Thank you.
Just to assure you, I know the disappointment they've had with the CAIS program in times past. I sympathize with them. Many warnings came out from farmers, saying that the original CAIS program would not meet the need, that it was not going to be responsive, bankable, predictable, and it didn't deal with emergencies. All those things unfortunately turned out to be true, starting in 2003. There was a lot of pent-up anger about it.
With our changes, to be perfectly blunt, there's going to be about $2 billion flowing out from the federal coffers to farmers this fall, from September to the end of December. Actually, even that's not.... Let me be completely honest: that's where we control it. Where the province delivers the CAIS readjustments and so on, if they're later than that, we can't control it. So where we deliver it, it'll be out by the end of the year; where we don't deliver it, I can't guarantee that in the same manner. But basically it should go out, if not by Christmas, then I'm hoping shortly after that. Ours will be out by the end of the year.
The provincial governments have a couple of concerns. When I first broached the idea of replacing CAIS in my very first federal-provincial meeting, they simply were not interested. All ten provinces just said they would not hear of it. What they said was that they thought they could create something new that could work, that would still be a margin-based program.
Secondly, they were very concerned about affordability, because of course we have this shared jurisdiction; we have a 60-40 split on this. Since it's a statutory commitment, if we have to pay $1.5 billion, we just pay it. We don't question it; we don't have to go back to cabinet. It's a statutory commitment, and it's there for farmers. The provinces have always been concerned about affordability and the fact that under their system they have to keep going back for a top-up when we exceed the budgetary expectations.
But they were very clear that they were not interested in branching out into other programming. That's why, for example, when we did the retroactive changes to it—when we had the family options, and when we did the cover crop programming—all these were 100% federal programming. The provinces are just not interested in spending more money. I'm not sure of the exact context, but those are the facts.