Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to you departmental folks for coming.
Andrew, you went to fairly substantive length talking about the new business risk management program and said that you're looking at April 1, 2008. The reality is that if nothing is done by way of a cash infusion, especially for the hog industry, and to a certain extent for the beef industry, there will be one hell of a lot of folks not here by April 1 in those industries.
I don't know, but I'm sure government members as well have to be getting e-mails, correspondence, telephone calls every day about people going broke in the hog industry. In my riding alone, nine people have gone out; that's 130,000 pigs on an annual basis. These are third-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-generation farms, some of them having been recognized as farms of excellence in the past. These are the folks who are going under in this current crisis. My worry is, we're sitting here talking while Rome certainly burns for those two commodities.
Today in the House during question period, the Secretary of State for Agriculture said money would be forthcoming to the beef and hog industries. I have two questions about that. When is this money forthcoming? Under what program is it coming? Don't, for heaven's sake, tell me it's the same $600 million that's been announced three times already.
Secondly, will this program you're talking about today meet what the Prime Minister said on April 6, 2006, when he made the promise of cost of production? Will this program we're talking about today meet the actual cost of production, or will it not? What about the money for beef and hog producers that the parliamentary secretary mentioned? What program is it under, and when will we see it?