Mr. Chair, as always I appreciate the members of the Bloc Québécois and not just their interest, but their devotion to issues involving agriculture.
Clearly the Bloc Québécois is passionate about agriculture.
The Bloc shares its passion with this side of the House. It is always an interesting debate when we get into the House to talk about the best way forward.
To be clear with the leader of the Bloc, I have suggested that our party's position, and I will deal with this more in my presentation later, has been that we want to change the CAIS program, and we campaigned on that. We want to change it so there is a separate stand-alone program for income support for farmers and a separate disaster relief program.
There has been an awful evolution of the CAIS program. Trying to make this work for farmers has been a terrible problem. As I have travelled across the country, what is clear to me is farmers want a separate disaster relief program from that. What I am faced with, and I am not picking on the provinces, is that this is a federal-provincial shared jurisdiction. I need the cooperation of the provinces if we are to move quickly on that.
Right now all 10 provinces and the territories are in favour of retaining the CAIS program. I respect that. It is my hope that by June, when we meet at our next federal-provincial meeting, I will be putting forward proposals to separate disaster relief from income support, and that is what farmers need. I think it will address many of the needs about which farmers are concerned.
On another note, the leader talked about many issues in his presentation. I would like to assure him that I agree with his idea that, when possible, we need to regionalize problems such as disease outbreaks in Canada. We need to take advantage of our big geographic country that makes it possible to regionalize disease and protect Canadian agriculture generally by doing this.
A good example of how that works was the concern raised when some poultry products were imported from France to Quebec recently. We were able to work with the government of France to regionalize the problem in France. We made sure that trade of other products coming into Quebec on an ongoing basis resumed very quickly. It seems to me that the leader is right. Whenever possible, we need to move to regionalize things within Canada so it does not disrupt trade or harm our farmers from coast to coast. When there is a problem, let us deal with it quickly, get help to clean up whatever that problem might be and ensure that farmers across the country continue to do their business.