Agriculture committee  In the end, we need some assistance from the CFIA to beef up our CVO's office, in terms of staff and technical help. We need some financial help with producers for the cleanup. We're looking at $200,000 per operation to try to clean these things up. We would appreciate some hel

Agriculture committee  I shared a copy of my presentation with the clerk earlier and I welcome this opportunity to address the committee. We appreciate the time and effort you're taking to meet with us and talk about this very serious disease. I'm not going to go through all the details in my paper, b

International Trade committee  Customers such as the Japanese send regular teams over to Canada to inspect plants and to inspect the whole processing business. They come on farm. They want to see how we raise the pigs and so on. The Chinese are going to be coming later to inspect plants, because we have a ract

International Trade committee  I'm not an expert on this. The smaller processing plants have to invest significant amounts of money to upgrade to meet the standards we have federally, because there are interprovincial arrangements. If they want to go international, there are certain standards that they have

International Trade committee  Our conversations with the processors are to the effect that the standards are as high as they ever have been and are increasing. The way we go about it is another matter, and that's the issue to us. We have to make sure that throughout the whole system—on the farm, in the proc

International Trade committee  For example, one company here is partly owned by a Japanese trading company. It's one of their 200 projects in the world. They essentially invested in this because the standards are so high, and they market this product as high quality. It meets or exceeds all the Japanese standa

International Trade committee  In the last couple of years we're starting to catch up again because the tariffs have come down and our prices now are more competitive with the United States. You get into this issue of the Korean purchaser, in this case he was a major retailer, and its confidence in who it like

International Trade committee  We're a little more complicated. We're highly integrated, so we have a lot of employees in our companies. All the processing plants are on my board of directors, and we employ directly and indirectly about 13,000 people who make their living essentially out of the pig business in

International Trade committee  The key thing here is that we don't want another experience like South Korea. If the United States moves forward and ratifies this agreement—and they have these preferential changes in tariffs and so on, and we don't have them—our processors who market into Japan will be at a sig

International Trade committee  For pork, there's this gate price system in place, which is designed to hold the Japanese domestic price high. On products coming in, there are different types of products that are affected by the different tariffs on this gate price. It's complicated. Certain products that are o

International Trade committee  We will buy across the Prairies and into the midwest of the U.S. for corn, grains, and oilseed meal, like soy meal and canola meal. We buy about 2 million tonnes a year to feed our pigs in Manitoba alone. We are very price sensitive. As you know, two-thirds of the cost of a fini

International Trade committee  Thank you. I'm Andrew Dickson and I'm the general manager of the Manitoba Pork Council. The Manitoba Pork Council would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to express its strong support for the ratification by Canada of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Th

Agriculture committee  We worked with the federal government in terms of a number of studies to look at how we could set up a private four-year price insurance program an individual could buy from an insurance agent. Part of the problem is we would have to get reinsurance, and the reinsurers are very

Agriculture committee  A massive disease outbreak or something like this, where barns all but shut down and you couldn't do business and animals would be slaughtered for welfare reasons, not because they're diseased.

Agriculture committee  I was contacted by some researchers from Saskatoon who were in the process of trying to register a new variety of barley that's low in phytate, and they've run into a roadblock with CFIA on the issue of novel characteristics. Apparently, because of the phytate-low characteristic,