When we lost the Crow rate, our farms directly lost upwards of $30 a tonne. That's a big reason why it's sort of challenging for farmers these days. It points to the fact that you, as a person in the legislature, have a direct effect on farm income. You effectively took $30 a tonne out of my grain income, and nowhere can I account for getting $30 a tonne back for that action having taken place.
So when you look at requests to increase the caps on, say, cash advance, or the increase in caps on payments through government programs, if you increase that cap, what you're saying is that “We don't really want any more farmers involved in the industry. We're happy with the farmers who are there now and want to continue to expand the size of their operations.” So you have to think very hard about what kinds of caps you want to put into place, and it does come down to a judgment call.
Cash advance was another program that was hard-fought to get. We very nearly lost the cash advance program about 15 years ago. Luckily we were able to keep it. There could be some reason to increase the cap a little bit because of inflation.
Anyway, there's food for thought.