There are two considerations to this: quickness in terms of response and quickness in terms of payments provided to businesses. I have been in the field for a long time, and I have seen that the program-focused thinking has always been difficult in terms of establishing responsiveness when a problem or a loss occurs. That has been the case for the AgriStability program. As you know, the management of the AgriStability program is based on income tax returns that arrive after the payments. In Canada, most organizations that manage programs give themselves tools to allow for advances, but the bulk of the amount often comes after the actual calculation of the losses experienced.
I would still like to say that the 85% threshold was set based on an estimate of losses a modern farm can suffer and on the assessment of all the risks it is exposed to. The factors include succession, which we discussed earlier, debt and producers' ability to survive margin and income losses.
Once again, programs have a short-term focus. They were created to manage a problem arising over the course of a given year. They were not implemented to manage specific situations, such as a string of bad years. A 20% income loss over the course of a year is one thing, but a 20% income loss two, three years in a row, regardless of the reason—be it owing to the market, the weather or any other factor—is another.