Since I raised the topic, I guess I get the first kick at the cat here.
On farmers' participation and the feeling about what the process is, I don't know how many people I've talked to about when we went through the APF 2 process. Everybody was wondering, is this really going to help? Is it really going to help; are they listening?
Then the provincial Government of Alberta called a group of us all together, and we went through this process again. It was basically a mini-APF thing too. We got a report back from the government.
When you have the provincial government and the federal government doing the negotiating on that, and you have the federal bureaucrats designing the program, and you leave the other segment that's really affected out of that process.... We don't even have any idea of any input into the programs. Basically the whole process over the years has been, “Come to us, say what you need, and go back.” The provincial governments decide exactly what to do.
Yes, I think a lot of producers feel the same thing might happen in this process again. Then when you do such things as cancel a national safety net group that was actually an adviser to the government and say you want to come out to talk to each of the individual groups, well, to us.... I've talked to enough people who say, “If I have ten different groups, I'm going to get ten different opinions, so I can do what I want.” If you can get those ten groups together and come to a consensus on a lot of things, that will help and will increase the producers' confidence that maybe the government is listening.