Agriculture committee  Thanks for the question. Clearly what agri-retailers have to incur in terms of costs, just from a standpoint of recovery, always gets translated to their customers. There's a minimal margin that every agri-retailer would like to make. Ken can probably testify to that. He's an agr

Agriculture committee  It's a pleasure to be here, Mr. Chair and committee. Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. CAAR has appeared in front of this committee a number of times, and we submitted a written statement in April, which I trust you also have a copy of. We were in absentia

Agriculture committee  Mr. Bellavance, I do agree with you, without question. My comment was that we are not in the business of public safety per se. We have a shared responsibility in complying with the regulations because we helped write them, so we're aware of some of the most common sense ways to

Agriculture committee  Because we don't set pricing, I'm going to refer that question to CFI in terms of how price is set for fertilizer. I can just tell you that at a retail level, if the Canadian dollar is high, you've got purchasing power relative to the American dollar if you're purchasing Americ

Agriculture committee  That's a difficult question without analysis.

Agriculture committee  I'll start with the security regulations. All I can tell you is that we have estimated the costs to the industry to be in the neighbourhood of $50 million to $70 million. So there are the dollars, however you wish to apply them to the market. If we were to pass on our costs--and

Agriculture committee  That should all be passed on to the producers.

Agriculture committee  That's correct.Typically, 100% of that should be passed on to the producers.

Agriculture committee  Mr. Boshcoff, something came up when we were at the ARA conference in Las Vegas--that's the retail association in the United States. I'm not extremely familiar with this, but I'm going to throw out this concept and see if it's a potential that may help. It's called fertilizer s

Agriculture committee  Well, crop inputs are in the $3 billion range across Canada. Fertilizers comprise probably 50% of that.

Agriculture committee  For the total market, these gentlemen might actually have better figures than I would.

Agriculture committee  Greg can probably give you some evidence. I'm hearing from our members that the market is brisk in terms of the amount of purchases this spring. However, margins are being pinched because sometimes, as Greg pointed out, we buy at certain prices but have replacement costs that are

Agriculture committee  Mr. Haney might give you a better response.

Agriculture committee  Twenty percent margins are probably extremely high. It's more like in the 10% or 15% range.

Agriculture committee  Retailers are not in the business of public safety per se. We've always taken security very seriously and comply with regulations. An example is the AWSA pesticide guidelines. But at this point we're taking on more onerous regulations that don't directly relate to what we do as