Agriculture committee  Yes. If we had a minimal export potential, maybe none of this would matter. But, of course, we have an industry that is the largest in terms of employment in the manufacturing sector in Canada, and we don't have a dollar that's at 65¢ any more. We have a huge opportunity, and if

Agriculture committee  Yes, I can, thank you.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also want to thank the committee members. It's an honour to present to you on your important topic of internal trade barriers and the link to growth and competitiveness in the Canadian agrifood industry. Let me start with a word that sometimes makes

Agriculture committee  Thank you.

Agriculture committee  I agree. We definitely support the idea of a single system. The challenge is for smaller establishments. Some of the changes recently proposed would make it easier for some of the smaller players to get their federal registration. That's fair. At the end of the day, I do think it

Agriculture committee  I'll take a shot at it. I'm no food safety expert. The origin of the system, I'm told, was when they were preparing for the Apollo space program and they had to feed astronauts in space. They started to think differently about how you would prepare food and ensure that no one w

Agriculture committee  It's a big question. As a company that lived the consequences of a major food safety breakdown, we feel that keenly and understand deeply what it takes to be a leader in food safety. The key is that we always have to make decisions and invest resources based on science. That's

Agriculture committee  I'll get that for you.

Agriculture committee  My guess would be maybe 80% would be consumer. In terms of hams, bacon, deli, and then other value-added meats, probably, from our total system, it would be something like 80%.

Agriculture committee  Yes. The business model is one to try to reduce our exposure to commodity risk. When the dollar went to par and we were so reliant on exports, we found that we had a business model that frankly wasn't sustainable. We're trying to build it into a more vertically integrated, value-

Agriculture committee  In the supply chain, what we've done now...we used to have hog farms that we owned or that had different contractual relationships for hog production in Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario. It's now just Manitoba. Of those hogs I mentioned, the 20%, we own them 100%. So it's a clear,

Agriculture committee  Right.

Agriculture committee  It is a risk management strategy. It's about having a procurement model that certainly guarantees you and gives you insight partly to the pricing and the cost structure that is relevant to producing hogs. It's also having the flexibility to source and take advantage of market cir

Agriculture committee  The company, as it's structured today—and it was consolidated organizationally a few years ago—focuses on three areas: protein, bakery and agribusiness. Protein is mostly pork and poultry, certainly only those species in terms of primary slaughter of birds and hogs. From that we

Agriculture committee  Yes.