Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I thank my colleague across the way for the hockey analogy about the goaltender. The dilemma is, Mr. Lloyd, that with your timeliness you actually missed the first period and you had an empty net. You actually started at the second period. I hope the other team is not really good at shooting the puck, or there would be a lot of goals scored before you showed up.
I say this with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, because we're actually talking about farmers who are waiting for money. It's not about pucks in the net; it's about whether I can sustain myself, and in some cases whether my farm goes bankrupt. That's what we're talking about. That's the important aspect of this, the timeliness.
This brings me back to the piece you talked about, such things as fruit trees and drought. You're right; if there's a lake on a section in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, it's a lake. If it's June, we're not planting; it's that simple. I've been out there enough and know farmers well enough—I know my friend Mr. Falk knows the area well—that if that section is a lake in June, you're not seeding.
So you're right; that is easy. Drought is more difficult for sure.
Let me use the example of last year, because you used tree fruit. I'm not talking about plum pox now. Now I'm talking about apples that bloomed, with burn-off because of a frost, that don't have apples on the tree in June. There will not be any apples in August if there are no apples in June, because when the blossoms burn off, it's exactly the same as having a lake on my section in Saskatchewan or Manitoba. There are no second blossoms on an apple tree during the season.
Yet last year we waited until, I believe, almost August before we started to figure out whether there were any apples or whether there was a disaster or not in the province of Ontario, even though we knew that 80% of the apples were gone, never mind 100% of the cherries.
You're right about how we should maybe adjust things, to look at things and how we get in. The other aspect—and you mentioned it, Mr. Lloyd—is that you have responsibility to intervene as the federal government as well, not waiting for the province.
How many times, to your knowledge, has the federal government initiated an agri-recovery program in the last two years before the province did?