Thank you, Mr. Miller.
We had a good meeting. I think the co-chair of the meeting, at the post-meeting press conference, said it was the best meeting he had been at in his time as agriculture minister. I thought it was a very productive meeting. We addressed all those issues you had raised.
In the communiqué, the provinces agreed to move ahead with a replacement of CAIS with four elements. They agreed with a disaster framework. They have not agreed with the funding formula for that disaster framework. So the framework is there, how it's going to work, what's covered under the framework, and so on. Some provinces are hesitant on the 60-40 split we have put forward as a funding proposal under that, but the disaster framework has been agreed to.
They've agreed to enhance the production insurance side of things. This is important. I think in Ontario alone, there are about 40 pilot projects on better production insurance under 40 different commodities that we want to add to PI. That's going to be an important part of the underpinnings for future BRM programming, because if we can get some good programming for what used to be considered maybe more exotic--some greenhouse issues, some cattle or other sectors--if we can get a good PI system the industry says is useful, and it can be part of the way forward, the provinces are very keen on that, and of course we'll pick up our share. We're paying for part of these pilot projects right now. They're very active both in Quebec and Ontario and across the country, but those two provinces specifically have been very active in promoting pilot projects to expand the PI prospects.
They've also agreed to this new.... There's a margin-based component to the BRM programming, and then they've also agreed to this farmers' savings plan. Of course we're going to kick-start that with $600 million from the federal government, federal-only money. But then it will replace what was the top tier of the margin-based program and it will go directly into farmers' savings plans.
So all those things I think are demands that we have had from the industry, from the national CAIS committee, from the CFA, from UPA. It's been broadly told to us and reconfirmed today in the AG's report that the current system was not working as it should have. The improvements we've made in the last year and the improvements agreed to at this federal–provincial meeting are going to help us have a better set of programming to replace that.
Something that would be of interest to the committee, I think, is that there's a growing interest in what the provinces are calling “regional flexibility” in programming. Again, that's undefined as yet, but what's come up repeatedly in these consultations on the next generation of agriculture policy is the need to have more regional flexibility. The way to address problems in Ontario is quite different from in P.E.I., for example. So there's a growing demand for regional flexibility, and we're working with provincial officials right now to come up with a definition of that before our June meeting, I hope.