Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank our guests for being here today.
I'll be coming at this from the perspective and the context that my riding is a rural riding in Alberta, so I'll be asking questions pertaining to the agricultural portion, just so you can prepare yourself.
One of the questions I have deals with the comments made here that it didn't appear you were able to sense whether or not there was value for money from programs such as the environmental farm plans and so on. Your report did highlight, however, that in order for farmers to qualify to receive farm stewardship program money or Greencover Canada money, they had to fill out an environmental farm plan first. So that did put the onus on the program to actually deliver a tangible result.
I'm just wondering about this from your perspective in dealing with accountability. Does the fact that in order to qualify for programs to receive money to help with farm stewardship they had to fill out the plan first not in itself create some accountability mechanism for the environmental farm plan program?