Agriculture committee  Yes, I think I got the question. One thing we can do is this. If we map our supply chains better and really develop an understanding of where the bottlenecks and inefficiencies are in them, I'm pretty confident that people can work together, maybe with some support from governme

Agriculture committee  The worry on the carbon tax, of course, is if it's shared based on the same way that bargaining relations are in supply chains feeding into retail, then this will just get pushed back and back. The processor will bear some. Then they will try to take it from the producer, and the

Agriculture committee  Sure. We have capability around artificial intelligence, automotive engineering, chemical engineering, chemistry and other aspects of excellence. I don't think we've particularly been effective in deploying that capability in thinking about how we turn a $20-an-hour job into a po

Agriculture committee  Well, I think it builds on your last question. One thing that Canada brings to the table is the natural resource base we have. It's a sustainable resource base. It's resilient. It's highly regarded internationally. Of course, it's totally out of scope relative to the domestic po

Agriculture committee  I think what you're primarily making reference to is working capital. The reason you need more working capital is that in a relatively short period of time, the environment has gotten more risky. That's the way you deal with that. You just add more cash in the system. Now, there

Agriculture committee  The difficulty we have is that we're short people who want to work in food processing and who want to work in agriculture. As I said, the trend is more people wanting to pursue professional careers. I think our challenge is to increase the value of people's jobs so that some of t

Agriculture committee  I understand there are some elements of industry that are working on a code of conduct and I'm not sure how that's going to work. That could be a very positive development. There are a number, as I mentioned, of what I'll call procurement tactics that our retailers use that proce

Agriculture committee  Maybe I'll say it this way: In my limited study, one example you can look at is Denmark. Denmark has done a very effective job of this. Really, part of that is some of their own technical capability. Also, the job here is to take individual positions in a plant that historically

Agriculture committee  Maybe what I can say about it is this, Dave. This information was collected previously. Back in 2013 or in around that period, there were quite a number of datasets being collected that were agricultural statistics. That data collection from Statistics Canada ended. To be fair,

Agriculture committee  In order to be fair, Dave, I think we need to learn a little more about it. There's some worry that, with carbon taxes coming, you have food packaging, you have the production of the farm product itself, and you have all the transportation and the transformation processes in bet

Agriculture committee  It's a real concern. Other countries have taken it on as well. Perhaps the best way to look at it is as an issue of inefficiencies, what types of inefficiencies create some of the demands on behalf of retailers, and what are some of the demands on behalf of the retail segment fr

Agriculture committee  I think we've already started the process of working with allies to take on, actually, issues specifically like the COVID-19 swabs on food packaging. My understanding is that Canada has had discussions with Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., probably the EU, and maybe some others,

Agriculture committee  It's a tough question to tackle, because you're really trying to hit a knife edge with regulation. It's not in anybody's interest to have no regulation. That's part of the credibility of the Canadian product—

Agriculture committee  The short answer is that the data doesn't exist. We go back to the survey of manufacturing and logging, which gives us information on the earnings of food processing companies and things like their GDP contribution and some of their major expense items. However, in terms of the c

Agriculture committee  It's a bit of a complicated topic, Dave, but thank you for the question. Based on pure economics and looking at sort of our mid-term history, it's expensive to transport livestock. You tend to want to locate livestock processing facilities in areas where you have production of l