Agriculture committee  Natural disasters are obviously exactly what we want to make sure we protect our producers against. We have a number of programs that help do that. First and foremost in the suite is the AgriInsurance program that provides insurance protection against lost production, which is largely what you see when you have a weather-related disaster.

Agriculture committee  The producer organizations recognize the frame we have and appreciate the frame we have. They have raised some concerns about coverage levels once you trigger the coverage that is provided by the programs.

Agriculture committee  Mr. Goldstein covered our opening remarks; I'm just here to answer questions.

Agriculture committee  Again, I'll come back to what the advance payments program does. We do two things. We guarantee the repayment of the advances, and we pay the interest on the first $100,000. If we go through the year and the producer fails to repay, we go in and pay the bank that gave the money in the first place.

Agriculture committee  You're right on, but I would add the fact that it starts and restarts. When there's an acknowledgement of the debt, you click the stopwatch again and it restarts again.

Agriculture committee  Mr. Chair, it would be our position that, yes, they can be raised above the $400,000 through a regulatory process.

Agriculture committee  It's clarifying.

Agriculture committee  It was an oversight going in. It's a complicated piece of legislation. This should have been added to this particular clause during our consultations after first reading with the administrators. It was caught, and we're fixing it.

Agriculture committee  It wasn't the producers. It was the administrators of the program who went through this line by line with us They said, “You missed 19(1)(c) in this list of provisions that shouldn't be in the agreement with the organization where we don't have a guarantee”. It was the Ontario Cattle Feeders Association.

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I did want to mention again that this did come out of our consultations and it was highlighted by one of our administrators, the need for this amendment. It intends to ensure that we don't put obligations on our administrators at this program that were never intended.

Agriculture committee  I'd be glad to take that question. With respect to the options, currently a producer-guarantor secures an advance with the product itself once it's produced or with a business risk management program while it's in production. When the grain is in the field, we want to have a business risk management protecting that in case something goes wrong with the product in the field.

Agriculture committee  Currently, a number of changes are going on, but I'll use one example. A producer must provide a proof of sale when he repays an advance. The intent of the program was it was a marketing program and the producer was to sell the crop and repay the advance. However, we end up with situations that were described earlier, where the producer at the end of the year, for very good reasons, has decided not to market that year: the market is down; the basis is too wide; whatever the point may be, they decided to move into the next year.

Agriculture committee  That's exactly the situation, yes.

Agriculture committee  Right now we take applications from administrators of a program and producers themselves on a year-by-year basis. It's the same application every year. The producer provides the same information every year. It's a burdensome process. What we're looking for in the future is to recognize that these producers and our administrators are clients year after year.