Agriculture committee  Perhaps again, Mr. Chair, I can start, and if there are further questions from the financial side, I'll pass it to my colleague and CFO. This is money that we are asking to reprofile, and it's to support the Canadian Swine Health Board. This board was created as part of the con

Agriculture committee  That line item is as you mentioned, Mr. Richards. It is to allow us to participate internationally in a number of fora. Some examples would be the International Grains Council, which deals in trade in wheat, maize, and rice. It is important for us to be at those tables. There is

Agriculture committee  As Pierre mentioned, this is not a reduction per se, given that we are trying to get authorization right now. Meanwhile, we are trying to improve the administration of those programs. On a number of occasions, some of our clients mentioned improvements that could be made. We are

Agriculture committee  There are all shapes and sizes of proposals, so yes, there are some partnerships with universities, but there are others from industry as well. There seems to be quite a bit of innovation going on in the sector.

Agriculture committee  As you can see, we have different chunks of the innovation pie that we're responsible for. Maybe I can start with the agri-innovation program. This is a two-year program. That would be part of the funding that you see in the main estimates, and it's up to $50 million. This prog

Agriculture committee  Mr. Easter, I'll start with generally where the program is at. With the second stay of default—and you're absolutely right, there were two stays after the 2008 severe economic hardship advances that were offered to livestock producers—we did look at all the flexibilities within

Agriculture committee  We totally understand and we're moving as quickly as we can to put those out. In fact, in terms of timeliness, with all of the devolution that has happened in Winnipeg, we have brought back a number of employees on casual status to make sure we address those issues of timing. For

Agriculture committee  One of the things that we did deal with this year was the implementation of a new system to do exactly that very thing and to automate more of the process. That was also implemented this spring. I entirely understand the concerns of the community. We're very aware of it and are d

Agriculture committee  Perhaps I can start and then have my colleagues jump in on some of these. On the agriculture budget for 2006, we'd like to come back to the committee with that number. We don't have the details today. On AgriInvest, it's true that we have had some growing pains in the implement

Agriculture committee  Thank you. Perhaps I can just start by very quickly highlighting what we call the BRM one-pagers.

Agriculture committee  These are documents that I understand we send to members and we also deposit in the Library of Parliament on a regular basis; every time, we deposit in up-to-date detail what total government contributions are as well as federal contributions by province. We will use this to mayb

Agriculture committee  First of all, we have already heard these comments from the agriculture sector. I will ask Danny Foster to respond to your comments.

Agriculture committee  We also have some other suggestions. We are getting them together and weighing the impact and the costs to departments. Producers will continue to receive compensation while we work on the next strategic framework. We are looking at policies and at the same time, trying to provi

Agriculture committee  We have a responsibility to provide the minister and the government with the most reliable information on the various options that are being presented to us by the sectors.

Agriculture committee  I will let Ms. Aylard tell us about what in effect will happen under this legislation. The point I want to underline is that we consulted the industry sectors, trying to do the best we could for the livestock sector in these situations, and then used every flexibility we had unde