Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up on a question I asked on April 30 about the AIDA farm disaster program.
At that point only 500 farmers had taken the time to fill out the AIDA forms and send them in to be processed. There are 100,000 farmers on the prairies. What percentage of them have now filled out these forms? How many claims have been paid? Very few farmers have been applying and receiving compensation. I would like to know if the minister thinks this program is helping farmers through the income crisis they are experiencing.
How much has been paid out under AIDA to producers in Ontario, in Quebec, in British Columbia, Nova Scotia and the other provinces? Even the minister of agriculture in Saskatchewan has called on the federal government to scrap this program because he has realized it is not helping the farmers who need it. Will the minister listen to farmers and get rid of the AIDA program?
AIDA was supposed to help farmers who had an income that fell 30% in 1998 but because of the fact that it is tied to NISA, a farmer's income has to fall almost 40% to qualify for any assistance. Did the minister tie the program to NISA so the government would not have to pay out the $900 million commitment?
When I asked this question during question period, the minister said that farmers were not applying. In essence he is blaming farmers for the fact the program is not working.
Long before the minister announced the AIDA program we urged him to keep the program simple and to make payments on an acreage basis. We made that recommendation over six months ago.
NISA is not working either for these farmers. In NISA, 8,600 Saskatchewan farmers have an average of $303 in their accounts. Another 10,000 farmers have less than $2,800 in their accounts.
I understand the reason the minister is not accepting negative margins in his AIDA package is that he does not want to promote bad farm management. Due to the drop in commodity prices there were an estimated 10,000 farm operations with negative margins in 1998. I wonder if the minister of agriculture is prepared to say that these 10,000 operations with negative margins are the result of bad farm management.
The calls coming in from the farm stress line in Saskatchewan are also an indication that AIDA is not helping producers. The number of calls to the farm stress line this year is already way above the monthly average for 1998.
AIDA is definitely not helping farmers get through this income crisis. Is the minister ready to admit that his farm disaster program is a disaster? Is he ready to sit down and work out a program that will help Canadian farmers?
It appears that the AIDA staff is also making up rules on the fly. A man called my office the other day. He and his wife have separate farming operations which include each possessing their own Canadian Wheat Board permit books, filing separate taxes and having separate NISA accounts.
The husband and wife each filled out separate AIDA forms and sent them in. When the AIDA staff looked at these forms it was determined that this husband and wife could not file separately because their farms were not at arm's length from one another.
I want the minister to explain how it is determined that these farmers who file separate income taxes, have separate permit books and have separate NISA accounts are not considered separate farms when it comes to AIDA.
This also raises a number of questions as to how AIDA staff will deal with other types of farming operations. Are the rest of the husband and wife operations to be considered as one farm? What about places where father and son each have separate farms but work together? Will they be considered one operation? The same applies for brothers or people who work together. Did the minister consider any of this when he was constructing AIDA?