Thank you all for your presentations. There was a lot of information there.
Lorne, to start with you, there seemed to be in your presentation—and I guess I can understand it, coming from government—a lot of concern over the cost to the government of these programs. That concerns me even more when I look at the information coming out of the federal-provincial meeting of ministers, in which they seem to emphasize “cost neutral”.
Any producer sitting in this room knows the reality is that we have been under a cheap food policy—a low raw material return policy, if I can put it that way. Farmers seem to be providing the cheap goods for others to gain income from it, and farmers can't bear the burden of those low returns. If governments are going to have policies that make money for everybody else in the system but not for the primary producer, then somebody has to come up with some kind of compensation for it. I wonder if you might have a comment on that.
As well, where do you stand on companion programs? Producers across Canada are basically saying they need national programming, but maybe it's time to bring back companion programs where, in certain regions, there are differences and companion programs may be necessary as well.