Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Ernie, Brian, and Linda for coming here and outlining your concerns in a number of areas, actually.
I might ask you, Mr. Chair, if you could think about the committee finding fairly quickly perhaps half an hour to see if we can discuss some recommendations that we could put forward to the minister to deal with some of the problems we've heard about over the last three meetings. We could draft a motion, but I think it would be preferable if we sat down as a committee to see if we could find some common ground to make some suggestions. Could you think about that?
Ernie, on the targeted advance, one of the concerns I have is that the department basically confirmed for us here on Thursday that under the program, the way it's laid out at the moment, with the minister's announcement, if you can't pay, you're certainly in default. Producers who go into default will be charged interest on the loan, back to the origination of the loan, including the up to $100,000 interest-free amount. Although the interest will be at a low rate, at a quarter of 1%, it's still interest going back to the beginning of the loan. As you mentioned in your remarks, we have a lot of multi-commodity producers in P.E.I., and Ms. Jody Aylard said under questioning that people in those other commodities would lose their rights to advance payments if they defaulted in another commodity—and that's extremely serious.
So my first question is, if we can't find a way to change that aspect, what will the impact be? On the one hand, people going into default is one thing, and it's serious, but second, what would the impact be of losing the advance payments for other commodities?