Industry committee  Maybe I can start and then hand it over to Bob. I think that history taught us a very important lesson with BSE. Following BSE in the early 2000s, we lost 27,000 farmers throughout the Canadian beef sector, and that certainly had the largest impact on our young producers. Theref

Industry committee  Our recommendations with the APP is to increase the interest-free portion for beef cattle to half a million, to increase the overall cash advance limit to $3 million and to extend the repayment terms for beef cattle to 36 months. Essentially, this will enable producers to invest

Industry committee  Yes, and I think the key thing here is that, right now, we're at a 30-year low for the total beef-cow herd here in Canada. We see opportunity for growth, and we see we can be one of the engines for the Canadian economy. Last year, we saw just under a 20% increase in the value of

Industry committee  I can't speak for the province of Alberta, but perhaps I could give some insight into the business risk management programs. Certainly, we see that they're not the right tool for us to be managing right now, or they need to be triggered. For example, if we look at AgriStability,

Industry committee  Certainly AgriRecovery could be an option to address some of the problems. It could be a funding mechanism to get it dealt with quickly, but it hasn't been yet. Anything that anybody can do to get it implemented...the more quickly we're going to be able to deal with the problem.

Industry committee  Bob, do you want to answer that?

Industry committee  We have a recommendation for an export development fund that could help with some of the investments that need to be made, as MP Masse was talking about previously, to be able to enhance the capabilities at some processing facilities. For us right now, all options are on the tabl

Industry committee  I'm not sure about that specifically. I could get a further answer for you, but I know that there is work under way right now on the regulations for the interprovincial trade of meat.

Industry committee  That's not something that I've heard. Go ahead, Bob.

Industry committee  I think the challenges with processing for us have been with the larger facilities, so I haven't heard that side of things.

Industry committee  We have previously recommended this export development fund. One of the reasons is that, for Canadian beef, we have access to a number of new markets and we want to make sure we're optimizing that in terms of economic growth. Perhaps a processing facility might need to invest i

Industry committee  I would suppose that one of the remnants from the BSE era was a set of regulations that required Canadian processors to remove a larger amount of something called “specified risk material”. Next year we're hoping to get our BSE “negligible risk” status. I think this is a really

Agriculture committee  Sure. On the set-aside we estimated and did a range from $35 million to $135 million, but we think we're probably going to be closer to the $135 million. Then, on the livestock price insurance, we've also estimated a cost of around $165 million.

Agriculture committee  I can jump in here. In terms of comparing us to the United [Technical difficulty—Editor] is that we're utilizing the programs that work best in each location. For us here in Canada, we think the livestock price insurance and RMP are the key programs that we need to be utilizing

International Trade committee  Yes, I could. I would first say that farms in Canada are small to medium-sized businesses. Some of our challenges in shipping into the European market are getting the audits completed to be able to send into that market. We would say that for the U.K., first of all, we should r