In our recommendations about business risk management and the approach to take, we certainly have not gone in that direction, other than at one point we were talking about an advance payment, a repayable advance payment, because, exactly as you say, countervail is a large concern for us, particularly for the number of cattle that we ship into the United States. As you go across the country, you hear people say we're too dependent. We hear other people say we don't have enough access, and you get it all the way around.
With the WTO agreements—I'm trying not to go too into depth on the WTO—you may have heard of these different coloured boxes--the amber box, the blue box, the green box. People will often talk about structuring a payment so that it's green and not amber. Amber is basically the bad subsidies, to put it simply. We try to avoid those, but all subsidies are potentially countervailable. We have groups like R-CALF and the U.S. National Farmers Union down there that watch the trucks very closely. The trucks all go through the same roads going to the same destinations, and that has sparked these groups like R-CALF, and they have brought countervail cases in the past.
We're quite concerned that this is going to happen again. If we have per-head payments, we run a very high risk that we could lose a countervail argument. Even having some of these ad hoc payments from time to time increases the risk that there will be a countervail complaint, and even when there's a complaint there's an investigation. It takes a long period of time to go through the investigation. Even if we win at the end of it, we'll have suffered many months of damage during the investigation because of the uncertainty that brings. So we definitely do try to stay away from these per-head payments.
We've advocated eliminating the viability test, making some changes as to how the reference margins are calculated. There are a number of recommendations in that regard. It's about trying to get a national program that works well for everybody across the country. What we've seen is, just over the last year, that Alberta had their program; Quebec has had a program for many years; we've seen an announcement today in Saskatchewan. Those are all temporary band-aids.
Fundamentally, we have to get to the underlying problems on this. I almost liken the situation to a patient who keeps getting sick year after year—it's a cold, it's the flu, it's bronchitis. Maybe there's a problem with the immunity system of this particular person. Why does this person keep getting sick? For us, our immunity system is having access to our international markets. Here we are, nearly six years into not having that access. I can guarantee that if we don't get these important markets open to us around the world, we'll be talking about a new crisis. I don't know what the crisis next year will be, but there will be one, because we don't have the ability to come out of it if we don't have access to our markets.
