Agriculture committee  Thank you for the invitation to appear before the committee. My family and I have a beef herd we raise on our farm in Castleton, Ontario, in Northumberland county, about halfway between Toronto and Kingston. Before talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership specifically, I'd lik

Agriculture committee  I'm not sure there is a disadvantage in signing the deal. In fact, in conversations with our U.S. cattlemen counterparts and whatnot, it is widely believed that Canada has shown its willingness to sign the deal. Going ahead with it would drive the U.S. into signing the deal too.

Agriculture committee  Oh, absolutely. We believe that we'll be able to do that. The important thing to remember about the Japanese market, as well as some of these other European markets, is that when we gain access, we're not looking at sending the whole carcass. We're looking at disassembling the p

Agriculture committee  For sure, beef research in Ontario needs some upgrading and whatnot, but as far as reacting is concerned, any Trans-Pacific deal would be brought in in stages. Overnight we would not have to raise our production very significantly. The deal as it states right now would bring it i

Agriculture committee  In the beef sector, the workforce in the packing plants isn't adequate to fill all the jobs out there right now. In some of the plants that are short of employees, where they're transforming the carcass into a specific cut to be shipped, they're having to pull employees off the l

Agriculture committee  We've had conversations and have expressed our desire to get this fixed. Minister MacAulay informed us, something we didn't know, that there's also a shortage of workers on the fishing end of things, in the fish plants. He's well aware of the situation.

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  As I was saying earlier, in many cases the products that we are looking to sell into Japan, as an example, are products that are not held in high regard in North America, like tongue, stomach lining, and that type of thing. It's a piece of the puzzle that we don't have right now.

Agriculture committee  I don't anticipate the U.S. would start buying tongue and stomach lining.

Agriculture committee  That's where upping our number of cows and where production comes into play, which we would do immediately—and have started to do anyway. If you remember, our industry has been in retraction ever since 2005 because of BSE. BSE occurred in 2003, but because we couldn't export anyt

Agriculture committee  We'll grow the pie.

Agriculture committee  You never know for sure about a deal until you get into it. Mr. Shipley was mentioning collaboration during the TPP negotiations. Claire and I and many others were right there with the negotiators and had the opportunity to be informed of what was going on and to have our input

Agriculture committee  One of the reasons beef prices have drastically gone up is the short supply of beef. The biggest reason there's a short supply of beef is that there's been no profitability in the industry for our producers. As I said before, there's been a huge retraction of the cattle herd. Wi

Agriculture committee  Canada sets high standards for animal care. I'm probably not the best person to talk about what other countries can do, but that's why we have the CFIA. The CFIA and our other government agencies are well-equipped to ensure that the animal and products coming back and forth are

Agriculture committee  On CETA, no, those technical issues have not been resolved yet. Yes, we continue to work at them and certainly hope that in the very near future those technical issues will be resolved, because, barring the resolution of those technical issues, Canada's beef producers cannot gain