Agriculture committee  My understanding is that since 2003, only two supplemental import permit requests were approved. I think both of them were in 2004-05 and they were for very small quantities. I think it was about a half a tonne.

Agriculture committee  I think so. I think what we tried to express is that we do not favour a definition based on a percentage of value. I can give you an example. If you're producing, say, 1,000 tonnes of ground beef and it has perhaps 800 pounds of imported meat and maybe 200 pounds of Canadian tr

Agriculture committee  Thank you. Thank you for inviting us to appear today to provide the Canadian cattle industry's views on “Product of Canada” labelling. Indeed, the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, as the only national voice for nearly 90,000 cattle producers, is always pleased to appear before

International Trade committee  The options are that you move forward or you fall back, and right now the position we're in is that we're falling back versus the United States. We need to get the beef access restored, get the prohibition lifted, and we need to get the same terms of access as the U.S. If we have

International Trade committee  I think non-tariff barriers have become a fact of life. We expect they will occur. How do you respond to them? That's why one of the things we have asked for is to have a mechanism in this agreement to deal with these SPS problems when they come up. I mentioned that the frustrat

International Trade committee  When I think about infrastructure and the many things Martin has mentioned that are common in shipping red meat, whether chilled or frozen, around the world, I don't really see them as being issues related to the Canada-Korea free trade agreement or any trade agreement per se. I

International Trade committee  I have the schedule of the United States-Korea free trade agreement, and for beef cuts--steaks, roasts, and those sorts of things--the 40% tariff will be eliminated in 15 equal annual stages. There will be what they call a trigger volume that starts at 270,000 tonnes the first ye

International Trade committee  We're funded in many different ways. Our primary source of funding is the check-off. Every time a head of cattle is marketed in Canada, this check-off is collected, and depending on which province it is, it's different. In Alberta it's $3. In Ontario it's $2.50, but I think there

International Trade committee  We could find that out. We also have something that was created about two years ago called the legacy fund. This was an idea that we, as an industry, had to get our markets back from the BSE and to recover from that. We believed that we were going to need approximately $210 mill

International Trade committee  I don't think I'd use those words. In the EFTA marketplace, it seemed that those negotiations were going on for so long, and then all of a sudden there was a deal. I'm not sure what happened. I think the closest thing we got to benefiting from the EFTA agreement is that there wil

International Trade committee  I was going to say, as I look at the trade, how it's evolved with Korea. It used to be that we sent mostly tongues and stomachs, the beef offals. They face an 18% tariff in Korea. The beef cuts, like the rib-eyes, the short ribs, the chuck roll, have a higher value. Those face a

International Trade committee  If we look at what the opportunities for beef in Korea would be....and that's what we're looking at, because we represent independent farmers, small producers, and basically we get paid to represent them, and I know that the auto manufacturers and large multinational companies ha

International Trade committee  Right. Thank you for that reminder. About a year and a half ago--and I think that's when the beef export federation was here--we discussed with them what our strategy with Korea should be. At that time we were extremely frustrated that Korea would not even speak to the Canadian

International Trade committee  We participate in an agriculture trade consultations group. We have a beef cattle trade advisory committee in which we participate as well.

International Trade committee  Yes, we were consulted a few times in the last few months and we got the impression the agreement was getting close with Peru, especially after the U.S. Congress ratified it in early December. The sense we had from the Canadian negotiators is that Peru wanted to sign it with Cana