International Trade committee  I'm sorry, I'm not sure I have an exact number for Atlantic in Montreal. It would be in the hundreds.

International Trade committee  Absolutely, and all our members have signed contracts with their raw sugar suppliers with respect to human rights and so on. Generally, from a sustainability point of view, the sugar cane crops in the regions that our members would be buying raw sugar from, for example, would b

International Trade committee  Atlantic Sugar has a refinery on the east side of Montreal and produces about 500,000 tonnes of refined sugar. That would be for the Canadian market--very little for the U.S., of course, because of the trade barriers--and would sell to major food processors in Canada.

International Trade committee  Which agreement do you mean?

International Trade committee  You are asking how long this discussion has been going on in relation to this particular agreement. I would say that I have a good relationship with the agriculture negotiator. On the trade side, in terms of the international trade department, it would be less open and transparen

International Trade committee  Yes. I don't know whether I should chat about specifics here, but certainly--

International Trade committee  Yes.

International Trade committee  I don't have the specific capacities of each of the plants at my fingertips, but it would be in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes. We certainly have capacity to do more than we do today. Our market has actually shrunk quite significantly over the last year or two because of the

International Trade committee  I don't know whether you want to know all the details, but essentially the USDA announces a quota increase of a fairly large volume—say, 150,000 tonnes. There are a few boatloads of semi-refined sugar waiting, from Mexico or Brazil. It's imported by the sugar refiner. Essentially

International Trade committee  They already do that. So this is a situation where they have a need beyond that, that they don't even have refining capacity to process that sugar in time. The problem is also legal interpretation, so the United States Trade Representative needs to work a little harder at finding

International Trade committee  The problem is that they increased the quota, but it was filled with a low-quality sugar that had to be processed by U.S. refiners. So it didn't get to the market that was needed. Customs and the various agencies were trying to come up with some mechanisms to ensure that the righ

International Trade committee  It would be 500 employees and 250 beet growers.

International Trade committee  We spent a lot of time dialoguing with the food processors, the sweetener users in the U.S., because they're our allies. Obviously they have interest in sustaining access to imports when they need them. We meet quite regularly with the United States Department of Agriculture and

International Trade committee  Sugar was considered a spice many years ago.

International Trade committee  We need a rules-based system; there's no question. Our view is that the WTO is the best mechanism to ensure that the rules-based system is most equitable for all. The problem at a bilateral or regional basis is that it doesn't deal with all the rules. It leaves out domestic suppo