There are two parts to my answer. Just in simplistic terms, the programs that exist now need to take into account ways to trigger in years where margins drop for those producers who are doing the right things: diversifying; expanding their operations to reach an economic unit; or beginning in an industry, regarding succession or just new entrants to the industry. Those things completely wipe you out of all these programs, except the top tier of AgriInvest. Nothing else even comes close.
I've been farming tree fruits for 15 years, which makes me one of the newest entrants in that business, and expanding to become what is now, I believe, to be our economic unit. It's around 100 acres, when it was 20 acres 15 years ago. That's a difficult thing to do. Under your structural change guidelines, it doesn't even come close. I can get just as little for my fruit compared with the year before and not trigger anything, when the farmer who hasn't done anything and has all the wrong varieties and declines a little bit triggers a big payment.
In terms of the way the structure of the program works, that would be it. In terms of the long view of it, I need the government to recognize that agriculture is important in Canada, and when we're talking about free trade with other countries and these types of things, give us the tools to compete. We have low-cost producers who use products that we're not allowed to use because our citizens in Canada want us to be model farmers in the world of farming. Yet we compete directly with those countries that are able to use obsolete products and other things that we're not allowed to use anymore with no tariff barriers and no trade barriers.
I'll give you an example from this summer. The cherry industry in tree fruits is a good spot to be in right now in B.C., and this year we had a new pest move in. It came in on fruit from California. It was originally from Japan, and the CFIA was marking our shipments as “not exportable”. At the same time, they said it wasn't within their mandate to stop that fruit coming in from California.
That's a little bit outside of the mandate of this, but you have to push the government to look at the bigger picture so they're not restricting you to just looking at the safety net programs in themselves.