Thanks, Chair.
I just want to respond to some of the things that have been mentioned. Mr. Atamanenko was talking about needing money for disasters and unforeseen circumstances, but that is what AgriRecovery is for. When a disaster occurs, there is a close cooperation that takes place between the federal government and the province affected to determine if AgriRecovery replies, and then there is actually a payout if there is agreement that it was a disaster in a specific region or in a specific industry. So there is already a BRM program called AgriRecovery, and farmers receive money through that programming. I think it's important to highlight that.
I think the second thing we need to do, particularly as this is an open public meeting...I think Canadians need to be aware, if they're listening in, that Mr. Easter just presents the information he wants to present, even though he knows why it is the way it is. I'll just give you an example, Chair. He keeps mentioning the BRM and this missing amount, this certain amount of money that's not in BRM, and somehow the Conservatives have taken it away. But Mr. Easter knows, Mr. Chair, that the BRM programs are based on demand. It's not just cheques that fly out to the farmgates whether there's a need or not; it's based on demand. Over this past year, the grains and oilseeds sector has done okay. So there was a certain amount of money budgeted under BRM that was not needed. It's no more complicated than that. So government payments went down to BRM.
Although there were natural disasters that had to be addressed through AgriRecovery, there were fewer natural disasters than were forecasted. So again, Chair, the demand was down. If these programs are based on demand--and they are based on demand, and Mr. Easter knows they're based on demand--then his argument is really an invalid argument. What he's saying with his comment is...he's identifying that demand is down. That should be a good thing. If demand is down, that means farmers are doing better. I can tell you that our Growing Forward program has been much better received than the Liberal CAIS program, which was criticized from one end of the country to the other. Mr. Easter likes to distort things again and say, they took all these factors into consideration and the plan they tabled was an absolute failure. Farmers across the country hated CAIS, and they were actually pleased that the Conservative government took the initiative, did away with CAIS, and replaced it with the Growing Forward program.
I think people need to be aware that these types of things have reasons. There are reasons behind the headlines that Mr. Easter seeks.
The other thing I want to bring up is the pork sector, which he mentioned. We know as MPs and we know as a committee that the pork sector is indeed in a crisis. But Mr. Easter's criticism is that we should just do a per head payment. He knows that a per head payment would lead to a countervail, which would in fact further harm the industry. He knows that, but he doesn't choose to say it. He goes for the headline of just criticizing because a per head payment wasn't done. Actually, if a per head payment was done, he would then grab the next headline, which would be criticizing the government for having done a per head payment when they should have done something else. He just hops from headline to headline when in fact he should know better.
The other thing I want to raise, Chair, is that with all of these programs, I think the government has to be very careful that they do not distort the market. I'll just give an example with the hog industry again. The hog industry has grown dramatically in the past decade within Canada. There are right now too many hogs in Canada for the market. We're trying to open foreign markets to our hog farmers. That's good. We're trying to expand the market to hog farmers. But there are still too many hogs in Canada, and the industry knows this. If Mr. Easter spoke to or listened to some of these associations like the Canada Pork Council, he would know that they're saying, yes, the industry realizes that there are too many--