It's a start, but it's to recognize, I think, that our climate is a lot more extreme that it has been for quite some time. I've noticed as a farmer that in the 30 years I've farmed, it hasn't been as extreme as it's been over the last five years.
There are a lot of things, and I think, obviously, our presentation is leaning more towards insurance programs. Last year during the flooding, many residential buildings and homes and cottages were flooded, and some of the private companies were saying, well, maybe it's time we started talking about flood insurance, because you can't get flood insurance.
Maybe we have to start looking for different models of crop insurance. If you're a young farmer anywhere in Canada, if you have any size of farm, if you're starting out the first year, you'd be wiped out because you don't have any crop insurance coverage. You'd have the area average, which is way below, not even close to, the cost of production. With AgriStability, it's the same. I assume if you had a disaster, they or the government would assign you an area, a margin you'd start with, but we've been asking our provinces to allow us to use maybe our father's margins, if we've been farming together with him for five or six years, and start using his crop insurance yields. But they don't like breaking that apart; they like to deal with you in one. We see that as problematic because it is important for young farmers and beginning farmers.
They've done some good modelling with crop insurance. I'm sure they've done it all across the country, but I think it's time they look at it as a national program, where they can say to the provinces, look, this is what we'll offer you. If you have four or five consecutive years of being flooded out, well, we're going to start reducing that amount that you lose every year. So you can still stay in the game and maybe you could hopefully get back on your feet.