Agriculture committee  In terms of food safety innovation, basically all these standards, as I said, are going on all over the place. We've got the global food safety initiative, we've got ISO 22000, we've got SQF, we've got BRC, we've FSEP. We don't have to do anything. We've got more stuff coming at

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the lead-in to the action plan, because that topic of concentration is addressed specifically in that industry-government action plan. It says “retail concentration”, but you have a worse concentration in food service. One-third is food service. The two major compan

Agriculture committee  I took part of it in my presentation.

Agriculture committee  WD is not one that the companies themselves would particularly go after. As an association we will work with WD in some of the programs, usually in partnership with the provincial government. We had one that developed a program to try to expand on private label development in wes

Agriculture committee  Coming back to the context of small and medium-sized businesses, the largest number of companies in this country are the small and the medium-sized ones. The tax cuts are not the biggest issue to them. The biggest issue is being able to get dollars up front to do the thing in the

Agriculture committee  To begin with the first part—about what we encompass—in the case of my particular provincial association, our membership goes from the people who wash the dirt off a carrot and put it in a bag right through to that full meal preparation you were talking about, whether it's fresh-

Agriculture committee  You have been, and I thank you very kindly for that. I suspect that in the questions I'll be able to finish it, so I can wrap it up there, if you wish.

Agriculture committee  That's the hardest thing of all, Mr. Chairman.

Agriculture committee  For the committee's record, I've also been the industry co-chair of the Agriculture Canada value chain round table for food processing in Canada. I'm going to address some of these remarks from a national perspective, and I will tie them together in terms of Growing Forward 1 an