Thank you, Mr. Easter.
In terms of the cost, first and foremost, just to give you an idea, when we went into the two-program set, in our first budget the CAIS cost was something like $42 million. I think we talked about an expectation that there would be a long-term cost of approximately $50 million for the province, which actually would have been higher than what we were spending on NISA and CFIP at the time.
In terms of the kinds of costs that we've had so far, in our first year, 2003, we had around $52 million. In 2004, our costs were about $66 million. And in 2005--of course, we had a pretty bad situation in terms of excess moisture--we expensed $129 million. Of course, that's just the provincial government's cost.
Obviously the difficulty there is that we do have a demand-driven program here, and at no time have we said we won't make good on the whole amount that is required in there. But it is a real challenge when you start going back to Treasury Board asking for those additional dollars.
In terms of cost, it's a real challenge. I recognize that the federal government has faced the challenge, too, but what it comes down to is that they've got 10 provinces to work off. We've just got ourselves, so the volatility for an individual province can be very wild and very difficult to manage. That's a lot of the issue there.
We've maintained for a long time that a 60-40 cost-sharing arrangement, especially for those provinces that have a large agricultural base, a small population, and probably a large agricultural GDP compared to the rest of the economy, is a particular challenge that makes it difficult to deal with.