Thanks, Chair.
Good discussion today, partly because we are talking about each of the individual programs, or many of them, and about where improvements could be made and where some of the frustrations are, but also because I detected, for example, Mr. Gowland, a strong preference for certain programs over other programs.
Certainly, in our previous meetings I've been putting forward the proposition that the pie isn't going to get any bigger. To want to make changes to all programs would increase the pie when in fact we may have to make decisions as to whether financial resources should go more toward a program that actually works for farmers less. Just to give an example, should some of the criteria for AgriInvest be relaxed and use AgriStability less? In other words, we're not adding more, more, more; what we're doing is starting to transfer to programs that farmers say would work better for them. So there have been some really good comments here.
I want to underline one thing that we have also discussed. This is the idea—one of my colleagues, I think Bob Zimmer, brought it up—of insurance-based programs. I don't mean cost of production programs, because there's a difference. Insurance-based programs don't guarantee profitability. They try to protect against the downside, but they're not going to guarantee profitability, whereas cost of production programs guarantee profitability. Of course, that's where we get into a problem as a federal government, because as soon as you start guaranteeing profitability, it's starting to look a lot like a subsidy. When it starts looking a lot like a subsidy, you start being open to trade action.
Let me go back to the insurance-based program that's not cost of production based. Instead, it's basically trying to cover some of the downside. You're basically going to see a price that you'd like to sell your product at and you insure close to that price, depending on how much premium you want to pay. It has nothing to do with your input costs. It just has to do with a market price, what you see on the market, insuring toward that price, and if you don't sell, you're covered to a certain level. In fact, Alberta has something like that for their beef sector, of course, under crop insurance. We, the feds, offer the crop insurance program, which is based upon that model.
I want to ask each of you your opinion on this in terms of perhaps expanding that to other commodities, because federally we only offer that really as crop insurance. We have a province that took a particular initiative, which is fine. I think that's where regional flexibility comes in. A provincial government looks at its sector and says, “Well, I think we should move on this kind of a program for our farmers.”
I would like to know your input, from a national perspective, if you see that that type of an insurance program would be worthy or worthwhile, helpful to farmers and other particular commodities, that you would have a recommendation to be covered.
Let me start with Mr. Gowland and we'll just work our way to the right.