Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, guests, for coming here today.
I was driving around this morning, and you guys have beautiful farmland here. It's very productive, and I envy you. I'm from Cape Breton. My parents were Dutch, and I have a Dutch family background, and sometimes I wish they went further west. But maybe we have a market there, and apparently you're not getting enough money for all the good land and work you're doing.
My question is mostly going to be towards programming. We've heard the last couple of weeks from many farmers, and young farmers, that the programs are not working. There's some talk that NISA was a good program and should have been continued, but right now they're not working.
I was in New Zealand. Ideally, it would be nice if there were no programs and we were all on a level playing field. But as was mentioned before, there's the U.S. food bill and all the other governments are subsidizing their farmers, so we have to help our farmers to some extent. The other thing is that in the United States you don't see different programs in each state. Even in the European Union they seem to have a continental program.
My question—it's probably to Marie-Anne and Joe, and maybe to Greg—is on the programming. If there was a new federal-provincial agreement, and many you were steering that agreement, all cards on the table, I'm talking about if there were $2 billion, $3 billion spent last year....
You alluded to it, Greg, to maybe going more towards the provincial route. I'm not sure how that would work in the scheme of things. But we found that the beef producers in Alberta are getting a better shake than the beef producers in another province. Quebec is doing something.
I think we have to steer, as a country, somehow to some more uniformity and better programs. Let's put the cards on the table: if we started from scratch and ask for some ideas, what should we be doing to make it better for farmers?
AgriFlexibility is another thing that was brought up over the last two weeks. It's not working, especially for diversified farms. It's just not working the way it should. It only works for farmers with one crop or one piece of livestock.
At any rate, on that point, we only have five minutes each. If you don't have enough time, you could always bring it up on another question. But that's where I'm steering: what should we be doing in this country to make it better for the people in the farming area, new farmers?