It is a concern for us as well. As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons we moved to a national joint federal-provincial-territorial framework was because of the very points you're making, Mr. Eyking.
At the time, risk management programs were very different. There was a lot of inequity across commodity groups and across individual producers and provinces. The effort to construct the policy framework was to pull together, in one common framework, the business risk management programs and to make them as equitable as possible across the country. There has been drift and a number of provinces have built their own programs to top up. However, the federal government has refused to participate in those because it just exacerbates the inequity.
I want to make one distinction, though. In the context of business risk management programming, we really do try to keep them national and equitable. In the construct of the current framework, Growing Forward, the provinces asked, and quite rightly, I believe, that the proactive programming designed for promoting food safety, environmental sustainability, or innovation.... They said they knew better what that particular commodity group in that region needed. They wanted flexibility to design programs that would advance those goals and that would keep the outcomes national in focus, but then for the “how”, they wanted to implement them on a regional or provincial basis.
That seems to have worked very well, because it means that programs are more responsive to the needs of the local producer. But that applies to the proactive programming. We really do want a common national program in terms of business risk management.