Agriculture committee  Absolutely, yes.

Agriculture committee  I think in the tree fruit industry we should. It would work and it would solve a lot of our problems.

Agriculture committee  Yes, a little more flexibility. You don't want them coming in and then taking off and working for whoever, but I don't think it would hurt if my workers went and worked for someone else for three or four days while they needed that little bit of extra labour.

Agriculture committee  Definitely. As I said, my parents and uncles talked favourably of NISA. If you were to get rid of AgriStability entirely and put in place a NISA-type program—AgriInvest really is a NISA-type program—they would appreciate that a lot more than what we currently have. So yes, defi

Agriculture committee  Well, I was actually going to touch on your comment.

Agriculture committee  I know we export because we have to, but if we had supply management... In British Columbia, I think the statistic is something like this: we can supply 50% of the food needs in B.C., so if we had a supply management system, I wouldn't need to export. I wouldn't care; I would be

Agriculture committee  I would say it's to the wholesaler. There aren't a lot of them, so when you have a few wholesalers, you have to take the price they're willing to pay. You go into the stores and the prices of apples are $1.30 or $1.40, and yet my return is 13¢. It's going down. The consumer isn't

Agriculture committee  I would say it's the demand for higher and higher quality and the costs associated with that. Just the other day, my dad was trying to figure out what nutrients to feed our trees. He was, like, geez, it's so complicated; in the past you had three or four sprays, and you went out

Agriculture committee  I don't know for the entire industry. Specially for our packing house the bulk of it is export because we rely on producing really high quality and going for more niche markets.

Agriculture committee  I can start. My soft fruit—cherries, nectarines, apricots—are sold 100% here in Canada. The peddlers, the fruit salesmen, have connections with produce managers and smaller retail firms. They come to my farm and buy 10,000 pounds of cherries and then take them out to Alberta or

Agriculture committee  On average it is 22¢ per pound, yes.

Agriculture committee  Yes, that's the average.

Agriculture committee  It's been really bad in the last three years. One thing that really killed us was the Canadian dollar. Now it's up at par and about four or five years ago it was around 78¢ American or something like that, and that is a huge difference right there.

Agriculture committee  Do you know what the amount is?

Agriculture committee  That's a great suggestion. SIR has worked. In my area, anyway, I no longer have to spray for codling moth. The problem with SIR is that as the acreage goes down, those people still in apples have to pay more. So definitely, if the federal government could come in and help out, th