Agriculture committee  Producers in the CAIS program are eligible for up to 75% of their estimated payment on their estimated loss for 2006, and La Financière agricole du Québec is prepared to sit down with those producers and work on the numbers to provide that assistance.

Agriculture committee  Definitely, one of the key principles in the design of the program is the trade issue, minimizing the risk of countervail for our programming, because clearly making payments just to have that clawed back—I'll use that term—by countervailing duties is not going to get us anywhere

Agriculture committee  Certainly in terms of the minister's direction coming out of, first, Harrison Hot Springs, and then again St. John's, when we created these task teams, both on the CAIS program and production insurance enhancements, we were looking at models from all over the world and homegrown

Agriculture committee  Yes, or in early January.

Agriculture committee  The simple answer for the last example you used is that it would be producers who have basically lost their whole crop. They know their revenue is zero and they know what their expenses are; they can very quickly calculate what their margin is for the current year. They know what

Agriculture committee  All the provinces are in, and one territory, Yukon.

Agriculture committee  In terms of regional flexibility, there are a couple things. One, we're putting in a lot of money federally under our programs. The provinces still have the flexibility to offer regional programs to deal with regional issues. In terms of the disaster relief framework, that actu

Agriculture committee  No, those numbers are strictly for the CAIS program as we know it; they do not include the inventory payment and the negative margin changes, which only came into.... Actually, let me correct myself. The 2005 program year would include the changes to negative margins, to the exte

Agriculture committee  That's the target, yes.

Agriculture committee  Yes. We're processing. There's nothing to lead us to believe that we won't meet that target. We're processing, I think the minister said in committee last week, approximately 3,000 cheques a week on the inventory. Alberta has just got under way; obviously there's a lot of money t

Agriculture committee  They want to do it too. Keep in mind that Ontario has agreed to match the federal inventory payment on a 60-40 basis, so they want to move that money as quickly as possible, because producers in Ontario are not only getting the federal payment, but they're also getting a matching

Agriculture committee  For the 2006 program year, the sign-up deadline for producers to actually participate in the program was September 30, 2006. They had until September 30 to actually sign up for the program. They could have signed up back in June. If they recognize, through a bad harvest or what n

Agriculture committee  Yes. Those are the actual payments out the door. I've also thrown in some estimates or forecasts of payments that we expect to be out the door for the 2005 program year, for example, as well.

Agriculture committee  It's whether what they're doing fits the definition of farming income. I don't want to oversimplify it, because obviously it's not a simple issue, but I will go back to how Revenue Canada rules on the definition of farming income.

Agriculture committee  We're certainly fully aware of the CFA's proposal with respect to a NISA-like, contributory-style savings program as a top-up companion program to deal with regional flexibility, etc. When ministers tasked officials to come up with addressing the issue of a separate income stabil