International Trade committee  Yes, we're ready. We've been there. In fact, one of the staff at the Canada Beef Export Federation, who has accompanied us on these missions a couple of times, is actually a native of Colombia. It's been very helpful to have him on these missions in terms of just having that loc

International Trade committee  Probably the Beef Information Centre—and they're probably going to kick me for saying this—is somewhere around $5 million to $10 million.

International Trade committee  That's right. A large percentage of that funding comes from what we call the check-off. The check-off is different in each province. In Alberta, for every animal marketed, $3 is collected and paid to the industry. We've been trying to create a national check-off. This way every p

International Trade committee  There definitely is. And there is a leveraging opportunity. I'm not positive what the ratio is, but for every dollar that we put up through the industry check-off there is some funding at the federal level. There is also funding from each of the provinces. I think what you were g

International Trade committee  From a results point of view, before all our markets closed down in 2003, the percentage of Canadian beef that Canadians ate was somewhere in the 60% range. We exported a number of our cows to the U.S., and we exported beef to markets that paid more for it. After our markets were

International Trade committee  I'd like to think we could do both.

International Trade committee  I'll probably disappoint you in that I didn't bring any of those numbers with me, but I would say that in the bigger picture of beef marketing, it's so important to have the marketing efforts and to be in the markets. Of course, you have to have the access. If you have a barrier

International Trade committee  I'm afraid that any number I give you is going to be wrong.

International Trade committee  The funding for the Beef Information Centre is in the millions of dollars.

International Trade committee  Our total beef production? I'll just give you a rough rule of thumb. One tonne of beef is roughly four head of high-quality cattle. So if we're talking 5,000 tonnes, we're talking roughly 20,000 head of cattle. If we produce approximately five million head of cattle per year, 20,

International Trade committee  To be frank with you, I'm interested in making the lives of Canadian beef producers better. I think this agreement and other trade agreements do that. It may be 1% or it may be half a percent. What access to international markets does for beef producers is it makes their animals

International Trade committee  In a perfect world, we would certainly say that multilateral has to be the primary way of reaching these agreements. Unfortunately, we're not in a perfect world. There's been difficulty in achieving that multilateral agreement, and Canada has not been part of the solution on the

International Trade committee  Well, we haven't shipped any since before 2003, because of the BSE restrictions. We've been shut out of that market since that time. Before that our shipments were fairly minimal. You can imagine the effect of an 80% tariff. So that's one thing we're looking forward to. But the

International Trade committee  Right now it's zero.

International Trade committee  Right. If we had that access tomorrow...and in fact we got that access yesterday. The minister has been to Colombia twice this year and received a commitment. That commitment was finally delivered by the Colombians yesterday. As of yesterday we have agreement on the export docume