Trade committee  Yes, both. Ultimately, it's not that we're afraid to market Canadian beef in the United States. If we were required to label beef that we ship from Canada to the U.S. as Canadian, I don't think the U.S. would be offside in asking us to do that. Where we run into the whole problem is where they're requiring beef sold at retail to be labelled with where the animal was born.

International Trade committee  Thanks, Dennis. COOL has been portrayed by its proponents as a consumer marketing initiative, and has sometimes even been misrepresented as a food safety measure. We believe it's purely a trade protectionist measure. The main target really isn't Canadian beef; it is actually the live cattle trade and live cattle imports into the U.S. particularly.

Agriculture committee  No. I think that as we go into what the priorities are in each market, they will be a big part of this market development plan.

Agriculture committee  About a dozen U.S. packing plants, fairly large packing plants, are important for us to send our Canadian cattle to, whether we send them as feeders to get finished in the U.S. or feed them in Canada and ship them for immediate slaughter. When COOL came into effect, we lost access to about two-thirds of those facilities.

Agriculture committee  As we were preparing our response to the NFU report, one of the things we thought was that it's just an over-simplification of our situation. As we were thinking that, we were also thinking that it's very much like the R-CALF approach in the United States—over-simplifying what the market is, pitting one segment of the industry against another segment of the industry.

Agriculture committee  I was making a little list of some of the issues. With the economic situation we're in right now, people are not buying cars, they're not buying shoes, they're not buying furniture, they're not buying things made with leather. That, right there, has reduced the price of cattle by about $30 to $35 a head on the price of the hide.

Agriculture committee  In our recommendations about business risk management and the approach to take, we certainly have not gone in that direction, other than at one point we were talking about an advance payment, a repayable advance payment, because, exactly as you say, countervail is a large concern for us, particularly for the number of cattle that we ship into the United States.

Agriculture committee  I think you've covered all the bases there. The thing is that President Obama said all the right things, and now we want to see those really occur. I think there's a role for everybody here. Both Canada and the U.S. had parliamentary and congressional elections in the fall, so there are people here, and there are new people there.

International Trade committee  Yes. We're certainly supporting their continuing to negotiate, but you're right, what we've seen so far isn't good enough.