I just want to add this.
This shouldn't be a partisan issue. It's an important issue, and as the witnesses said today, the ministers are going to be consulting, so what better opportunity to have open consultations at ag committee, right? This is a perfect time to do it. There's no timeline that I've heard of making it necessary to look at Growing Forward.
I know in Quebec, a lot of the groups, a lot of the farmers, weren't very happy with the business risk-management programs. That's fine. It was brought up previous times at committee; even in the House, we brought it up before in the previous Parliament. This is an issue that needs to be dealt with now. You know, in Quebec and Ontario, our dairy farmers are losing money every week. This could be an issue next winter.
I don't want to go forward and then next year, next winter, we come back and we haven't dealt with this issue. I'm going to feel sick about it, you know, because we had the opportunity to deal with this. This isn't a partisan issue, you know. We have to stand up and represent farmers. We can make this better. I think this is a golden opportunity to show that we're working together—three parties, as we did the first time—to just deal with it.
We have a month, or a month and a half—I don't know how many meetings that will include—where we could easily go through and have witnesses come in. I don't even think it would take that long. It could just be the next month, May, and then we could start on Growing Forward, if that is a compromise.
I guess maybe that's what I'd like to put forward. Maybe we could just start off and do this study, because there is a timeline. It's August first that these die. These provisions will no longer be there. I think maybe we could find a consensus, where we could compromise and do this, because it is very time sensitive, and then maybe we could do your Growing Forward bit. I would be open to that. I don't know if I could speak for my other friends on this side, but maybe we could find common ground or meet halfway.
We can kind of negotiate. We used to do that at ag committee, right? We used to negotiate. We used to find a way to make both sides or three sides happy. So I would just put that forward.