Okay. I do find that interesting.
Interestingly, it agrees with an article I read the other day by Larry Martin, which is a really interesting article. He's with the Macdonald Laurier Institute. He spoke of a study that was done in 2010 by Al Mussell. It showed that from 2004 to 2008, 100,000 farms had sales of less than $100,000. These 100,000 farms represented 55% of all farming enterprises in Canada but represented only 5.7% of total farm operating income from all Canadian farms.
He thought that with the demand for food in the world we ought to be able to scale up, and that these people, these farms, ought not to rely on BRM programs as much as they do. Of course, he went on to quote how much money is spent on them. Yet I read in The Economist that the failure of small farms will lead to the failure of small-town economies and the corporatization of farms—huge farms. He suggests that may be the only way to go if we're going to feed the world.
I understand that argument. I don't agree with it, but I understand it.
But if we get rid of AgriStability, for instance, to me it's like somebody having the opinion that they've been healthy in their eating, they've looked after themselves, and they've cycled every day and worked out, so they don't have to rely on our universal health care system, whereas there are other people—perhaps like me—who are less attentive to their health and who do rely on the health care system from time to time. So while we're not about to get rid of the universal health care system, I don't see why we would get rid of AgriStability.
Don't you see it really as a valuable tool with the BRM and the pork crisis and all of these things we've suffered in the last three or four years? People have had to rely on it.