Agriculture committee  AgriRecovery explores all of the support available through the BRM programs currently and then looks to target the costs that the producer cannot manage. It looks to fill that remaining gap.

Agriculture committee  Yes. It is impacting many farmers and many sectors, so in terms of the collective experience, it could be characterized as being a collective experience.

Agriculture committee  Yes, that is correct. It is a framework that's part of the Canadian agricultural partnership and that allows us to work together with provinces to put in place the AgriRecovery initiatives to respond to disaster events.

Agriculture committee  Yes. This would be characterized as an extraordinary event.

Agriculture committee  In regard to the summer events that led to drought and obviously wildfires within British Columbia, there was an assessment done in regard to those disaster events in each province. Again, there is a current active program initiative that's taking place in British Columbia to deal with both the drought and the wildfire impacts that have happened.

Agriculture committee  The AgriRecovery process starts when a province makes a formal request to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to start an assessment. Once the province has done that, that really initiates the process to create a task team to study the disaster event and look at the criteria that are part of the AgriRecovery framework to see how that disaster event meets those criteria.

Agriculture committee  —and then targeting a response—

Agriculture committee  It was on November 19 that B.C. formally put in a request to have an AgriRecovery assessment, so that is what started the process. We've been working very closely with British Columbia, as well as with some of our other federal colleagues and Public Safety, to do the proper assessment regarding those disaster recovery costs.

Agriculture committee  In regard to the types of extraordinary expenses or costs, Francesco provided some of those. To be more specific, we're looking at the lost feed and the feed that producers may have to purchase in order to feed their animals. We're looking at the transportation of those animals and whether they need to be taken away from those flood zones and moved to a safer location.

Agriculture committee  With regard to the AgriRecovery process, whenever we complete an initiative with the province, we do take the time to conduct a “lessons learned” to see what worked well and what didn't work well with that initiative, with the idea of looking forward to how we could better respond to those disaster events and to how we implement programming.

Agriculture committee  —to learn from our experiences and apply them going forward.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the question. As Francesco articulated, it has been categorized as a one-in-a-hundred-years event impacting southwestern British Columbia with regard to flooding and landslides. It has been described as the worst financial agricultural disaster in B.C.'