Thank you, Chair.
Actually, you've touched on one of the areas I was going to touch on. I'm looking at the programs, and there are some things I'm hearing consistently over and over again. One is the timeline of repayment, or the time of a payment. Bankability always comes up when I talk to producers. If they could go to the bank...even if they know they're going to get their payment, if they knew the payment would be close or at least closer to what they actually get.... I think there have been some improvements there. Then the cross-subsidization, or the farmer who has a combination of, say, in this case, hogs and grain, or beef and grain, getting caught in that scenario, as Mr. Person talked about. The other concern I always hear about is caps. I come out of Saskatchewan, so I hate caps. Caps, to me, basically punish the efficient producer, and I don't think that's fair.
I guess what I'm looking for here is a couple of things. Regarding timeline of payment, do you have any ideas on how we could speed that up? Right now we have the ability to do an advance on your AgriStability payment. I know there were concerns when we did that a couple of years ago. Under CAIS, when you did an advance, some guys would actually take the advance, over-estimate, and then suddenly get a bill in the mail because they had over-estimated. I think we made some changes, at least in Saskatchewan, to help prevent that from happening.
In the same breath, on bankability, Revenue Canada.... I kind of like my income tax forms, even though I hate income taxes. But at least when I fill out the form, at the end of the form it says I'll get so much back, or I have to pay so much, and that's pretty bankable. Have any of you guys looked at what we could do to create that situation in this scenario?
Then, of course, there is the cross-subsidization, such as when you have a hog enterprise and you have a beef enterprise and a grain enterprise. Have any of you thought about how you would structure that? I know even trying to restructure it through corporations doesn't necessarily work, because they'll merge you together and bring it back under the whole farm. In fact, I've seen scenarios where some of the bigger farmers are actually four or five brothers who farm together to be efficient, yet they get penalized because they're getting lumped together under AgriStability.
I guess I'll go back to the timeline of getting the payments out quicker, and work down that list. What I'm looking for here, guys, is how to make it better. We can all pick on whether it's a good program or not. I hear that it's generally a good program except for a few flaws, and I think that's what we need to speak to as a group. Let's pick out what those flaws are and see what we can do to improve them.