In the EU and the United States, the farmers make a good living from the mailbox. The cheques come in the mailbox and they make a good living. Farmers are not sitting home wanting to make a living out of the mailbox. If the weather was right and the cost of production wasn't going up so high.... The share of the consumer dollar seems to be going down all the time. So these are various things that the farmer has no control over.
Since the spring, we've been hearing from a lot of farmers, and we hear the programs are not working. You guys alluded to that strongly here today. There's a lot of questioning about why it's not working. Now the numbers are out. I think overall in Canada agriculture programs total $8 billion, federally and provincially. For some reason, a lot of that money is not getting into farmers' hands. You guys mentioned the reasons why.
So let's look at how we could change the programs. You alluded to some. One of the things we have heard, for example, is that this Olympic average has got to go, because you have these various years in a row on the margins. So I'd like to hear some suggestions on that.
The other thing that bothers a lot of farmers is that the programs aren't uniform across this country. You might see immigrants, young farmers, going to one part of the country because they have better programs than others. So what can we do to change the programs? Should they be more uniform? Should we change the years? If you people were sitting down starting from scratch, and you knew you had $8 billion to go into agriculture across Canada, where should it be going and how should it be changed?