Agriculture committee  It would be progress. There have been some negotiations among the provinces on federally inspected meat. It may not ever come to pass in my lifetime, but there is work being done.

Agriculture committee  The government's problem is a result of that. The result is that people are closing their doors.

Agriculture committee  How many automobile manufacturing companies are there in the world? Can I count them all on two hands? We've got 4,600 small and medium-sized guys. We've got 6,700 different companies in Canada—

Agriculture committee  Multiply that around the world, and good luck.

Agriculture committee  I don't think it's anywhere near that kind of number. It's not a homogeneous industry, unfortunately, and that's the difficulty.

Agriculture committee  That's fundamentally what one of the major issues is. Again, safety is not a marketable issue. They can do their own marketing thing in whatever format. It's that one single standard, and we'd prefer that it be the CFIA standard at the appropriate level so that we can comply once

Agriculture committee  There are no soft-fruit processors in Canada. They're gone. First let me make one point. We're not talking about a bailout here. We're not talking about a handout. We're not talking about grants. What this industry needs is a loan program, and that's fundamentally what we're tal

Agriculture committee  They essentially have the same needs, although the very small ones, the “fives”, don't. They need some help. Their primary issue is related to meeting safety standards versus putting in significantly larger plants. As an example of the others, the gentlemen I referred to as the

Agriculture committee  Do you mean in terms of companies?

Agriculture committee  All sizes would benefit from it.

Agriculture committee  Even the small businesses, because—

Agriculture committee  If you want to go from being small to medium-sized, you need to be able to go into that kind of a jump. Again, we have Alberta. We have a lot of things in place out there. We have this business incubator. We have the development centre. We built the business incubator so that peo

Agriculture committee  At the end of the day, it's whatever the defaults were—

Agriculture committee  —and the time value of the money.

Agriculture committee  As I said, it's whatever.... It's the loan pool we're talking about here.