Okay, I'll take the first stab and let John think about his response while I fluster away.
My own personal experience with this is through this NGO called FarmStart, which has worked actively to link farmers at the end of their life, who don't have an obvious heir—and there is a significant number of people who fall into that category—with new and aspiring farmers, many of whom are new immigrant Canadians.
The FarmStart model, which is in the process of expanding quite rapidly through a big grant it has just received from a private foundation, is to set up incubator farms where new and aspiring farmers—as I said, many of whom are new Canadians—can develop the agronomic and marketing skills to access markets and establish their business plan in a fairly secure, low-risk environment for a two- to five-year period. From that, the FarmStart NGO attempts to create links between these aspiring farmers and farmers who are in the process of winding down their operations.
It's that sort of model that I think represents a good success story that we should be able to build on in some regard. There are some critical bottlenecks. For example, the new aspiring farmers, whether they're new Canadians or not, as you rightly note, often don't have access to financial resources. Even if they've got a good business plan, it's hard for them to qualify for government programs and it's hard for them to qualify for business loans.
Also, often these relationships that are forged between exiting farmers and entering farmers are quite informal. The aspiring farmer doesn't have what would be considered the required level of farm assets to qualify for government programs. This sort of issue represents a peculiar regulatory loophole that a potentially large number of people are actually falling into. A re-evaluation of what a farm asset is and some sort of pump-priming money to help establish new farms and build up the capital while they embark on new enterprises represents a serious bottleneck. I think it's something that's probably.... I would urge the committee to consider building it into the Growing Forward 2 program.