Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and committee members. I wish to apologize at the start, I am not the eloquent speaker that Patrick is. I always feel embarrassed whenever I have to talk right after him. My name is Brian Nilsson and I am co-CEO, with my brother Lee, of XL Foods. We ar

Agriculture committee  I'll start by giving a mild example. I was just at a cattle conference on Monday and was one of the speakers. One of the other speakers was a well-known analyst. She used to work for CanFax, which is the price-recording mechanism we have in Canada. She presented a report and gave

Agriculture committee  My first thought is that if we actually had that type of legislation and saw its impact, we would find the impact to be extremely negative to the cattle producers. One of the things we learned very early on was that this industry is based on capital and the amount of money in it,

Agriculture committee  I would probably epitomize someone who believes in a free market. I think the cattle population, other than in the period of BSE when it was abnormally forced to increase, will find its level. We are firm believers that we are actually, over the next five or ten years, going to r

Agriculture committee  No. What I would say is that I, for sure, want to express that I do not support COOL. Absolutely, I would like it to go away. One of the things I wanted to point out is that I think we are not having the consequences to western Canada that were initially perceived. A lot of that

Agriculture committee  Well, I believe right now we've started our WTO challenge with Korea. That's a very progressive step. I would say Korea is one of the markets that would have a definite help, if you want to say. It would increase pricing for all sectors of our industry. Currently, the United Stat

Agriculture committee  I would go with trying to say that as we move into periods where hopefully we see better pricing, I would like to think that the herd expands again. It's an integral part of the industries I'm in to have that expansion, and that's what we're hoping for. I do qualify that the Uni

Agriculture committee  I'd like to see the report that says the prices have dropped to the extent that you're talking about. Actually, this spring the prices were higher than they had been previously. Through a big period from late last fall and on, prices were higher. We've had higher prices on cull c

Agriculture committee  I just don't see that. In general, I will not disagree that the market is still not up to a level that would make it very profitable for producers. The underlying issue that we face, all of us, is trying to maintain the livestock industry. We're part of that. We're in the product

Agriculture committee  COOL was brought forward from a splinter group within the United States that believed they could create a premium for U.S. meat by identifying our meat as Canadian. Right now these people are frustrated because they're not seeing this premium, so they're saying it needs to be mor

Agriculture committee  I was just going to say that I think what you are seeing is that there is a debate between the two countries on the organic recognition standard. I think that is more of an entrepreneurial...or how would you call it, Patrick? One saying they have an organic standard and you don't

Agriculture committee  I could point out that in our purchase of Lakeside, one of the things that helped was that we knocked the administration costs at the corporate office in the United States by about 80%, because I don't really think I'm worth that much, so we don't charge that much to our plant. W

Agriculture committee  At this point, if it sounds like we have a mission that we believe the livestock need to stay here, it's to sustain our industry. That is part of what we're trying to do. We're trying to make sure, because there is a danger that our industry contracts to a level where we then los

Agriculture committee  The very first packing plant we bought processed 130 cattle a day. Currently we process 5,000 a day here in Canada. The hardest part for us to learn was that we couldn't compete with the bigger plants. The cost structure from a small plant is so much higher that they have to deve

Agriculture committee  This would be a number that I think would probably shock everyone; it ends up being about 12% of our total production. It varies, maybe between 6% and 14%, depending on the time of year and things like that. To be quite honest with you, over the last five years and with the tur