Mr. Chair, I have in my riding a pregnant woman who is having her first child. The father of the baby is not being allowed to come over. I have another citizen who's married to an American woman who needs medical services every three weeks who is not being allowed to go over and come back. I also have parents who have not seen their children in months because they're not allowing custody arrangements between Canadians and Americans to continue. Will the minister create exemptions to allow the reunification of these Canadians with their family?
I thank the member for an important question. It is never our intention to keep families apart. At the same time, we are exercising all due diligence to ensure that we prevent non-essential travel to protect the health and safety of Canadians. We've been working very hard to ensure that we have a solution for those individuals who need and want to reunite with their families. We will have further information on that as soon as we're able to resolve that difficulty.
Mr. Chair, the Minister of Agriculture has known there's been a capacity issue on cattle processing for more than a year and has done nothing. We don't have a BSE exemption that would allow us to use American processors, and there's been no incentive to create additional capacity to process. How bad does it have to get for the minister to act?
We have done a great deal for the meat sector lately. We have invested $100million in the beef and pork sectors through the AgriRecovery program. That's a significant increase, because in the last few years the program has provided between $7million and $15million only. That is significant. We have also invested $77.5million to improve the capacity of processors