Thank you very much.
I'm Peter Tuinema and I'm with the Ontario-Quebec Grain Farmers' Coalition.
You heard this presentation yesterday, I guess, but one difference is that it's from me today, and the second is that it's in English. What I didn't realize is that my partners in Quebec weren't going to inject Quebec numbers; they actually used Ontario numbers.
I'm not going to go through the whole document. You heard all that yesterday. You're hearing from Dale, who is from a different organization but is connected to us, and you're hearing a lot of the same stories--that CAIS is an income stabilization program and that we need income support programs to deal with a lot of these issues.
You're hearing some of this twice from one organization, but in two different locations. You're hearing that both Ontario and Quebec have the same challenges with grains and oilseeds. There's product coming in depressing our prices. Dale has touched on some of the ways to address that, but currently we need income support to deal with this situation.
To address that federally, what we're asking for is companion programming and income support dollars to fund programs like that, but with reasonable regional flexibility. You've probably been to eastern Canada, where they're very different from Ontario and Quebec in a lot of the products. One program nationally to try to address all the agricultural issues on business risk management across the country isn't going to do it; we need to have more flexibility in how federal programs are developed.
With the latest announcement, the $1 billion, there's $600 million going into a NISA-type or producer savings account, top tier. That's certainly an excellent program to be coming forward with, but it's still only income stabilization and doesn't necessarily address our problem. The $400 million that's part of that--it's excellent that those dollars are coming forward, but they're ad hoc dollars. The quickest way to get ad hoc dollars is out through ENS. I agree with that, and that's probably the way it needs to be done to do it quickly, but it's not always the best way. It's ad hoc, and a lot of those dollars don't end up going to where the need is. They may be going to sectors that haven't necessarily had struggles in the last year. In a lot of cases, that sometimes makes things worse, because producers compete for different resources that they work with and it can distort the market.
What you're really hearing this afternoon and probably this morning is that one program is not going to do everything. Changing that programming a little may address some of the issues with the program, but it's still a stabilization program. What we need really, certainly for grains and oilseeds, and there are other sectors, is an income support program with regional flexibility.
Thanks very much for your time.