Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I can use one very simple example that will answer a number of your questions. A number of antibiotics are not certified to be used in Canada, but a product that comes into Canada has the capacity to be able to use those antibiotics. It puts us at less of a competitive edge, and if antibiotics are not approved for use in Canada, then product that is coming into Canada should not be able to have that same kind of treatment.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  It should be a shared responsibility among all of us. You need to look at different aspects. Even in processing it's different, and the pre-market label approval that we talked about--these are key components that we believe must be maintained in the country, that's for sure.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. You have a copy of our presentation. It is not my intent to go through that entire presentation, but just to hit the highlights, if I could. Chicken Farmers of Canada is a national organization funded completely through farmer levies. Chicken Farmers of Canada plays a key role in developing, partnering, and managing programs that augment the quality, safety, and competitiveness of Canadian chicken.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Yes. My flight is at 8 o'clock, so I'll probably leave a little before 7 p.m.

Agriculture committee  I have a whole book to go through here. I think what we're looking for out of the disaster program is that the individual farmer is not financially hurt because of a disaster. Some of these disasters have been put on individual businessmen in agriculture, and it is unfair for that to happen.

Agriculture committee  First and foremost, one of the things that we must have under research and development is we must have the scientists. Government needs to have a program in place that will allow scientists to go through college here and be able to work in up-to-date facilities in this country. We need to have up-to-date facilities with skilled scientists who can continue to push our research and development.

Agriculture committee  To be frank with you, concerning the talk about the flexibility, some areas are still grey for us. We need some clarity in those areas and we've raised a couple of those areas. Once we have clarity in those areas, we need to find out if they have given us more flexibility or if they have given us some limited flexibility.

Agriculture committee  In our presentation we talked about one of them, which is the old CAIS program. Another one is the Health of Animals Act. There is an issue there. So there are some issues we have to have some clarity on and which we have to move forward on before we can say this one has provided more flexibility because these areas are of concern to our organizations.

Agriculture committee  There's no question that the major buyers of our product would like to put their own brand name on. It doesn't matter which one they have. Either of the two major players in Canada have their own major brand, and there's no question that they are putting more pressure on, that they want to put their own product name on their own product.

Agriculture committee  Just to comment, when I look at the chicken industry, there are four major key players. Two of the four major key players are co-ops. There's a good, strong cooperative movement in the poultry industry from one end of the country right to the other, and the cooperative has been extremely strong in our industry.

Agriculture committee  We haven't looked that broadly to have a look at that avenue, to be frank with you.

Agriculture committee  It's a very good question, because you're asking the price at which oil is going to start to have ill effects. The question, whether we start talking about oil or ethanol, is whether the demand for the grains is going to continue to develop. We have seen a number of reports saying that this is just a little phase we're going through and that things will start to come back in line.

Agriculture committee  We've actually seen our numbers increase slightly over the years.

Agriculture committee  They would be just over 2,800.

Agriculture committee  It came from the United States.