Agriculture committee  It's general industry stewardship. You see a lot of it come from industry itself. There is a degree of self-regulation that's proactive ahead of the government, but it works in conjunction with the government. I don't want to speak to the ammonium nitrate code as much as CFI might, because they were more instrumental in making that code a component of regulation.

Agriculture committee  It potentially could be $70,000 per site, depending on the existing site infrastructure. The averages we've put forth range anywhere from about $40,000 to $70,000 per site, times 800 to 1,000 sites across Canada.

Agriculture committee  It depends on the current infrastructure, but yes, that's correct.

Agriculture committee  The United States, through the Department of Homeland Security, has a special registration for products of concern, and with that special plans where, in terms of security risks, each of these agri-retail sites will be placed in a registration process. They've all had to file a registration that identifies all the products of concern.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for permitting us to share time with you this morning. The Canadian Association of Agri-Retailers and its 1,000 members across the country service the nation’s producers and are the front line of a fertilizer and chemical trade worth over $3 billion.

Public Safety committee  We look forward to presenting to your committee our findings, Mr. Breitkreuz. As soon as we have all the appropriate data in place on a report basis, we'll immediately share it with you. That should give us a measurement of where the current members are in terms of infrastructure status, in terms of their proclivity to reach what I call the “threshold of inducement”, and in terms of what it would take to get them to do the security upgrades.

Public Safety committee  We're going to a new level. There have been a lot of requirements for handling and safe stewardship to protect the people who are handling it and to make sure there's documentation, but now we're at a whole new level involving outside threats of acquisition for criminal and terrorist activity, as opposed to inappropriate usage or careless usage.

Public Safety committee  I'd like to echo that and thank you for the opportunity to be here today. Originally we'd thought we might have to wait until the fall, so the fact that you've picked it up. And I credit individual members of this committee as well for pushing that. We would like to impart that we absolutely want to work as closely as we can with government to do the right thing here.

Public Safety committee  Right. We'll try to give you the actual costs for our members, and from there we could maybe work with you more towards a study of the economic impacts.

Public Safety committee  You are quite intuitive. We're trying to be patient. We've just recently focused on this issue in the last, say, five months, and we know that the wheels don't turn so quickly that we could walk away with instant satisfaction. So even though we do feel at times that we're sometimes passed around to various departments, we are still being listened to, and we'd like to think there is progress.

Public Safety committee  Right, but the debt itself could be prohibitive in terms of operations.

Public Safety committee  That is correct. They'll get a tax credit for that.

Public Safety committee  Correct.

Public Safety committee  That is correct.

Public Safety committee  The only trouble is, unfortunately, this is an all-or-none situation where if you're going to decide to do the infrastructure upgrade you have to do it all and you have to do it well, which means it's either zero or $120,000. There is no in-between, no small co-investments, and that's the challenge.