Mr. Gowland.
Evidence of meeting #60 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was programs.
Evidence of meeting #60 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was programs.
Noon
Chair, Canadian Soybean Council
With a margin-based program, certainly it's been a difficult challenge with the grains and oilseeds. We cannot dispute the amount of money that has been actually moved into the CAIS program, especially in the grains and oilseeds area. But the whole thing at the end of the day is the fact that it's not targeting need. Certainly for the programs that we've had in the past over the years there was always that target of need, and money got disbursed in a more fair and equitable manner.
Noon
President, Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association
Yes. CAIS works best where there is a dramatic one-time loss. If you're into a relatively stable situation, but even if you're not making any money or you're declining, it doesn't do you any good at all. To me, it works very well in some situations. You can lose a lot of money and not collect a dime. It simply depends on how you lose it.
I know someone who got $700,000 out of it in one year, and they needed that. They'd lost a lot, and that was great. I know someone who lost $300,000 or $400,000 and they needed more money. They never got a dime because it was that slow loss instead of a big one. So there are all kinds of flaws. There are ways to put money out there, but there's no equity in what you have right now.
Anybody who has diversity, it works against them. Diversity is a good business practice, but it evens out your humps and bumps so you'll never collect. The guy who has something that periodically goes sky high, periodically goes to the bottom, that type of dramatic pricing situation, they're going to love this program. For lots of guys who are doing a great job out there, it's never going to pay off for them. It's simply flawed all over the place.
Noon
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Bezan
Thank you.
To follow up on that, we're sitting here and talking about business risk management, and everybody is talking about trying to fix CAIS. Why are we even trying to fix it? If it's not working, what's the option? Through the APF consultations, it's about CAIS and fixing it and giving the NISA a top-up. CFAA, I know, has supported that model. But what else is out there? Because I'm not a fan of CAIS. I'm a farmer. I hate the program. And my constituents.... One of the biggest challenges I have in my office is farmers calling in who don't understand the forms, aren't happy with the payouts they receive, haven't got anything out of the program other than a bill from their accountant. So open that for comment.
Mr. Troup, Mr. Gilroy.
Noon
President, Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association
A NISA-styled program has equity, because everybody gets treated the same. I'm saying with caps moved up to a modern level, because the old caps are so far out of touch they're unreasonable. But NISA does not address the one-time really bad hit, and CAIS does. So something along the NISA line in conjunction with truly a disaster insurance--that combination could work.
Noon
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Bezan
Would that accomplish the self-directed risk management that you've been asking for?
Noon
President, Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association
Self-directed is on top of that, because that is a replacement for production insurance. That works. What you're just building up on your own farm, your own little nest egg because of your situation, it works for horticulture because nothing else does.
Noon
Vice-Chair, Ontario Apple Growers
Yes. Just briefly, on the whole notion from agriculture, when the APF-1 consultations took place, we had three or four key criteria for a business risk management program: pay out in a timely fashion, keep it simple or predictable, and make it bankable.
CAIS is zero for three. That was agriculture across Canada that asked for those things, and zero for three isn't a very good record.
Noon
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Bezan
So the question is, why do we keep talking about it?
Mr. Robertson.
Noon
Coordinator, Ontario Region, National Farmers Union
I guess I look at NISA more from a younger perspective, and NISA, in a way, feeds the full. You have to have something to be able to put in it to begin with, and it doesn't help the young end of the farm generation. So I'm concerned that if we move that way....
To begin at the beginning, which is where I started, CAIS and a lot of these programs are a bureaucratic response to a market problem, and we have to deal with the market problem. We can move those chairs anywhere we want on the deck of the Titanic, but until we deal with the fact that farm income is going down.... We have to deal with that.
That's not to say we don't need business risk management in the short and medium term. We need it. We need those programs. They need to be flexible. They need to be bankable. We need all of that, whether we do that by fixing CAIS or we design something new. But again, you get into provincial, territorial, and federal stuff, and that's going to be another nightmare.
The real solution is market power, empowering farmers in the marketplace so that they can actually get a fair return on the wealth that they create for this nation, because farmers are wealth creators. We're solution providers. But we've been abandoned, and we have to deal with that.
12:05 p.m.
Chair, Canadian Soybean Council
The whole concept of CAIS, the one-size-fits-all concept, certainly shows it doesn't work.
As far as grains and oilseeds go, we had the programs in place from NISA and companion-type programs that were targeted to need. I guess we've always advocated and still advocate that we need to move back to that type of a program, maybe not the same thing but at least somewhat with similarities that address the need, the bankability, the predictability.
I think that's the long and the short of it, that as growers, we need that in our operations, the bankability and the predictability, to move forward with anything we do in business. Especially, we talk about within our industry the innovation side of things that is happening and dollars that are put in by governments, by industry, and by growers. I think we need that type of stability there to help move forward those innovation-type projects.
12:05 p.m.
President, Ontario Cattlemen's Association
From our sector's point of view, that is one of our concerns. If we did get rid of CAIS tomorrow, what would we replace it with? We do not have an idea of what it could be replaced with in a timely fashion. So in the absence of that, that's one of the reasons we have been moderately supporting the CAIS program, recognizing, though, that it does need to be improved in terms of predictability, bankability, and timely payments.
Also, from our sector's point of view, if we did have a workable production insurance program linked to CAIS, along with a separate disaster program for all of agriculture, that would go a long way to addressing specific issues and specific needs for our sector.
12:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Bezan
I want to thank all of you for your presentations today. The opening comments that you made, Grant, we take to heart.
One of the reasons we're doing this is because it's not the first time we've heard it, and part of this process is to have a reconciliation between the APF consultations that are going out there right now and have been held across the country. That's why we're travelling, the political reality being that this committee hears from producers as well and see how that mounts up against what recommendations are going to come out of the APF-2 consultation process.
Essentially, we want to make sure our viewpoint and the viewpoints that we hear from across Canada, from individuals like you at the table today, are going to be reflected in our report. So I want to thank all of you for taking time out of your busy schedules to be here and helping us with this process.
We are going to suspend for an hour for lunch. We'll be back here at one o'clock.