Madam Chair, I appreciated my colleague's remarks tonight. He put forward some good plans. I have heard some good proposals.
I have heard from constituents in my riding about the CAIS program. They are drawing comparisons now between it and the Income Tax Act. The Income Tax Act has become so convoluted, so big, so unrecognizable and so difficult to understand that even accountants cannot understand it. It is the same thing with the CAIS program.
That is why I said during my remarks that it seemed to me it was a program designed by bureaucrats for bureaucrats, which seems to work quite well when they do all their test models in Ottawa. However, when it comes out to the farm gate, it all falls apart somewhere between the ivory towers of Ottawa and the farm game.
How would my colleague see a program that would deliver the assistance to the producers in a timely manner, rather than this convoluted program that they have now? I have stacks of letters from producers in my riding who have tried their best to access this program. They cannot understand it. They have made repeated phone calls at huge expense to themselves over a period of weeks and months. They receive conflicting responses from the other end, depending on with which bureaucrat they talk. It seems to be a nightmare of ongoing frustration for them to try and access this program to get the paltry assistance the government has tried to filter down to them.