Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Malpeque for his very pertinent questions. I must say that, having worked with him on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food for some time now, I usually appreciate his contributions enormously. Even though we do not belong to the same party, we have certainly developed a sense of solidarity on this issue. I think the whole committee has that sense of solidarity. Earlier, I mentioned the unanimous report we produced. Some people in the Conservative Party seem to have understood, but they have not yet helped the minister understand what was going on.
The examples that the member just gave are good ones, and they are also tragic. I do not know how the minister responded to those cases. Producers have told me that they have not yet received a response to all the letters they wrote to ask the minister for help. Nevertheless, it is clear that these people cannot continue to live like this. They cannot survive on such ridiculous sums of money.
As I was saying, this evening, we will no doubt hear people on the government side talk about billions of dollars—some $2.3 billion—that it injected to deal with these crises. But producers are telling us that they have not received a penny of it. The government knew that CAIS was not working, so it proposed AgriStability, which is a lot like CAIS and does not seem to work any better.
Producers have been receiving advance payments, only to be told two weeks later that they have to pay it back. That is a serious problem. The member for Malpeque may know more about this than I do, but I do know that in Saskatchewan, producers were told that they had been sent a cheque by mistake, which was too bad, but they had to pay it back. As if they needed that on top of everything else. These people have had it up to here!
The fact that this is happening proves that there are serious flaws. It is not that the government cannot fix these problems. It can attenuate the crisis. The committee, the members of the opposition, and agricultural producers gave it the means to do so a long time ago.
There are solutions out there, and it is up to the government to implement them.