The cheques may be in the mail, but they won’t be what many farmers were expecting.
The first applicants to qualify under the Agricultural Income Disaster Assistance program will receive less than half of their entitlement in cheques mailed late last week. They may not receive their final payments until the 1999 crop is being harvested.
The news caught Saskatchewan agriculture minister Eric Upshall off-guard.
“That would be very, very disappointing. We were always told the money was going to be out by June at the latest, and that means all the money,” Upshall said.
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Federal officials say final payments won’t be made until the application deadline has passed on July 31 and calculations are completed.
Upshall told reporters he knew the cheques would come in instalments, but not that it would take so long.
“If you’re running into September we’re going to have to, at that point in time, do the analysis for the next year’s program and you’re running up against a very bad time frame to make any changes,” he said.
The first AIDA cheques went to a small number of Saskatchewan and Manitoba farmers on April 30.
These farmers will get another payment when the provinces sign the federal-provincial agreement that created the program, taking them to about 80 percent of their total entitlement. The final cheque will follow.
Saskatchewan and Manitoba were expected to sign their agreements earlier this week. That means farmers will receive 80 percent of their entitlement in the first cheque, followed by the final payment.
Vern Greenshields, communications adviser to federal agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief, said most farmers will get two cheques because few applications have been processed. He said about 675 applications had been received from Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Newfoundland – the three provinces where Ottawa is administering the program.
