Thank you.
My name is Lysa Porth. I'm a professor of finance at the University of Guelph and a professor of actuarial science at the University of Waterloo. I hold a Ph.D. in actuarial science and agricultural economics. I'm also a co-founder of Agi3, which is a Canadian company focused on agricultural risk intelligence, private insurance innovation and geospatial AI for farm-level risk management.
The message I hope to leave with the committee is that Canada cannot afford to accept the status quo and leave BRM unchanged.
For decades, much of the BRM discussion has focused on program tweaks. While those issues matter, I believe we've been looking in the wrong place, and the deeper issue is structural.
The current BRM suite provides an important foundation for producers, but the risk environment has changed faster than the structure of those programs has. Public spending is also increasing, as we've heard. Producer satisfaction is decreasing, and the protection gap is still widening.
The core challenge is that we're asking a small number of programs to do everything for everyone. A single structure cannot be equally effective across every crop, region, farm type and layer of risk. Canada needs a more modern, layered public-private risk management framework.
That starts with a simple recognition that not all agricultural risk is the same. Some losses are catastrophic or base layers of risk, where public sector BRM programs should maintain their clearest mandates. Public dollars should protect this foundation because broad participation, stability and government support are most needed.
However, above that foundation, there's room to do things differently. At the upper layers—what I call the “performance layer”—losses are often more frequent, farm-specific and are sensitive to management technology and local conditions. That is where underwriting data, pricing and individualization matter most.
Private sector products can help control public costs while improving choice, flexibility and performance for farmers. Now, public spending is spread across multiple layers of coverage, so public programs and private products can compete for the same premium dollars and risk layers. If a farmer lowers public coverage to buy a private product, they may be leaving subsidized dollars on the table, even when the private option may be better suited to their farm and may provide more individualized coverage.
As a result, the current structure can unintentionally block the innovation that farmers need. The answer is not public versus private; it's public and private coordinated by risk layer. Canada does not need to spend more to begin testing this. It needs to place public support in the right part of the risk stack.
A coordinated pilot could do that in a cost-neutral way. A participating farm would still have access to the same overall level of public support, but more subsidy would be pushed into the catastrophic base layer where government has the clearest role. Less subsidy would attach to higher, more individualized layers, putting them on a more even playing field with private sector products.
This is a win for farmers, government and the private sector. Farmers gain real choice and better coverage options without taking anything away. Government can focus public dollars where they buy the greatest value: the lower systemic risk pool. Private capital gains room to invest, compete and innovate in product design, underwriting, claims, technology and producer advice.
This is not a wholesale redesign of BRM overnight. Nothing is taken away. The practical step is a coordinated national pilot in the next policy framework. Run it in parallel with the current system. Give a cohort of farms the choice to test a layered public-private model, and use real farms, real data and real accountability, before making broader reform.
Technology is also essential to making this work. Modernizing BRM can't simply mean digitizing forms, portals or policy documents. Digitizing paperwork is not the same as modernizing risk management. True modernization means modernizing the actuarial engine itself. The good news is that Canada doesn't need to start from scratch. Canadian-built technology already exists. It's being used by farms, and it's ready to be leveraged more broadly.
Agi3 has built a patented and patent-pending geospatial, AI-native agricultural risk platform that supports exposure management, risk classification, pricing, underwriting, in-season monitoring, claims evidence and portfolio learning. It has enabled private crop insurance, grain forward contract default protection, yield and revenue concepts, and coverage from the field level to the whole-farm level.
This technology has been developed in Canada and implemented in Canada. It is ready to be leveraged more broadly. We are also working with Alberta and Manitoba on a project to demonstrate how BRM can be improved for farmers while containing costs for the public sector. Canadian-built technology already exists, and farmers are asking for better tools. What is missing is a structure that allows those tools to scale.
Other jurisdictions, including the United States, show that a stronger public-private ecosystem can drive innovation, claims infrastructure and farmer choice. Canada should build its own version: one that protects the public foundation while giving farmers more choice and government better tools to manage cost, integrity and performance.
Thank you.