Mr. Speaker, as an emergency assistance program, AIDA has been a cruel joke. After almost a year of Liberal fiddling, only a fraction of allocated funds has trickled down to desperate prairie farmers. The minister said that money is on the table. Money on the table is not in farmers' pockets. The worst feature of the program is that to qualify, a farmer has to have three profitable years immediately prior to 1998.
My question for the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food is why was AIDA crafted to avoid paying anything to those farmers most in need?