Agriculture committee  It's not a limitation for us. We can access enough live animals. There are plenty of them still heading to the United States.

Agriculture committee  Just to clarify for my honourable colleague Mr. Curtiss Littlejohn, we're not from the packing industry. We were actually hoping the money would go to the renderers. They need the money to dispose of the specified risk material. That would pull the whole thing through.

Agriculture committee  In terms of the long term, we made these comments as well at the agricultural policy framework.... If you look back, you will see that the vast majority of the money that Agriculture Canada spends goes toward business risk management and farm income support. But we need to be m

Agriculture committee  Certainly it would be the Asian countries. For instance, with Korea, now that the Americans have a deal, we want the same deal. Otherwise we won't get the same preferential access. Japan, as well, has a pretty stringent tariff system and safeguard mechanism that they've put in

Agriculture committee  I'm the meat guy, but I'm not necessarily the export expert. Certainly from my recollection we exported to well over 100 countries last year for pork and about 65 for beef. I guess some of the challenges we faced were with some major markets. For instance, when Romania joined the

Agriculture committee  We certainly see that as well. There are some packers that feel it would be well worth spending the money, if some Canadian packers could invest the money to come up to European Union standards and meet those standards, and then gain access to that market. That is provided we get

Agriculture committee  From our standpoint, for pork processors...the immediate relief for all the meat sector would be elimination of the inspection fees at the plants. That would be a very helpful thing. On the beef side, it is some help to expand the program that currently exists to allow eligibili

Agriculture committee  Fair enough. That's exactly what we were asking for--some help for industries to get larger-scale...and to get the equipment they need. If you get a chance to tour a packing plant, you'll notice that there's still lots of manual labour. So there's still lots of opportunity, but

Agriculture committee  I'm the very last one. I'll go through it as quickly as I can. Thank you very much, and thanks for inviting us to speak to you this afternoon. I work for the Canadian Meat Council. We are Canada's most important agrifood sector, with sales of approximately $20.3 billion and ab