Some progress has been made since then. NISA is now a national program where government support is directly linked to relative economic contribution. And while GRIP has disappeared in most provinces, it s legacy has been a system of allocating federal safety net funds which is somewhat more balanced than what existed before pending decisions to be made by Canadian agriculture ministers in early 1999. However, inequities still exist.
Programs continue to exist for other provinces for which there are no equivalents for Ontario.
Granted, some of the imbalance in federal safety net spending is caused by the relatively greater portion of eastern prairie farm income from grain crop sales and the much higher level of global subsidization which exists for grains compared to most other farm commodities. But the reasons are much more basic. Some price projections released in late 1998 by the Market Analysis Division of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada are most interesting. There could be several explanations. Crop failure is one, though that occurs somewhere in Canada every year, and it s why crop insurance exists.