Agriculture committee  Just as a reminder, the reference margin under the current AgriStability program is based on five years. What we use is called an Olympic average. We look at the previous five years, drop the high and low, and average the remaining three years. That becomes the producer support level going forward.

Agriculture committee  It wouldn't be doable because we wouldn't be able to report the AgriStability payments as green under the WTO rules.

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  I think that is something we're going to look at in terms of Growing Forward 2. In fact, at the last federal-provincial-territorial ministers meeting, ministers asked officials to look at insurance-based options for risk management going forward. There was no restriction on whether that would be public or private.

Agriculture committee  I think probably the number one lesson is that we need to communicate better in terms of what the AgriRecovery program is about and what it's intended to do. The two initiatives you mentioned were done under the AgriRecovery program, which is a disaster framework. AgriRecovery is there not to provide assistance for lost income due to disasters, but to help producers move forward: what do they need to do to resume business operations or take actions to mitigate the impacts of the disaster?

Agriculture committee  As you know, the insurance programs we have are under provincial jurisdiction and are actually quite successful. They've been around for 40 years. We have funded research, if you will, in looking at private sector models that could fill the gaps that aren't currently covered by the crop insurance programs.

Agriculture committee  Thank you. There was a point you made about high margins being experienced. What was that point? I missed it. I'm sorry.

Agriculture committee  And what was the point before that? I'm sorry. Do you remember that?

Agriculture committee  I'll try to whip through these in terms of responses. In terms of delivery, as you mentioned, we have devolved the delivery of AgriStability to Saskatchewan now, in addition to B.C. The federal government is delivering the AgriStability program in four provinces: Manitoba and three of the maritime provinces.

Agriculture committee  With respect to the hog and cow sectors, the livestock sector, we're always a little sensitive about the numbers for trade reasons, but in our forecast for the livestock sector for 2009-10, we're looking at over $1.1 billion.

Agriculture committee  I'll give you the high-level breakdown of that $6.4 billion.

Agriculture committee  It was $6.4 billion.

Agriculture committee  Yes. That's the federal-provincial cost-shared programming. As an example, the AgriInvest contributions to date are over $566 million. In addition, the federal government topped that up with $563 million as a kick-start to the AgriInvest program, which is a new program that was brought in as of 2007.

Agriculture committee  Sure. I'll speak to the changes to AgriStability and to the whole suite. We went from production insurance and the CAIS program to a four-program suite, which included AgriStability. The main differences between AgriStability and CAIS are in inventory valuation. That was an important change long demanded by the agriculture sector, especially the livestock industry.

Agriculture committee  Some of those changes would be easier to make if ministers made that decision. Others do have challenges--like giving producers the choice of the top 15% or a margin-based program. You can well imagine producers trying to make that decision and finding out at the end of the year, “Geez, I made the wrong choice”, and that they should have gone with the margin-based program rather than the 15%.