Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the member for her speech. There are a few things I think should be clarified when it comes to the scrapie situation. The standing committee had extensive hearings on scrapie.
The minister and the department had very close productive discussions with sheep producers in Quebec on the situation they had and the situation with scrapie as far as improvements made to the program being very substantial.
In addition to that, I think something we always forget is that the federal government has transferred $200 million to the province of Quebec which chose to spend that money in a different way. Rather than have it for disaster relief, Quebec chose to spend it on price support. When there was nothing to sell because of the disease, the producers were not getting anything.
We have to put some blame on the producers themselves and on the provincial government, which chose to spend the transfers from the federal government in a different way.
If that had been spent differently or if the provincial government now decides to maybe reconsider how to dispense with the transfers, not just in sheep but in hogs and in other livestock, we could have a better program, a NISA type program for the province of Quebec.