Agriculture committee  It's around $125 million or $130 million. In the last five years we've been able to average about a 2% per year increase, in terms of our budget. This may not seem like a lot, but when you're faced with continual challenges to reduce, not increase, budgets, that's doing pretty we

Agriculture committee  Do you mean a disaster for the province to come up with the money?

Agriculture committee  Oh. Clearly in 2005 there was a very big disaster for us, with the excess moisture situation we had. We had a lot of excess moisture claims through crop insurance, and in CAIS, as I say, there were very large payments to producers.

Agriculture committee  That's actually the exact challenge we're trying to deal with right now: to determine how you deal with major fluctuations like that. It is almost out of the scope of some provinces to be able to deal with them, and that's where we're coming from. It is a significant disaster.

Agriculture committee  From our perspective, crop insurance has probably always been the mainstay of our safety net programming. We've really tried to do a good job of listening to what is needed and further develop it. I think that has been a big factor. Keep it affordable, keep it so that you have in

Agriculture committee  I apologize because I don't have answers to all of your questions, in terms of our percentage. Having said that, I recognize, as do all of us around the table, that health care and education are two of the biggest portfolios in any government. They take up a very large percenta

Agriculture committee  It is interesting, because of course we have a shared jurisdiction in this country in terms of agriculture. That's part of the challenge we have. Having said that, of virtually all our trading partners, the federal government is the major player in terms of agricultural policy an

Agriculture committee  Thank you. First of all, I just wanted to let you know that not only is Gimli a pretty good spot to be, it's also “paradise” in Icelandic. I just want to leave that with you.

Agriculture committee  It is the heart of New Iceland, absolutely. I grew up here; I've been here most of my life. When I say our crop insurance program is the best in the country, I firmly believe it. One of the biggest reasons--and you might have heard this from Neil Hamilton this morning--is that w

Agriculture committee  Sure. From our perspective, Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Initiatives reorganized about three years ago, and one of the biggest things we've done in reorganizing is to ensure that we have a very strong extension system in Manitoba. We and Quebec are probably the only two

Agriculture committee  I guess we have the best crop insurance program in the country, frankly, and it shows in terms of the participation in and satisfaction of producers with it. We are certainly trying to enhance it and to ensure it does stay an integral part of the safety net framework.

Agriculture committee  What we've been doing is we've been working with the federal government and other provinces in developing that agricultural disaster assistance framework, which is geared at those kinds of disasters that are not being picked up by the disaster financial assistance arrangements, t

Agriculture committee  From our government's perspective, it is important to have those kinds of tools that can provide market power for producers, and orderly marketing clearly has been one that has delivered. There have been a lot of studies around that have suggested there are some significant adv

Agriculture committee  The way I would answer that is I think there's a degree of flexibility you need to have in terms of designing your own program so you can address the individual needs of the producers in your province. We've done a number of things with what they call wedge money; we've provided

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Easter. In terms of the cost, first and foremost, just to give you an idea, when we went into the two-program set, in our first budget the CAIS cost was something like $42 million. I think we talked about an expectation that there would be a long-term cost of app