Thank you all for appearing before us.
This isn't the first time we've looked at business risk management. We looked at it a couple of years ago in our study of the competitiveness of the agriculture industry. And yet we still have a letter coming--of December 5--from the Auditor General confirming what you said in regard to BRM, that “Farmers can wait up to two years for a payment and the amount of the payment is hard to predict.” So while I'm not particularly optimistic that what is recommended here is going to resonate, necessarily, with the government, I'm still hopeful that with Growing Forward 2, it's an opportunity to embrace these ideas and make some changes.
Having said that, I suppose this question is premised on our belief that climate change is actually happening, something on which, I believe, Mr. Orb, you said something extremely interesting. You said that we have to define disasters. When you said that it just really struck me.
Some time ago, Nicholas Stern, then Chancellor of the Exchequer in Great Britain, and a former World Bank chief economist, said that it's going to cost $7 trillion to deal with it, and $11 trillion if we don't deal with climate change.
Given our collective failure to deal with the issue or to embrace adaptation to the change, I'm wondering if you actually see a greater need for these business risk management programs, particularly AgriInsurance and the AgriRecovery, as we move into the future and face more of these predicaments. How would you see the definition of disasters perhaps broadening, if that's the case?