Thanks, Mr. Chair.
We've certainly heard a lot of good ideas today, both this evening and this morning in Truro, and a lot of common themes, I think, that we're going to take away.
I want to talk a bit specifically about the CAIS program. It's been said that while success has many fathers, failure is an orphan. Well, CAIS seems to be an orphan for me, because I have yet to meet anybody who will claim responsibility for coming up with it in the first place, or any organization that says it supported it at the time.
I think, Mr. Harding, you pointed out, I guess, the fundamental flaw--or one fundamental flaw, anyway--which is that it's not predictable and therefore not bankable. That's because when you fill out your forms, you don't have all the information you need to plug into the formula to spit out a number at the other end, the way we do with our income taxes--you might make a mistake, but basically it spits out a number that tells you either what you owe or what you're going to get back. With CAIS, you have to wait.
I had one farmer say that he'd found the best accountant he possibly could, a guy who helped set CAIS up, and he was told he was going to get somewhere between $8,000 and $43,000. You could ask a kid on the street and they probably could have guessed a similar confidence interval.
I'll start with Mr. Harding, and maybe others will want to jump in. Is it possible to take the CAIS program and change it so that it actually is bankable, so that it is predictable? There's a semantic argument: would it still be CAIS or would it be something else?
Are you familiar with any work that's been done? Is there a similar kind of whole farm program, a fix, that would address that problem, which is the predictability and the bankability of it?