Thank you very much, Minister Strahl, for being here today, and for the officials being here.
I'm going to spend my short time talking about one program, specifically the Canadian farm families options program. It's part of the program you've put forward, a most recent program in fact.
We closed out our tax year yesterday, and most people have prepared their tax forms and submitted their numbers. Just a week ago, we find, the program that was introduced last year was changed—a very unusual time for a program to be changed.
When I look at the numbers, I see $550 million as a start to the program. Over two years, the accounting costs, I think, were deemed to be about $170 million, which left about $380 million in the program for actual delivery to farm families. What I see on paper here is that as of April 22 about $142 million had been delivered, leaving about $238 million yet to be delivered.
I'm wondering first of all why the program was changed at this late time in the program. It would be like suggesting to people, after they've made their RRSP contributions, that they're not valid contributions for that particular year.
In Ontario, 3,129 applications were received. When you apply the numbers as I've been given them by an accountant, we would find that besides the $29 million delivered to the program in Ontario, another $9 million was further delivered to the accountants.
So I'm not sure whether this program was designed and created for farmers or whether it was designed to help defunct farmers who are actually taking on a second job as accountants to subsidize their industry.
Basically, that's the premise of my question. I have other questions as well.