Agriculture committee  I assume you're probably talking about the income payment money, what we'll do if we don't need the $190 million that will be available this year, although that remains to be seen because we're not at the deadline. It certainly would be up to the minister and the government to decide what they might do with that money.

Agriculture committee  Public Works actually manages that for us. There are about 190 consultants on a roster that we have to provide to the farm business assessment services. We can supplement that list with what we call a short-form contract, so we can add more trainers. We're also looking at other ways in which we may be able to increase the number of people available to deal with the applicants to the options program.

Agriculture committee  The reason for making the link is again to encourage participation. We had those services available, but the participation wasn't as much as we would have liked, where we were getting good feedback on farm business assessment, CASS. People who used it were maybe very timid at the start, but in the end they were pleased in general with the service.

Agriculture committee  All of us often need outside advice or professional advice on how to manage our finances or businesses, and that kind of thing. It's often very beneficial, when you're deep into it yourself and the pressures are on you, to have some professional from outside, who doesn't know you or the operation, just come in and give you some good advice.

Agriculture committee  I imagine all these things will be raised in the evaluation when the committee is set up. We hope to be working on that in 2007 and get the evaluation under way. Right now we're running the program, getting the applications in and processed, and letting people have some time to decide which service they're going to use, and that kind of thing.

Agriculture committee  In a way, the program is designed to help them think about that through the farm business assessment service that's available. How much change will occur in their operations as a result of using these services through the program remains to be seen. But we have testimonials from people who have participated in farm business assessments in the past couple of years—because the program was already available—and the results are interesting.

Agriculture committee  Under the farm business assessment, there are five days of professional services, and the program is paying 100% of the cost of that service. Under the Canadian agricultural skills service—and Michèle is an expert in this, so she can correct me if I don't get this correct—the funding is there to pay to have a professional, I think it's 100%, do an individual learning plan, and then there's support for training and even travel to get to the training at 100% level as well.

Agriculture committee  I would have to say we're pretty happy with the numbers that are coming in. We can deal with more applications, and we'd love to see more applications, but this is a pretty good result so far.

Agriculture committee  The number sounds quite large, but I'm not sure if we have a number. You're correct, it is a pilot program, and there will be an advisory committee set up with stakeholders and academia and so on to consider and evaluate the program and see how effectively it helped address the low-income challenges of these farm families.

Agriculture committee  I don't have an assessment or evaluation that I could give you today. That is one of the things, though, that we will certainly be looking at as we evaluate the program--who participated, where they're from, demographics, that kind of thing, what their situation is. That will help us make suggestions for the minister to consider later on.

Agriculture committee  Merci. Actually, the minister did announce that the deadline has been extended to November 20. I'm sorry I didn't mention that in my opening comments; I should have. So applications are still rolling into our processing centre in Winnipeg. As I mentioned, as of November 5, we have well over 13,460 applications, and we're still expecting to get quite a few more applications into the program.

Agriculture committee  Yes, actually, participation from Quebec has been very good. As of November 5, 3,260 families and individuals have applied to the options program.

Agriculture committee  We have done some communications. Actually there was a mail-out about a month ago in Quebec to all producers and farm families. You're right, we did estimate there will be about 5,000 eligible participants from Quebec. However, we usually don't get 100% participation in our programs; it's usually some other rate.

Agriculture committee  This is the number of applications. It's possible that some may not be eligible. Currently in Quebec, we've processed 1,121. Keep in mind too, because of the original October 31 deadline, we did get a lot of applications right at Halloween, thousands of them. Based on that, we still have about 2,100 more applications to process in Quebec.

Agriculture committee  It's the income reported on line 150 of your return. So it's income from all sources.