Agriculture committee  No, there wasn't.

Agriculture committee  You'd have to ask the minister why he chose to only choose barley producers for a plebiscite. I agree with you there is no need to deregulate the single-desk monopoly to address any concerns I have heard. No concerns have warranted deregulating single-desk monopoly. They could al

Agriculture committee  I don't think we should play with any numbers. I think all wheat and barley producers should be eligible on a one vote per person basis.

Agriculture committee  I would reiterate that I believe any concerns that have ever been expressed about the Canadian Wheat Board could well be dealt with within the single-desk monopoly. The other concern I have is the implication that wholesale deregulation has for any other marketing structure in

Agriculture committee  Thank you. I want to make a couple of points. First of all, there's not nearly enough information that CWB II would be able to survive. Let's ask all the grains and oilseeds producers who lost equity in SaskPool over the last two years, or in the Alberta Wheat Pool. None of them

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It is a pleasure for me to be here. You do have a very short brief of the presentation I'm going to be making. I won't read that brief. I will relegate my comments to just simply verbal comments. I would like to start out by applauding the minist

Agriculture committee  An all-based margin program will never ever address the declining margin problem. That's why we're suggesting adding components to a base-case program, such as companion programs. We can use the B.C. tree fruit issues as an example. There are companion programs, and these are to

Agriculture committee  No. The only calculation we've done is what you see in front of you, and that's our best guess. That's why at this point we are not asking for implementation of a NISA-like tier, we are asking to explore putting a NISA-like tier at the top of CAIS. We would very much like the dep

Agriculture committee  No, that's not our position. When we talk about priming the pump in agriculture, again we're not necessarily saying we should emulate the U.S. programs. But pay more attention to the declining margin--within the context of what has been suggested for the horticulture industry. Pa

Agriculture committee  We have talked to the agriculture minister about these issues several times. We had that opportunity. Part of the complication is now with the signing of the agricultural policy framework. They need seven provinces and at least 50% of the production to agree to the changes, and s

Agriculture committee  With regard to making changes, there have been quite a few improvements already made to the CAIS program over the last little while. They're looking at expanded negative margin coverage. We're looking at the change in the inventory evaluation. We're looking at an additional disas

Agriculture committee  You mentioned BSE. One of the things I wanted to say is that there is an additional BSE-like disaster component being developed for CAIS. It doesn't necessarily provide deeper coverage, but it provides broader coverage in that it might include business interruption, although that

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's a pleasure to be here to speak to the people around this table, because I know that everybody is keenly interested in making agriculture work better in Canada. Let me begin by saying that I support what the horticulture industry has just talk

Finance committee  In that case, I think all the information has to be put out there. There has to be a discussion from people on both sides of the issue--a good evaluation, a good analysis--and then a producer plebiscite to decide where we go with the single desk.

Finance committee  Yes, that's correct. If you look at the primary production sector, of course, it's much lower.