Agriculture committee  Yes, I do hope that we are able to get a “balancing out” amount of money. My only hesitation in saying that--I hear announcements of $5.5 million or billion--is that it actually go to the producer. I sit through a lot of meetings. I'm the president of our local Stockmen's Assoc

Agriculture committee  Can I make one quick comment?

Agriculture committee  I agree that retailers are taking more of the profit, but our dollar... We're kind spoiled in Canada with how cheap our food is, even at the grocery store level. Like, I can feed my whole family for $400 a month, but I might go out and buy a pick-up and spend $800 a month. Or m

Agriculture committee  Just quickly, I think the biggest change is that our expenses continually climb and the amount of money we're getting for our product continues to go down. Our parents, grandparents never dealt with that. They were able to increase their production and the price kept climbing a l

Agriculture committee  I completely see that point of view. We do have very safe product in Canada, and I'm proud of that fact. But with our BSE situation, I believe we're still at about 50% of the markets that are not open. So there does come a point where, well, it's been seven years and the market

Agriculture committee  We recently took a tour of a slaughter plant down in the U.S., in Washington. The SRM that they remove from the animal totals five pounds. So they have to deal with five pounds of specified risk material, which is like a spinal cord and a bit of the brain, the cerebellum, I think

Agriculture committee  I think our standards are sort of killing us. It's hard; we can't compete in our world market when... In the BSE situation, in our whole cattle industry we've had 14 cases of BSE. In Britain, when they had their BSE outbreak, I think there was somewhere around 250,000 cases of

Agriculture committee  I think just calling it specified risk material, they could definitely narrow the window on...and how much volume that is. That little processing plant on Vancouver Island that I was talking about: it costs him $30,000 a year to deal with specified risk material. I think if we

Agriculture committee  As an example of that, our farm bought land in 2005. We bought 1,250 acres, and we paid $950,000 for it--which is a little less per acre than the fruit growers, but... Our plan, in order to buy that land, was to sell more land and do what they call bridge financing. We financed

Agriculture committee  With our use of crown land, sometimes just the ability to do small projects can really help us out--permission to clear fence lines, and have thinning programs done. We seem to have to get a permit in B.C. to do all sorts of things. For example, our ranch has had cattle on it sin

Agriculture committee  It's the same if I go to cut rails to build a fence; they'll give you a permit to cut rails, but then they say they have to be bent and crooked rails, or from dead trees. Well, in the end you just do what you have to do. Little changes like that could make our life a little bit

Agriculture committee  The National Farmers Union report talked more about the packers consolidating and controlling the amount that they can pay for livestock. There's a lot of that I agree with. I don't know if you want to comment, Ian.

Agriculture committee  Can I make one comment? I agree, I think it is time to... I'm very appreciative of what the government has done for our family, that we're still here, but there's no way that we can make up for our lost income with programs. I like the idea of bringing in some sort of marketi

Agriculture committee  Perhaps you can mention the retail part.

Agriculture committee  I'd like to make one more comment. We've been looking at moving to Saskatchewan. We too think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.