That's a good question. It's on people's mind. I have encouraged farmers, of course, to stay in the CAIS program and use it as best they can. Even if it's an imperfect vehicle, it is a flagship delivery system for income stabilization. I encourage farmers to continue in it, because you never know where it might go. Also, it is the program we have.
At our March 18 bilateral meeting that I had with the provinces, we did discuss--because it is a shared federal-provincial agreement, of course--the possibility of replacing CAIS. I put that on the table. I told them that we would like to move to a program that creates separate income stabilization and disaster relief programs. We issued a communiqué at the end of that meeting saying that we were investigating those options and that at our federal-provincial meeting at the end of June I'd be presenting options to the provinces that involve a separate income program and a separate disaster relief program. We're working with the provinces behind the scenes right now to see if we can come to a consensus on it. So there is ongoing work.
Obviously, I don't want to duke it out with the provinces in a public way. It's a bilateral agreement, and we have to work with them. I think it's wise for farmers to know that we're not going to do any knee-jerk reactions. They should stay in the program. We are making some fairly radical changes to the program. I guess at some time we'll have to decide at what stage the incremental changes make it something quite different or whether it is simply modified.
The provinces have been pretty firm that they want to stay with some sort of a whole farm program. What I've been insisting on is that we have to separate disaster relief and make some pretty radical changes to the current system if farmers are going to accept it.