Agriculture committee  As for insurance-type programs for what you're talking about, the more volatile markets are—like they are at the present time—for grain, oilseeds, and livestock. The cost of insurance, i.e., doing it right now by doing options in the futures market, is cost-prohibitive. I would

Agriculture committee  Basically the Ontario market is about one-quarter beef, one-quarter pork, one-quarter grains and oilseeds, and one-quarter horticulture. We have the opportunity and the climate to grow many different, and be in many different, businesses. I think we have a more stable weather pat

Agriculture committee  We lost 40% of our feedlot industry in Ontario due to BSE. There's a political—

Agriculture committee  Yes, you can say we're completely green, or whatever colour you want to use for negotiations and world trade organizations, but there is a point where you're going to have to adjust somewhere to keep those farms in business, or you let them go out and the strong get stronger. We'

Agriculture committee  Good question. Again, I'll just take my particular case of BSE. I deem the problem of BSE to be partially political, where the borders were closed and they really shouldn't have been. So how we can fix those low margins—that's where I was saying we have to be compensated; our ref

Agriculture committee  I think we're doing a lot of the right things. We're putting money into international trade. We're putting money into trying to get rid of what I call the politics—you know, people coming up with any excuse why we can't sell another product. I think farmers are participating in t

Agriculture committee  We basically have a program—well, it's being implemented at the present time—in Ontario. It's just an Ontario-based program called RMP, risk management program, for cattle. Time will tell. There are some concerns about it being manipulated. I don't know. I think if it's properly

Agriculture committee  There are two things I'd like to add to that. One is that we are establishing a very good traceability process in this country of the products we're producing. I think that will help us. Another one is to put more bodies on the ground in those countries, more embassy staff who ar

Agriculture committee  There have been sufficient incentives. I think you can always use more. I agree with you. Just being a base commodity producer in this day and age I don't think can differentiate you in the global marketplace from somebody like the U.S. growing corn. If we can value-add more here

Agriculture committee  I'll answer that. As I pointed out in my presentation, something like AgriInsurance is in all provinces. Basically it's crop insurance, but it's different in each province. As you know, it's 60% from the feds and 40% from the provinces, and for crop insurance, in our case a large

Agriculture committee  Again, what I would like to see is multi-enterprise coverage. I also would like to see compensating farmers somehow so that we don't have our declining margins due to what I call political interference, such as when the BSE hit us and they wouldn't open the borders for us, etc. I

Agriculture committee  When I was looking at this, I saw some figures. Ontario has approximately 23.25% of the non-supply managed agriculture production in Canada. We are presently getting 16.5% of AgriInvest, AgriRecovery, and AgriStability funding.

Agriculture committee  That was going to be the answer to my question. That's why I was looking at 2% or so, because I figured that was a better way for Ontario farmers to have more money to be put into a program. I would up the caps. Right now it's 22.5%. I would up it to 30%, 35%, or 40% so farmers c

Agriculture committee  On the whole issue of caps, I would say the farms who are bigger want higher caps. In the future, I would see a need to keep raising the caps as farm sizes increase. I would maybe make it an ongoing thing, not that you have to go to legislation all the time. If you say the top 10

Agriculture committee  I'm pretty sure it's arm's-length ownership of the businesses, so I don't think you can.