Mr. Speaker, I have listened to this afternoon's speeches with great interest and to my colleague in the Alliance with no less interest than the others. There are some things he says that I am very interested in and some actually disturbed me a great deal. I will divide my remarks into two questions.
First, it seems to me that rural Canada at the moment, be it farm country or the more remote parts of the country, depends on foreign trade more immediately than the rest of the country.
For example, I live in a riding which is 40% rural. Half of it is cottage country with one mine, forestry and that kind of thing. The other half of the rural part of my riding is very mixed farming: 150 dairy farms, 500 beef farms, a 50 year old buffalo farm, chicken farms, hog farms and things of that type. Fifty per cent of the farm gate income in my riding depends upon exports. The mine's products are almost entirely exported.
Rural Canada needs rules based fair trading overseas. I accept the member's enthusiasm, but I would like to ask him a question regarding the dispute settling mechanism in chapter 11 we are discussing at the moment. How would he as a member of the Alliance deal with the oversubsidization that is occurring within and without the trade agreements from which our farmers suffer so deeply?
I support fair rules based trading. How would he and his party deal with these subsidies which we as a government have been struggling with to try to reduce the subsidies in the United States, in Europe and so on, which are crippling our farmers in their foreign trade?