Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  As a matter of fact, I haven't, but several of my colleagues in the department have. They've been part of a task force. We've been working with the Province of Quebec very closely, and certainly have had a lot of contact with the federation in Quebec. As a matter of fact, I think even the minister and Mr.

Agriculture committee  Maybe I'll just use a simple example. An average producer—and most potato producers have what we call “healthy margins”, they've made some decent money in terms of their potato operation—who has a reference margin or an historical margin, average historical income, of $280,000, would be eligible for $190,000 under the CAIS program.

Agriculture committee  No. It probably wasn't clear in my opening remarks. It's finalized in the sense that the information for 2005 was due on September 30. We're in the process now of doing all the application processing. As I indicated, the bulk of the information usually comes in around the deadline.

Agriculture committee  That's a very good question. That was because of their moisture conditions in 2005. Manitoba's projected expenditure for 2005 is going to be about 150% above what they had for 2004. Certainly as a result, the provinces have raised the affordability issue as a concern. That reflects the demand-driven nature of the program.

Agriculture committee  Sorry?

Agriculture committee  That's the number of producers who have received payment. We're averaging around 140,000 to 150,000 producers in total in the program. What you're looking at is the number of producers who have received payment to date. We're virtually complete for 2003-04. We're processing the 2005 applications, and we've paid a total of 27,000 producers.

Agriculture committee  It's a very good question. Clearly what ministers have agreed to is to separate out disaster relief programming from income stabilization programming, and looking at CAIS, or a margin-based program, as dealing with the income stabilization component. In terms of disaster relief, whether it's a disease situation or whether it's flooding—and potato nematode would fit the circumstances of a disaster because it is a disease situation—really what we're looking at is providing assistance to help producers resume their business operations or mitigate the impact of the disaster as quickly as possible.

Agriculture committee  In fact, the potato producers in Saint-Amable are eligible for significant assistance, well over $3 million, under the CAIS program right now. They just have to submit their applications and La Financière agricole du Québec is ready to respond right now. I can go back to the last potato disaster that we had in New Brunswick in 2004.

Agriculture committee  On the first question, we've looked at the payment distribution by farm type. The vast majority of these payments will go to grains and oilseeds producers, followed by cattle producers, in that order.

Agriculture committee  On inventory evaluation, which I know is quite surprising because everybody thought this was really going to benefit the cattle sector, it's clear it does. But it also reflects the fact that grain prices were declining over those three years, so the vast majority--and I'm talking upwards of 80% of those payments--will be going to those two sectors.

Agriculture committee  That's correct. We will be moving to an accrual reference margin. We had extensive discussion with the National CAIS Committee on this. The idea is that you need to be comparing apples to apples. To measure your margin in the program year on one basis, an accrual basis, and use a reference margin on a cash basis--there's a significant gap there.

Agriculture committee  There may be situations where an individual producer may have a lower reference margin, but we went through extensive analysis, through over 50,000 files, took this to the National CAIS Committee, and on average, grains and oilseeds producers will have higher reference margins because we're moving to the accrual basis.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon. I guess we just made it. Good afternoon to the committee, and thank you for the invitation to meet with you once again on the CAIS program. As you are aware, federal, provincial, and territorial ministers agreed this past June in St. John's to take the steps necessary to implement a new margin-based program and to create a new disaster assistance framework, something separate from income stabilization.

Agriculture committee  For any individual who has production insurance, that information will be provided by the provincial production insurance agency to the PFRA federal administration in Regina, and we will send out an application with the relevant information. If the producer does not have production insurance, they call the PFRA 1-800 number, and an application will be sent to them.