Agriculture committee  I guess what we heard--and perhaps you've heard some similar reports coming out of some of these small facilities--is that a certain amount of meat, and I've heard different numbers, was being required to be disposed of. I don't know what you found in your investigation, but I wa

Agriculture committee  My impression is that it was the inspectors. I couldn't say that definitively, but that was my impression, that it was the inspectors. I only heard it in Ontario.

Agriculture committee  A good part of it is. This is the sort of thing we're trying to figure out ourselves as we participate in this working group. How far can we get with this? I don't think we believe we can get down to the one pound in Canada, at least in a year or a couple of years. I don't think

Agriculture committee  The regulations are the same, but we've seen in practice in some facilities, in Ontario in particular, that some of the meat around the spinal column is required to be left on to a certain depth. I can't remember exactly the measurement around the spinal column, but there's some

Agriculture committee  The term “abundance of caution” comes to mind. I'm not sure where the directive has come from. But our working group is looking at the U.S. approach, looking at what's done in Canada, and having pathologists look at spinal columns prepared in different ways to determine whether t

Agriculture committee  I don't believe it's a technology issue.

Agriculture committee  I guess as we work with CFIA one thing we're keenly aware of is that they take these things extremely seriously. They don't remove or loosen a regulation without a great deal of thought and scientific evidence behind it. That's the process they're going through, and unfortunately

Agriculture committee  That's basically what I was going to say. On our understanding of how it's going to work, the $25 million and the $40 million are two different sets of money for different things. The $25 million is to address the $32 per head cost. The $40 million is for investing in technologie

Agriculture committee  Yes, Travis mentioned that in Canada it's about 58 kilograms per animal. In the United States it's one pound per animal. So we have two objectives here. One is to get the volume of material closer to the U.S., and the other, the $40 million, is to find a marketable purpose for th

International Trade committee  Definitely having diversification with more options is always better. On the Jordan one, I understand there were some good results in that FTA for beef. There's also Panama, and I think we're still waiting to see all the details on that one. But Europe is the jewel. Europe has a

International Trade committee  We know we're playing catch-up with the Americans in a number of markets. We had to play catch-up when Taiwan and some other markets opened. We'll be playing catch-up when Korea eventually opens. Here we finally have an opportunity to get ahead of them. We want that opportunity a

International Trade committee  It goes back to the BSE restrictions. Hong Kong shut down to both Canada and the U.S. in 2003, and in 2004 we were both negotiating with Hong Kong. They had a requirement that they wanted us to implement a certain protocol on how the carcass was split and the use of certain equip

International Trade committee  I think what is very different in the U.S. versus either Ottawa or other countries, where the traditional diplomatic means maybe work a little better, is that in the U.S. Congress, every congressman and senator is basically independent. Sure, there are some party-line votes and t

International Trade committee  What we do tell them is how important trade is to their profitability, to their ability to sell cattle at a price they'd like to get for it. I think beef producers know what an impact having all of our market shut out in 2003 has had on beef prices, and we still have not fully re

International Trade committee  I'd have to double-check that, but maybe. I'm not sure.