I will move it and explain why. I move that the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-food examine the functioning of the AgriStability program, and that the committee specifically examine the impact of efforts by the federal government to recoup CAIS overpayments on primary producers.
As we just heard in the last discussion and from the ad in today's Hill Times, the AgriStability program is not working. It's especially not working for beef producers and hog producers. The problem is that the viability test is there for beef and hogs, but if they didn't have a couple of good years it doesn't work. If you have long-term declines in pricing, it just doesn't work. It's the same as the old CAIS program in that way.
I think we need to look at that and make some recommendations on it. The minister himself stated when he was here the other day that the federal and provincial ministers of agriculture would be providing a report on this issue to the ministers meeting in June. We should have input from producers in that.
The second part of the motion is an extremely serious issue, and that is CAIS overpayments that have been paid out. They've been turned over to Revenue Canada. I've talked to quite a number of producers. Some of them have left the industry, and all they have left are their houses. They farmed and provided cheap food for Canadians over the years, and ended up losing their farm operations due to overpayments on CAIS. They're now getting hounded by Revenue Canada to the point that they will likely have to declare bankruptcy and will probably lose their houses in the process. That's how serious it is. It's not huge dollars in most cases, but it's causing a lot of stress to those people who find themselves in that situation.
I think we need to make some recommendations to the government on how those payments could be made in a way to alleviate some of that stress on families who are really in serious trouble over those overpayments.