Absolutely. I apologize for my lack of announcement or fanfare in coming before the committee. I know you gentlemen are up to speed on the agricultural issues, so I didn't think you'd need much of a head start. It was my only opportunity before Christmas, and I wanted to be here before Christmas because of the livestock situation.
The minister from Quebec, Monsieur Laurent Lessard, is my co-chair in the fed-prov meetings. He and I will be having a short discussion on the agenda before the meeting tomorrow. It is basically, at this point, completely on the livestock situation, with nothing on Growing Forward, and so on. We have agreement in principle on that, so it's strictly the livestock situation across the country that we will be discussing as to what the provincial governments are prepared to do. There are programs that we share 60-40, and we want to make sure they are onside with those as well, and they are affordable and fairly quick in their delivery.
We are certainly seized by this. When we had our first fed-prov meeting in November in Toronto, we came in a little earlier on the Friday evening and spent three hours discussing livestock, before we went on to the Growing Forward situation. Hindsight is always 20/20. If we had been able to bring in the new suite of programs a year ahead, as we proposed to do, a lot of this would have been mitigated by the stand-alone disaster component. We would have been able to funnel money through there a little differently than we do now.
But nothing is off the table at this point. We're having these discussions with the hog sector specifically. They're hurting more than the cattle sector at this point. They cycle faster so they're going down quicker than they were before. The difference in the dollar really hurt them quite a bit. We're seeing 75¢ per kilo talked about from the European Union, which again is going to build on that open wound. So we are addressing it all. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow we'll have some more concrete actions in mind.