As much as we try to implement government programs with bare minimum costs, it's becoming harder and harder to do. We want to say that we don't disagree with the concepts and notions behind accountability. We understand why these standards are put in place. We want to say on record that we want to continue working with the government. However, the way we used to work was very simple: we received our money as a grant.
Let's say, just for argument's sake, we had a program for $12 million. Over two years we would receive one twenty-fourth of that money, or $500,000, every month. Various applicants would apply to us for funding. The board would determine who was eligible and who would receive the money, and in an extremely timely manner. What was also great was that if we earned any kind of interest over the fund, we would use that money to go back into projects or apply it to the overhead.
Part of this also led to flexibility. We never had any “use it or lose it” deadlines, a term that's probably very familiar to our applicants. We never had that problem. If we were funding a research initiative and it had a bad crop year, we would simply renew the funding for another year until the conditions were right to do that research. After all, in agriculture you can basically count on the unexpected, especially when it comes to research.
So we had a flexible, no-nonsense, common-sense approach to agriculture funding. And as Kim pointed out, we passed numerous audits and compliance reviews.
In addition, the council was able to provide loans to high-risk projects, to applicants who would make a profit, and the council would work with the applicants to determine a fair payment schedule back. We didn't have itchy trigger fingers. If a payment was missed, we worked with the applicant to make sure the payments were made and that we weren't basically ending the project.
With one of our programs, we lent out $10 million and recycled those funds back to approve more projects and to support ongoing administration of the program. It was an amazing leverage initiative, and also great value for money.
We were very efficient. We were receiving our money as a grant and allocating the funding as reimbursement funding. We required an applicant to spend the money, show us receipts, and we would reimburse them for their expenses. If the applicant found some savings, so did the program. It was a win-win for everybody. It was highly transparent, efficient, timely, and accountable.
Now let's fast-forward to today. The federal government has a new program, the Canadian agricultural adaptation fund, or CAAP. We also have the Growing Forward framework.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada should have funded us as a grant, but this--what I'm holding here--is the introduction of the contribution agreement for the new CAAP program. This is what I'm dealing with: 111 pages in size nine font. This is what I'm working with as an administrator for a program. Approximately half of it is just the management guide, telling us how we do our job. Unfortunately, this has not one, not two, but three annexes, with an added subsection on how we do communications.
I'll pass it back to Kim.