Thank you. You're absolutely right. Again, we're looking at two issues. How do we create profitability in the industry and how do we sustain farmers through an income crisis? Profitability. We're committed to finding solutions and creating a policy environment within which farmers can be successful.
In the U.S. they've somehow learned how to prime the pump, which has accrued benefits to the primary production sector as well as to value-added. But as long as you have a program that's based on a historical reference margin on a whole farm, you will always have the problem that when prices decrease, your program starts ratcheting down with regard to how effective it is.
That's another reason why we've been trying to build components around it. Now the contributory top tier is a baby step toward addressing declining margins, in that an ENS margin never deteriorates as fast or as far down as a production margin will. So we believe the top tier is going to be effective, once we go to that component, in addressing declining margins, but the provision for companion programs allows us to do things on a provincial-specific basis, which, if we did them nationally, would attract tremendous trade challenges.
So if we do some of those things to address declining margins on a provincial-specific basis, we think we can make the business risk management programs more effective as well.