Agriculture committee  It might be a very difficult question to answer, but you could look at it differently. In looking at the grains sector, if you go back a few years--three or four years--it wasn't that profitable. But it came up. If you look at the hog sector, there were different reasons the pric

Agriculture committee  If a sector is profitable, there will be no problem in terms of the next generation. Look at Quebec. It had a program. Of course, supply management comes into play, but farmers are, on average, much younger there. If a sector is doing well, the next generation will step up. I wa

Agriculture committee  Exactly. The agriflexibility program was put forward because different provinces can use it where the need exists. Programs can vary, as in the example I gave earlier. Manitoba may want an agristability plus program. Ontario may opt for a risk management program, as well.

Agriculture committee  If I could begin answering, because I've talked about the future of farming in Canada, I'm talking about grain farming and grain farmers. You must have research and you need to be competitive. You need to have the increases in yields. You need to have research for resistance. L

Agriculture committee  I listed a few things earlier. Obviously, a program that does not take into account production costs cannot really do what we would want it to. Something else that was mentioned earlier, an Olympic average is very short. You need to increase the number of reference years in orde

Agriculture committee  No, not about that point there--no, not really. We brought forward a suggestion a few years back with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture about the AgriFlex program, saying we know there are problems, so we have to use a different fund to help it out. That's what we brought fo

Agriculture committee  If I could answer it, I'll give you one example I wanted to give when I did the representation but didn't. I'm a grain producer. Do you remember at the beginning of 2000 the prices were going steadily down? There were declining margins. We know we had a problem. Now we're heari

Agriculture committee  Good morning. I am here today on behalf of the Union des producteurs agricoles. I am a farmer in Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, and the association asked me to give a presentation on agriculture programs. The agristability program is without a doubt the main risk management program a

Agriculture committee  Do you mean the last part?

Agriculture committee  I'm an excited person from Quebec, so at times I go a little fast.

Agriculture committee  These changes would equip agristability to better respond to farmers' needs, especially in terms of helping them respond more effectively and efficiently to market price cycles. According to the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, these changes would represent an annual investmen

Finance committee  You have to understand that we had asked for the program we had talked about a little earlier, i.e., the AgriFlex fund, but it does not work as we had envisaged. However, it is a pan-Canadian program. There are provincial programs that could function more effectively with federa

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  There had already been a program in 2005 called the Transition Fund, with funding percentages established for each province, and the provinces used it as they saw fit in order to run their own programs.

Finance committee  Before answering that, I would like to apologize for the fact that we did not give at least part of our presentation in French. Our regular translator has found another job; and so we had no one to translate for us. I apologize.