Each province has its own agriculture minister. Federally, we have Minister Ritz, but each province has its own agricultural minister. At the federal-provincial meeting, which has just passed, each province brought its own unique set of issues to the federal government. I think there needs to be a way for the agriculture ministers to work closer together on federal programming.
Right now, the Growing Forward suite of programs is pretty much set in stone, and the federal government says that will be until 2013. That frustrates a lot of these provincial agriculture ministers, who have their own unique needs. I think there has to be a way we can facilitate a more flexible way for provincial agriculture ministers to access federal dollars for their own needs within their own provinces.
As we mentioned, Canada is a big country. Agriculture in British Columbia is a whole lot different from what it is in Quebec, which is a whole lot different from Saskatchewan. I think we have to be sensitive to those different issues. If we look at what happened out west this summer with the floods, and then in my end of the world with the drought--we didn't get a drop of rain through the whole month of August.
Every day we all need to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and we're being asked, as farmers, to do that for more and more people on the same amount of land.