Mr. Speaker, the member is correct.
Part of what we were trying to accomplish, and the reason we said to the minister at the beginning that we would be helpful in moving the legislation is that we wanted to do exactly that. We wanted to find a way to help farmers who literally had millions of tonnes of grain sitting on the Prairies.
There are two truths to that. Some of it is in bins, for sure, and some of it is in elevators, but a lot of it was sitting on the ground, literally on the Prairie ground. Some was covered by tarps. I witnessed when I was in Saskatchewan not long ago that some of the tarps are gone.
When there is a bit of a thaw and rain, the wheat gets spoiled. A farmer said that I should come back to Saskatchewan to hunt deer, because they are going to be the fattest deer ever seen due to the amount of grain they will eat, which is just sitting on the ground.
It is true; they will be. The dilemma with that is that it is now contaminated. It cannot be sold for feed because of the contamination. We lost some time, and we lost some opportunities.
My colleague, the member for Sydney—Victoria is right. This could have happened through the rail service agreement a year ago, but it did not happen. We cannot look back and say it should have been, could have been, and we hoped it would be. It did not happen.
Now we are at a point where we have moved it a bit but not nearly enough. There were some things we suggested that would have moved it even further. They were not taken up by the government side. Maybe in hindsight it is looking at them and wishing it had, but that was, again, an opportunity missed.
I look forward to getting this moved forward, to at least getting this amount done for farmers. Farmers are looking for a signal from all of us here that we understand the dilemma they face. It is real. It is not just a statistical number. It is real for them and their families, and for many of them it is a question of their livelihood and going into further debt when they cannot move the grain. If they cannot sell it, they do not get paid. That is the reality of not moving their product.
The bigger issue across the country, of course, and the minister addressed it during his speech, is reassuring our international customers. We saw through testimony at the committee that Japan had said it was going to buy somewhere else because Canada was not a reliable supplier. The Canada brand has become “not reliable supplier”. That is a shame.
Farmers across this country have spent decades building that Canada brand to the point where we were seen as producing the finest quality wheat in the world and as the most reliable supplier, on time with good delivery. Now we are seeing that erode so quickly.
We all know, in a competitive marketplace, how quickly customers get frustrated and simply say they can go somewhere else, and because they can go somewhere else, they do not need to get it from us. That is a shame.
We are going to have to work hard on that. Farmers will redouble their efforts, no doubt. I would look to the government and suggest it is going to have to redouble its efforts, as well, to ensure that at the end of the day we find those customers and convince them that they need to come back, because we can and will be again not only the best in the world but a reliable supplier of that great grain that is grown on the Prairies.