Mr. Speaker, it is hard to know how to use the 10 minutes allocated for this stage of the debate, but let me begin by saying there are many times in the House of Commons when reasonable people can reasonably disagree, and this is one of them. This is one of those cases where the farming community is divided. We do not know if it is 60:40 or 40:60 because there has not been, by the government's accounting, a fair test of the actual will of the people.
What we do know is that there has been no empirical evidence whatsoever presented by the government to convince our side of the argument, which I argue is a perfectly legitimate point of view. The government has not presented any paperwork, documentation or business case as to why or if farmers will be better off. It tells us over and over again that farmers will be better off, but it is anecdotal. It is much like my colleague just said. He did a straw poll of 20 farmers in his riding and all 20 of them said they wanted to get rid of the Wheat Board. That is not very scientific when there are some 75,000 prairie farmers producing grain. We do not have the tools we need to do our job. If we are going to have a reasonable debate, we would all benefit from the same base level of information.
We have empirical evidence. We have 75 years of evidence that says the Canadian Wheat Board has served farmers well and provided the best possible price at the minimum possible risk for farmers in an inherently unstable industry. We have asked the government to produce something, anything, to support its contention. In the absence of any documentation, business plan or cost benefit analysis, we can only assume that no such documentation exists. This leads me to the conclusion that it is a reckless and irresponsible action on the part of government to undertake such a comprehensive change in the way the rural prairie farm economy does business without so much as a business plan.
The government accuses us of all kinds of things, but nobody in his or her right mind would dismantle a successful $6 billion a year corporation without an impact study, a business plan and some justification and documentation as to why and if it will be better. We have heard nothing. To add insult to injury, not only has there been no evidence, no documentation and no proof, other than the notion and the whim of some self-interested Conservative members of Parliament who in fact farm grain themselves and who, I will argue later in my speech, are in a direct conflict of interest, now the Conservatives have even shut down debate. They have moved closure so that we will not be able to do our due diligence.
It is our job as members of Parliament to analyze, assess and test the merits of legislation put before us with reasoned debate, but we are not going to have that opportunity. A lot of people do not realize that the Conservatives pulled a fast one regarding the committee. Instead of sending the bill to the agriculture committee or even the international trade committee, they are sending it to a special legislative committee, which, by some happy coincidence, is not allowed to bring in witnesses other than technical witnesses to talk about the technical details of the bill.
Nowhere in the study at the committee stage will farmers be brought in to discuss the merits of the bill. The committee will only be able to discuss what various sections of the legislation actually do. That does not help members with hearing witnesses about whether or not they like using the Canadian Wheat Board. At no point in this process will we be discussing the merits of this sweeping, profound and permanent change the legislation contemplates in the way prairie farmers market their grain.
I have some quotes which I think members will find interesting. It seems almost everybody, except the Conservatives present, recognizes that the Canadian Wheat Board has been a net advantage to prairie farmers.
Robert Carlson, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union, said that he is convinced the Wheat Board earned Canadian farmers big premiums compared to U.S. prices and that the end of the monopoly will further weaken North American farmers and give more control to the giant multinationals. He said that it has been consistently true that the Canadian Wheat Board has earned more money for Canadian farmers.
Americans have been aware that the Wheat Board is an advantage for years. That is why they filed 13 separate trade complaints at the GATT and the WTO claiming that it is such an advantage to farmers it constitutes an unfair trade practice. Thirteen times they lost.
Alan Tracy, president of the U.S. Wheat Associates, said that the elimination of the single desk would leave a void in farmer advocacy, market development, customer support, export promotion, and quality assurance.
Listen to what the president of the Canadian National Millers Association said:
The CNMA knows of no research or evidence that demonstrates or even suggests that tinkering with the Canadian Wheat Board's mandate will create new North American market demand and opportunities for Canadian wheat flour millers.
He went on to say:
We do not anticipate the ultimate survival of the CWB without its current single-desk authority.
It kind of puts to lie this myth that the voluntary wheat board can survive when we all know this is chimera. He went on to say:
And we are certain that the CWB will not continue to be a reliable, full-service supplier to the Canadian wheat milling industry under those circumstances [of a dual market].
Perhaps one of the most revealing quotes we came across was by one of these big agrifood industry giants that will be the ones that will benefit. Our contention is, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary I believe it should hold, this particular action would takes hundreds of millions of dollars out of the pockets of prairie farmers and put them into the pockets of the shareholders of the agrifood giants, one of whom I will now quote. We all know Mr. Paterson, a Winnipeg grain giant. We have seen the Paterson stamp on all kinds of grain elevators all across the Prairies:
“We’ll do better than we do now,” says Mr. Paterson...whose family firm has climbed to more than $1-billion in annual revenues. “Our best years were in the time before the wheat board,” and that pattern should reassert itself, he says.
They are salivating. He is being quite controlled and temperate in his comments, but behind closed doors they are salivating and wringing their hands with glee that finally they can return to the bad old days of the 1920s and the 1930s. They could gouge Canadian farmers mercilessly when they owned the industry, when they owned the whole food supply chain, from the seed in the ground to the final finished product on the store shelves. They want it all. They want that vertical integration. They are going to gouge farmers, and that is how they are going to get it.
I have done some research on what the prices were like in the years when they had a single desk and the years when they did not; in the years when they had the five-year wheat pool and the years when the pool was gone; in the years when they had a voluntary wheat board and in the years when the single desk Wheat Board came in, in 1943. We studied these things. We have the graphs, the charts and the empirical evidence to draw from. The Conservatives have produced nothing, not a single word in support of their arguments, but the anecdotal whim and notions of a minister who is deluded and obsessed and who came here for one reason and one reason alone and that is to abolish the Canadian Wheat Board.
We are dealing with people who are in a direct personal conflict of interest. If they had any honour and decency, they would abstain from this debate and they would recuse themselves from the vote, because they personally stand to gain from abolishing the Wheat Board, if they believe their rhetoric. They say that prairie farmers will get more money if they abolish the Wheat Board. If that is true, they should abstain from this debate and recuse themselves from the debate altogether. If one accepts, as our argument is, that they would not make more money, then why are the Conservatives turning the rural prairie farm economy upside down and on its head when they have no evidence whatsoever it would be at the advantage of Canadian prairie farmers?
