Agriculture committee  I think it's a great question. I think that's the underlying issue here, that it's money that would be...whatever. It's the old stigma that the packers carry walking in here, and this is why it's amazing that we have the producers on the same page. Talking about your working gro

Agriculture committee  Mr. Lemieux, I want to respond to your comments about industry supporting the regulation. I'm one of those people, because I thought it was the right thing to do for this country. As far as OTM product and market access in this country are concerned, we certainly appreciate the

Agriculture committee  I'll start, and then I'll turn it over to the world wizard. I took note of your comments. Keep in mind, when we talk about $31.70 we're talking SRMs from animal feed, not human food. We have an equivalent food policy between Canada and the United States, so you have no just caus

Agriculture committee  I'd love to throw this one back to the responsibility of the government, but the industry did supply the numbers, along with government. As I alluded to in my opening statements, they were underestimated because we didn't have the true outlying cost beyond the walls. I'll leave i

Agriculture committee  Our major competitor is the United States of America. We need equivalency with that country in order to be able to trade effectively; otherwise, we get out of the beef business. We're asking the government from our urgent need on this subject. That's our competitor and that's who

Agriculture committee  Sorry, Mr. Easter. What I wanted to say there is that we're looking for immediate.... You do have to keep in mind the final rule out of the U.S. We needed to understand what was going to happen, still anticipating their feed policy. We've finally seen the feed policy. So we're ta

Agriculture committee  That's right.

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much, sir. I always find this a humbling experience. The only thing I will capture and start off promptly with is that this is an urgent issue, and we sure appreciate you seeing us in a prompt and expedient manner. It's important that this moves along and very qui

Agriculture committee  Which one, sir?

Agriculture committee  I think what you'll see is that the total government cost estimate based on 2008 was $9,461,000. Those were all estimated numbers, and they stopped at the plant door, because we didn't want to respond for the rendering industry. All we could do was capture what we feel the loss w

Agriculture committee  Exactly. Do you know what? One thing that I do want to say to everybody in this room is that we're not in a position to blame anybody, whether it be regulatory or government. We did what we thought was best. We anticipated that by putting this in place we would get a jump on ou

Agriculture committee  Just to follow up with Mr. Boyle, I believe that if our country were running at capacity and our herd were normalized--and we're into that rebuild, hopefully--this issue might be bigger than it is today. It's because we're running at such a low volume today that we're not really

Agriculture committee  Minister Ritz was at our last beef round table, and we complimented him on making his global tours and so on, so we do appreciate all those efforts. It does return to us. The issue we have--and again, we'll come back to it--is that market access is great, but we still have one

Agriculture committee  That's all that's available from a supply standpoint.

Agriculture committee  It's all that's available that would meet this specific.... Is there a demand? There is, but you need the supply to meet it. That's the key.