CAIS doesn't work for those situations because it's only on primary production and not on the value added.
I'll go back to the point you made about transition. We're trying to transition our primary producers to get a return so they can invest in the future. CAIS looks after the past; it doesn't look after the future. Here in Nova Scotia, our federation is taking the initiative this year to be the catalyst to buy the only multi-species, federally inspected plant in the Atlantic provinces, because we see we've got to move up that value chain. We've got to start producing products. The money in hogs isn't in producing loin chops; it's made in producing smoked products and adding value to the end product, i.e., sausages, etc. So in this province we've taken the initiative because we can't lose that conduit to the marketplace. If we lost that kill floor, that abattoir, we'd have no conduit to get our product into the marketplace. CAIS doesn't look at it.
What we are asking for in Nova Scotia is the flexibility to use up front that CAIS funding that would come here normally. If we look at supply managed products, if they go under pressure from imports, they're going to need to be maintained. Where is the money going to come from to maintain their income? It's not going to come out of CAIS, but it could be used in the CAIS funding. If we look at fur, we're not even going to be able to sustain CAIS in this province if the fur price drops. As Chan mentioned, we produce a million pelts in this province. If the price drops about $20 a pelt on mink this year, that's $20 million. It doesn't affect the CAIS payment this year, but on the Olympic average, if we have another bad year, we won't be able to sustain the supply of sufficient funds to get to that point in this province.
So we're saying look after profitability rather than margins. Even with the $20 drop in the pelt price, they're still making a good margin. Unless we have profitability to the primary producers, they cannot move up the value chain, and CAIS does not look after that.