Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise on the first day back after a summer recess to address an issue that a lot of people think should not be in the top 10 issues in the House. It certainly speaks to the fact that, as the NDP member just said, the Liberal government has basically stood aside and done nothing for the last 12 years that this has been an issue. That raises the point we need to get to.
Let us bring a bit of reality into the debate. We heard from members of the other three parties, with the exception of my colleague from Vegreville—Wainwright who has taken a third crack at this issue and I welcome his intervention on that. It is a huge issue in his riding and mine, which parallel each other in western Canada. It is becoming worse because of the government inaction on this file. It is another strike against agriculture.
The magic coefficient that permeates all of this is a little agency under Health Canada that reports to Agriculture Canada but basically does nothing for either one, called the Pest Management Regulatory Agency. When people from that agency come before our committees, they tap dance, shift aside and blame somebody else; it is never their fault. But it is their lack of attention to files such as these that this issue has been dragging on for 12 years and there is nothing to take the place of strychnine. That is why we are asking for strychnine to be reinstated at this point until that agency does find something that is as effective and as accessible as that should be.
The cause and effect is the Liberal government and its PMRA that it does not keep to task. It has been before the agriculture committee a number of times and I have walked away shaking my head. There are so many issues it needs to be tuned into, to be interventionist on and it is not. That agency basically is not doing its job and is not earning its pay at this point, in my estimation.
Several other issues fall under the purview of the PMRA. One is generic glyphosate along with the strychnine. Another one is ivermectin which agricultural producers are running across the border to pick up. They are going to be penalized for doing that. They will not be allowed to do that even under the own use certificate that the government has allowed the PMRA to piecemeal out some solutions.
There is a general malaise in that agency. It needs a good boot to get it up and running. It is not a budgetary problem; it is a science problem. It seems to ignore or skirt around the sound science that attaches itself to all of these different issues.
A case in point, today it was talking about the re-evaluation of strychnine. The PMRA is doing another study which is in the comment period. If the agency really wants to get comments that are pertinent, it should go outside the Ottawa bubble and talk to the actual end users, the farmers and ranchers who have been using this product for years. There has not been a significant problem. There has been some criminality, but that is under a whole other cause. That is under criminal use and criminal intent. Those people need to be punished to the full extent of the law, and rightly so.
The ordinary farmers and producers have a twofold problem with the way they are allowed to go after the Richardson's ground squirrel. They like to use that fancy name because everybody gets this warm, fuzzy idea of a squirrel, that they are cute and cuddly. Let us not forget that these are rodents. These are closer to the rat family. They burrow in the ground, chew up vegetation and create a tremendous amount of havoc in farming country. The number of $200 million annually in losses and costs has been tossed around. That is probably a very conservative number. We could probably multiply that by three or four times.
It is compounding now in that we have had a couple of years of drought. We are back into rain this year, more than we need. We have some major concerns with not being able to use best farming practices that the government insists we use and not having access in this case to the chemicals and poisons that we need.
The parliamentary secretary to the agriculture minister said that even the U.S. has banned above ground use of strychnine. That is fine. We do not use it above ground. The bait goes in the hole, underground. It is not accessible to any other animals unless there is criminal intent and someone wants to poison the neighbour's dog or bait a deer to get coyotes and so on, and that is a no-no. That is already listed in the Criminal Code. Let us not confuse the two. Let us not use that as an issue to keep the strychnine away from farmers.
The issue is a matter of concentration of the poison, freshness and the timeliness in being able to use it. Right now we have it under special permit. People have to run to their municipal offices, on certain days only, when it will be mixed for them. They have to bring in their bait, barley, grain or whatever is going to be used, and it is mixed. Then they rush home and bait the holes. The problem is it takes time to do that. A lot of farmers get up early in the morning to do it, or do it when the machinery breaks down, or on a rainy day, or something like that.
That compounds the problem with timeliness when they have to drive to the municipal office, which in many cases could be 40 or 50 kilometres away. They have to stand in line to get the bait mixed because everyone else has to go on the same day. Then when they get home, they want to bait those holes as quickly as they can with the fresh baited poison.
Therefore, the problem with having it mixed in Toronto is the freight problem. The type of bait that is used is usually screenings and gophers will not go for that. They have a persnickety pallet. They have a choice of hundreds of acres of fresh green stuff or stale old bread. Gophers are connoisseurs. They will get into the fresh grass and gorge themselves. We must have freshness, timeliness and the concentration of the bait. Those are the three things that need to be addressed by the PMRA and its Liberal taskmasters who sit on the other side of the House.
None of the other parties seem to want to step up and say that we have to maintain what we have under best farming practices until or if and when the government does come up with something newer. It has not. There is all this talk about two other products out there but no one has access to them. Again the timeliness, the freshness and availability are the major concerns with this problem.
One adult gopher can dig 50 holes in a season. Those are a lot of holes that cattle and horses step in. It makes a tremendous mess, plus the damage it does to the surrounding green space. There are a billion and a half acres under attack annually by pocket gophers, half of it in green space and the other half in pasture land. That is a tremendous amount of forage and fodder that goes to waste and does not go into the food supply. Canadians demand a fresh, secure and sustainable food supply and it is all borne on the backs of producers. A billion and half acres are under attack and an increasing livestock herd, almost 20% higher than normal, has to be sustained on fewer acres because of the gopher problem. The government has been complaisant for the last 12 years and complicit in the PMRA not getting the job done. We have a major a problem.
We have people going out and shooting gophers. On a corner section of land of 160 acres in my riding one can go out and shoot 2,000 gophers in an afternoon and not get anywhere near all of them. It is that type of problem we are seeing. Gophers multiply like rats. They have a couple of births a year. The ones born in the spring are having young ones by the fall.
It is a galloping problem. The government has to address the problem, not talk about studies again. The member for Mississauga South talked about not doing this because it was against something. If one gopher on his front lawn chewed 50 holes in a season, he would probably be a little more concerned. That is the type of infestation we have in western Canada.
There was much talk about the 0.4% being adequate. If we talk by strength, it is not. If we talk by volume, and the Liberals hide behind the fact that when it is mixed it amounts to 0.4%, years ago the ideal was 5%. We did not have huge problems at that time. We did not have any problems with 2%. There are no sound scientific studies done. It is all guesswork and knee-jerk environmental reactions. We need to be cognizant of the fact that there could be and may be some damage, but we have to control that. There are many other issues that we need to control as well and we see study after study but no movement on that.
Saskatchewan has a real problem since the federal government has curtailed a wildlife damage compensation under crop insurance. The member for Vegreville—Wainwright talked about 60 acres of canola at $350 to $400 an acre gone missing. It is not even covered any more. If we complain about the problem, we are told there will be a strychnine shipment coming in three months. That is not adequate.
This is a timely bill with the study going on in PMRA and the comment period. The third time will be the charm. Farmers and ranchers, especially in western Canada, are looking for this type of leadership on these issues. We are happy to bring that for them. A new Conservative government would make sure that issues such as these would addressed and that the PMRA would get back to doing the job it should be doing.