7. For the purpose of paragraph 6, the term ‘net revenue’ means the income of fishermen from the first sale of the fish or shellfish caught during the introduction and testing of the new technical or organisational knowledge less the selling costs such as auction hall fees.

If I take you down through the list of numbers that are available on our website, market receipts for year 2000 are $29.8 billion in Canada; total direct payments are $2.8 billion; total cash receipts $32.7 billion, the sum of the two; net operating expenses $25.6 billion; net cash income $7 billion; realized net income, which is the return to the farmer for his labour, and after depreciation, is $3.3 billion.

(2) The Commodity Board shall distribute the proceeds of the sales in each pool conducted pursuant to subsection (1), after deducting therefrom all the necessary and proper disbursements and expenses in respect of the sales, in such a manner that each producer receives his share of the total proceeds in the pool in proportion to the quantity and taking into account the class, grade and size of the beans delivered by him to the Commodity Board.

The Commission shall be empowered to adopt delegated acts, in accordance with Article 149, laying down the method referred to in point (b) of the first subparagraph. Where that method is applied, the net revenue generated during implementation of the operation, resulting from sources of revenue not taken into account in determining the potential net revenue of the operation, shall be deducted from the eligible expenditure of the operation, no later than in the final payment claim submitted by the beneficiary.

In addition, they feel that producer accounts should be allowed to go into a negative balance when eligible net sales drop below 75% of the previous three year average, to a maximum of 10% of the previous three year average of eligible net sales in any given year, with a total allowable negative balance of 25% in all years combined.

Using the rule mentioned earlier, by which the finance minister decided that the government was to step in and give $1 billion to the maritimes in compensation after they experienced revenue losses from harmonization in excess of 5% of their current sales tax revenue, we could have said “If that is how it will work, let us reduce personal income taxes, reduce business taxes and raise the provincial sales tax so that, when the federal government comes to us with its plans for harmonizing and asks us to reduce our tax rate, it will have to pay us compensation because we will have experienced a loss ...[+++] in excess of 5% of our provincial sales tax revenue”.