It's an excellent point. The Canadian Federation of Agriculture brought that forward some time ago and are promoting it. The Ontario Federation of Agriculture has picked it up, as has the Quebec UPA. We're moving as far as we can as fast as we can on that idea.
Alberta has done quite a bit of work on this as well. The unfortunate part is that no one has a model that shows us how to implement it without attracting countervail. We're all cognizant of this as we go into this global marketplace. Some of them are nuisance suits, but some of them are legitimate, and AgriFlex is problematic from that standpoint. We'll certainly keep working on it, though, no doubt about it. I think there's something to be had there.
We are in this go-around putting flexibility in the non-business risk envelope, the growing forward side, all the companion programs. We are putting the flexibility in there, so that the provinces can make the decisions.
Some like the training more than they like the environmental programs, more than they like the farm stewardship. We will allow the provinces to make those decisions. So we've gone as far as we can with the flexibility concept, in conjunction with the provinces, on the non-business risk side.
You are mixing issues a little bit when you say “flexibility” and “ad hoc” in reference to an animal or disease disaster and the actual business risk side. They are two separate things. Certainly the disease side is always ad hoc.
We try to be proactive as much as we can, and the role of CFIA is changing more and more from reactive to proactive. We see this in a lot of the farm-gate testing, farm food safety. We're trying to get ahead of the curve to mitigate a lot of this before it happens, testing ahead. We know there are hot spots. We saw it with the anthrax that has broken out in the last couple of years. We saw it with the TB around the park in Manitoba. Those programs will always have to be ad hoc, because there's really no way to know how big and how bad it's going to be at any given time.
Still, we're trying to get away from ad hoc on the farm sustainability side and business risk side. We want the provinces to know what's coming and we want it to be affordable for them. We want the producers to know what they can count on. If we need to expand those programs, that's what we will do. That's what we did in the livestock sector. We adjusted programming to make sure that the money flowed in a way that was more favourable to the livestock sector.