Finance committee  Yes, it's very significant for us. I guess you heard this earlier. I did catch the end of a question in your first session. There are not enough truckers, and the cost of freight, of getting our potatoes to market, has gone up substantially. We've also seen, though, that even if

Finance committee  Yes, I actually have some numbers. I won't kill you with them but we've increased by $120 million in sales over the last four years. Processed products count for a lot of that, but that increase is more than the exchange rate differential. It's volume as well.

Finance committee  Thank you very much.

Finance committee  Thank you, and sorry about that. The first one was CFIA and the current round of cost recovery that's under way. Do you want me to go into a little more depth on each of those items?

Finance committee  As I mentioned, for our farmers here in P.E.I., our potato farmers pay over a million dollars a year already to CFIA. That's quite a bill. Farmers have been willing to pay that—obviously they've been doing business on that basis—but now we hear of much bigger increases and so on.

Finance committee  Absolutely. Also, we're willing to work. We're not saying it has to be status quo and we want it for free. We're willing to work with CFIA to talk about how things might be a little more efficient in terms of what we see, but so far we haven't really had that opportunity because

Finance committee  On the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, we understand that the difference between Canada and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is that one of the key elements for agriculture is that the competitiveness, or the economic impact on farmers, is not part of something that PM

Finance committee  Good morning, Chair Easter and honourable members of the finance committee. I work for the potato farmers of P.E.I. The Prince Edward Island Potato Board represents approximately 180 potato farmers in this province. We work with other potato organizations in Canada and the Unite

Agriculture committee  Sure. Thank you. We like “buy Canadian”; that works for us. As somebody said before, we have 140,000 people and 85,000 acres of potatoes. We can't eat them all, so we need markets out of our province. We've really found, to be quite honest, that when we meet with our friends in

Agriculture committee  In our province, our potato board licenses people to sell Prince Edward Island potatoes. We license one group that's a dealer, which can sell to Canada, the U.S., and Puerto Rico. The others are exporters; they go offshore. That's only on the fresh product, on seed potatoes or fr

Agriculture committee  Do you mean in terms of a buyer who is also a seller?

Agriculture committee  It's federal. I believe the issue is with the Competition Act.

Agriculture committee  I'd really have to do a little more research on that, because I deal mostly on the fresh side. We do have processors and so on, but they do their own marketing. We help with marketing on the fresh side, but what they're doing and whether they're able to capitalize on that, I don'

Agriculture committee  It wouldn't hurt us. I know there are some products, like “Europe's Best”, that come in with potatoes from Europe in them. I don't know how those companies are dealing with that, but it's a very small part. We're really dealing with Canadian and U.S. products on the potato side.

Agriculture committee  In the month of October.