Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Finnigan, for the question. My response was in my opening remarks. I will preface it by saying that it is complicated. It's not ever one thing, but surely, in terms of what I said in my opening remarks about the cumulative impact and the cumulative burden of regul

Agriculture committee  On the code, what I will say is this. I think that promoting and supporting good-faith dealings and responsible commercial conduct is important. Does Maple Leaf Foods think that is a good idea? We do, 100%. What I would say is that, for us as an industry player, it is 100% clear,

Agriculture committee  Yes, they are working, but we can do more. It's going to take us doing the actual research to understand where our gaps are so that we're not just going from 20% to 30% haphazardly. Yes, I think that it's good. Yes, I think we can do more. We really need to dig in and take the

Agriculture committee  On its face, yes.

Agriculture committee  Absolutely, I'm happy to, and I'll try to be brief. It's complicated, but in brief, the issue is that when we do our allocations for the poultry sector, what happens is that the processors take on all of the risks but have none of the power in the allocation. What we saw during

Agriculture committee  You know, it's two different issues, but, absolutely, we wait very patiently to hear about what processors are going to be getting. We're happy that producers got their compensation, and we wait very patiently to hear about the compensation for processors.

Agriculture committee  That is the million-dollar question, right? I think the answer is yes. Of course, there is that sweet spot somewhere, but I think the difficulty in finding that sweet spot goes back to the principles we have all been talking about here. When we, as a company, are looking at eit

Agriculture committee  In our opinion, at Maple Leaf Foods, the biggest problem, particularly with the temporary foreign worker program, is the complexity of the application process from start to finish, the complexity and the time commitment, because, as we were saying, we are dealing with acute short

Agriculture committee  I could go on forever, so I will try not to. I can't remember if the point was made by Mr. Laycraft or Mr. Lowe that oftentimes with regulation it's not the particular regulation. For us, what we find is that it's the inflexibility in what we are required to do. As you rightly

Agriculture committee  That's right. It's too focused right now on the process, whereas it needs to be focused on the outcome and on providing the company with the flexibility to get to a predetermined outcome that, with the regulators, we have agreed on. In 2018, there was a suggestion to form a lit

Agriculture committee  Thank you for that question. We at Maple Leaf Foods have very good relationships with universities across Canada. We have a summer student program across many universities; we have co-op programs; we have a centre of excellence program where you can come into the organization o

Agriculture committee  Yes. I think that the point about collaboration across the different stakeholders invested in a solution is important. Will that help? Absolutely, it will help. What I would say—and not to be a Debby Downer, frankly and honestly—is that I do think collaboration across the stakeh

Agriculture committee  I'm happy to jump in here. To answer your question directly, yes, recruiting is ongoing. Of course, meat cutting is but one of the skilled labour requirements that we have at Maple Leaf Foods. As I said in my interventions, this is definitely not a new issue for the industry. I

Agriculture committee  Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I am here representing Maple Leaf Foods, the largest food-processing company in Canada. We have operations across Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, and Ontario and an exporting footprint that includes Asia, the United States and Euro