I'll just give you a little bit of my background. I'm a farm boy. I grew up in Lacombe on a cow-calf operation—actually, it was a mixed farm when I was a kid, and it became a cow-calf operation because it was the only thing that was viable after a while. With the small number of hogs and the small acreage we had, it no longer became viable to grow grain or oilseed crops. It no longer became viable to produce hogs and sell them in the marketplace. I eventually left the cow-calf operation when BSE hit in 2003, and the rest, as they say, is history. Dad is still there trying to diversify and to do what he can, but other pressures that have been put on his current operation are going to try to force him out of business again.
Without getting into too much detail about my personal life, I also spent a long time as a computer programmer. I worked for Agriculture Financial Services Corporation in Alberta. I worked on programs—I built information systems like the farm income disaster program, the database, and all the data architecture behind there—and I understand the enormous amount of money we spend on the administration of agricultural programs. As a member of Parliament, I have problem after problem when constituents come to me and say it's taking too long to get their applications through. Accountants come to me and say that filling out an AgriStability form—or the CAIS application form, as it was known as before—required a master's degree to even navigate through the paperwork.
We're spending all this time and effort and frustration, yet at the end of the day we don't seem to get any further ahead insofar as Albertans moving forward. I'll give you an example. We have some running jokes in Alberta: we say we work in the oil patch to support our farming habits. When you take a look at the young people growing up in rural Alberta right now, they are all working in the oil patch—drilling for oil, natural gas, or whatever the case might be. They're diversifying their farm operations by having steamer trucks or other types of oil field operations...working out in order to help keep the farm going. It just isn't viable or sustainable.
I'm going to ask a very technical question here, getting back to the reference margins. Somebody brought up the idea of moving to an Olympic average versus the three. If you look at what happened to the hog industry, when you have depressed prices over a sustained long period of time, your reference margins go so low that you can't even trigger a payment anymore through the stability programming. How do you fix that?