Agriculture committee  I'm a little hesitant to name names in this forum. I would much rather get back to you, perhaps.

Agriculture committee  As you look at my age—and I'm retired—you can imagine that lots of the senior public servants within PAC are people I know very well. One of them rose to a level just below the secretary. It is an administrative decision. I would suggest to you that you could reach out to any senior agricultural person in agriculture, and you'd get that same reassurance.

Agriculture committee  I think I lost my train of thought. It really was that there's nothing magical about this. It's a stroke of the pen. Do you satisfy the requirements under the PACA or don't you? Right now, we've been told that if we have an insolvency tool, we satisfy it and we get it back.

Agriculture committee  In reality, that's not likely to happen. The U.S. and Canada have had regulatory backdrops for fruits and vegetables for going on a hundred years. No other country, really, has come forward and has done the dispute resolution or had the kinds of grade standards or the kind of co-operation that the U.S. and Canada have.

Agriculture committee  I think it's an accurate statement, as far as it goes. Certainly, the DRC provides dispute resolution, but this bill is not about dispute resolution. This bill is about getting paid when there's been an insolvency. I don't have any problem with that statement. The DRC is very important to the industry.

Agriculture committee  That's correct.

Agriculture committee  Sure. Thank you, Rebecca. There's no mystery about getting reciprocity back. It doesn't require Congress. It doesn't require anything. The Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act itself provides that, if another country has a system that is deemed to be equivalent to theirs—so the DRC satisfies part of that—and if we had an insolvency tool, it's automatic.

Agriculture committee  Do you mean suppliers and retailers in the U.S.?

Agriculture committee  It's a very difficult question. The DRC has been set up and operating for a long time. Before I retired, most of the problems that would come up regarding dispute resolution or payment issues between farmers and large retailers were really resolved though informal mediation. It operates much the same way as PACA in the United States does.

Agriculture committee  The DRC and PACA have had a long history of working together. In fact, the PACA actually handles a few of the disputes for the DRC. Then we talk back and forth regularly because the systems are so common. As this reciprocity returns, there will become more U.S. members. There will be more applications to DRC to resolve disputes.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for this opportunity to speak with you regarding Bill C-280, the financial protection for fresh fruit and vegetable farmers act. As you indicated, I retired as the president and CEO of the Fruit and Vegetable Dispute Resolution Corporation in 2021, having been part of the DRC since its origins and inception nearly a quarter of a century ago.