Agriculture committee  Thanks, Charlie for asking that. I can't wait to respond.

Agriculture committee  First of all, I certainly echo Travis' comment. We don't want to have programs that influence producers' decision-making. We talk about all the things we can do in the supply chain. Can we go after niche markets? Can we specialize, or should we diversify? There's no question that

Agriculture committee  I'm glad you asked that question. That's one of the issues we're also very concerned about. We have talked often about this concept of equity. I mentioned earlier that we don't know exactly how some of this money is going to be given out. We think the $600 million will be used to

Agriculture committee  We do want to see a national CAIS program, and we do want to see it similar all across the country. The CAIS program is a margin-based, whole farm program, and there are a lot of problems around it. It's complex and hard to predict. But if it's whole farm and generally available,

Agriculture committee  We would not be opposed to companion programs. The biggest problem with companion programs, from our point of view, is that they tend to vary from province to province. The biggest issue, of course, is that wealthy provinces are better able to support their producers than a less

Agriculture committee  The accountants have made their initial presentation of their study and have not come up with the options. The information I have from some of the people dealing with them is that the firm is not going to get paid yet, because they haven't finished their work. So we are still loo

Agriculture committee  There was a task force that worked all last summer. There was representation on that task force from various areas of production, as well as from the federal and provincial governments. The task force wound up in the fall. I think there is still some work being done in the fede

Agriculture committee  I think you're asking about production insurance and whether we think we're making some progress. I certainly mentioned production insurance earlier when I spoke. I indicated that it's probably one of our greatest sources of frustration. We want to see a good, viable production

Agriculture committee  From the point of view of the pork council, we went on record as being very sympathetic to the plight of the grain producers. At that time many of them were losing their farms as a result of currency changes and programs in the U.S., and it was a real issue. At that time we said

Agriculture committee  Mr. Chairman, as I said earlier, we were very interested in the announcement of a NISA-type program. We didn't make many commitments beyond that. We certainly have experience with NISA. When we had the NISA program before we felt it was trade friendly, and I think it could cont

Agriculture committee  Mr. Chairman, we want to stress that the Canadian Pork Council supports the continuation of a margin-based income stabilization program. The current CAIS program has met the needs of many hog producers across the country, although there certainly can be some improvements. There h