Agriculture committee  I have lived this for about a decade, raising capital. I'm an immigrant to the province of Saskatchewan in many ways. I've lived outside of Canada for many years. The financial institutions of Canada are extremely risk-averse. In the U.S., much more risk is taken. We need to incr

Agriculture committee  Absolutely it's encouraged, but I also want to explain that in the beef industry, in particular, where it's so concentrated.... I gave you the PlayStation example where there are loss leaders in beef. You need that global reach because, whether it's crown-cut tongues or mountain

Agriculture committee  Well, I think it's all about raising the productivity of the agriculture that you have and adding value to it. My interest is in regenerative agriculture. Agriculture is essentially an indirect investment in water and it's all about soil health. The most important technology we h

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. I can unpack a whole bunch of different things there, Warren. I love the idea of snow beef. Differentiation—it feeds back to the point. When I lived in Japan, I walked through the Kobe beef slaughter plants in Gunma. They actually let people go into the carcass cooler

Agriculture committee  I think you have to build a culture of innovation, which you alluded to. In our case, we were the first to commercialize the rinse and chill technology in Canada. We commercialized a fully automated organic and grass-fed ground beef brick line. We're looking at custom fabrication

Agriculture committee  A tax credit for automation would be good, but it's the upfront capital to actually get that moving, on site; I would say an endorsement, a guarantee.... For example, if you're going to a Japanese customer, they need to know that they have guaranteed supply. HyLife in Neepawa,

Agriculture committee  I think so, and with a realistic timeline. The timeline was that projects had to be completed by September 30. Anything strategic takes time, so especially during a pandemic it wasn't really realistic in terms of the framework and the execution. I'm not complaining here. I think

Agriculture committee  I'm sorry, are those the humane handling standards you're talking about?

Agriculture committee  So it's the over-30-month and under-30-month standard.

Agriculture committee  You could look at it. Certainly, that's an issue that's deregulated in many markets. Yes, Canada has been impacted more than other countries, for sure, on that front. I think opening deregulation is a good thing in that respect. On standards, the bigger thing is growing the Canad

Agriculture committee  For example, the emergency processing fund has two categories. There's an emergency category and a strategic category. To my knowledge, not a single strategic investment has been approved in that fund. I understand that there might be a top-up. It needs to be funded and strategic

Agriculture committee  Fabrication is your area with the greatest.... You have people density and risk of the contagion, so as it relates to us our bottleneck is in fabrication. Having a combination of better layout and automation would greatly improve both the productive capacity and the safety of wor

Agriculture committee  There are always challenges. We went through many challenges on the regulatory in 2014 and 2015. We went through recalls, a licence suspension, many things that came with taking a provincially licensed plant to federal status, which we achieved. Since then, we've done a Costco pr

Agriculture committee  I don't think the issue per se is supply, because as I said, almost half of farmland in Canada is in Saskatchewan; there are plenty of cattle around us. I think the issue is the scale. For example, if we went into international markets, it's the global reach—you need to be able t

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Lianne. Essentially cutting to the chase, the issue is we're not capitalized effectively. I outlined to you the critical mass of capital funding issues we face with two extremely strong incumbents in the area. What I think is the issue is during the pandemic, when the