Myron Thompson

[Criminal Code, February 13th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I could not resist getting up because the member went on for quite a while about how well the Criminal Code works in this country's justice system. He knows very well that there are tens of thousands of victims who would not necessarily agree with that and of course thousands of supporters of these victims who certainly would not agree.

The member is a lawyer. I bring that up to him every once in a while in committee because he likes to talk in legal tongues quite often, and it makes it a little difficult for those of us who are not lawyers to understand quite what he is saying. I almost gathered from his speech that he was saying the Conservatives are going back to good Liberal law with Bill C-35, and I thought it was rather strange that a lawyer would suddenly want to be a comedian.

Going back to good Liberal law? I have been here 13 years. I have seen good Liberal law in action. I have seen Liberals bring forward omnibus bills, which he said should be brought forward, in order to deal with all the legislation, omnibus bills, for example, like Bill C-2, which was an act to protect children. That was the purpose of it.

Yet in regard to that omnibus bill, although there are many aspects of it I wanted to support, I could not, because the Liberals kept insisting that child pornography might have something like a public good or a useful purpose. It was in the legislation. How can we go from an omnibus bill that would address such an evil thing as child pornography to that kind of terminology when the bill contained some things that were pretty good?

It makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever that the Liberals would dare bring forward an omnibus bill that would allow child pornography. What has happened in 13 years is that child pornography has now become a $1 billion industry. There are great arrests going on now, but this should have been prevented 13 years ago when that Liberal government had a chance.

I do not need any lectures from that member or anybody on that side because I have seen them in action for 13 years. They do not take their justice system seriously. They do not take protecting society seriously or they would not have come up with some of the garbage I saw throughout those years. I think the member would humble himself a wee bit instead of talking about going back to good Liberal law. He should think about it.

[Committees of the House, February 5th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I just want to point out that what I am trying to get at is this constant saying that the Conservative government now is not doing anything about something that, it almost seems, had just come to light. It has been going on for a long time. Where were the other governments? Why was something not done?

[Committees of the House, February 5th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, having emigrated to this country in 1968, I am not all that familiar with this entire situation. I noticed in the fourth report that some people had come forward and did shed some light on irregularities surrounding that particular case. It is unfortunate if there was wrongdoing of any kind, and I am certainly in favour of trying to correct these things later.

I remember the Milgaard case and cases like that. These wrongs have to be corrected. I do not have any problem with that. It is too bad that the political nonsense has to come into the debate, like what I heard from that member about how those guys over there who promote being tough on crime and all that are not the ones who are going to or can do anything. I get tired of listening to that coming out of their mouths all the time from that side.

However, I want to know, when was some of this light shed on these irregularities? This particular crime or incident took place 50 years ago. How long had there been suspicions that there were irregularities? Am I to understand that it was only this year and that the Conservative Party is to blame for the fact that nothing has been done? It was just brought out this year. Surely there must have been more information earlier. I am quite confused about the timeline. If the member could straighten me out on that, I would appreciate it.

[Committees of the House, December 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question. I indicated in my speech that people who are MPs from the Liberal Party who live in Toronto do not have a wheat board either. The members of Parliament who come from Montreal do not have a wheat board. The city members from Edmonton do not have a wheat board either.

The point is that those areas where they are obligated by law to market their goods, as they are told, through the Canadian Wheat Board live in the Prairies, in the rural areas. There are some who would like to have the choice. It just sounds so easy to me, that living in Canada that should be made possible.

The member from the NDP talked about how there should be extensive studies and whatnot. I do not disagree with that, but the Liberals threw all of that open continental barley market back into the Wheat Board and there have never been any studies on it since then. It is just automatic, and that is the way it is going to be whether they like it or not. That attitude needs to change.

[Committees of the House, December 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like the member to maybe dig into access to information and get the real facts of what happened in the open continental barley market.

Second, whenever a group of farmers, and it is the group as a whole, wishes to have a method of marketing their product, I do not think anyone objects to that.

What I am saying is that the people in my riding who farm, who grow barley, want to have choice. It is not the 1940s and 1950s any more. Many of them have gone to university or college and have taken some courses in marketing. They would like to be able to exercise that. Farming is different now than it was back in those years. They would like to be able to extend their ability to work with the job they have of growing food for our nation into marketing and into value added.

They just want to have the freedom and the choice to do that. There is no way that any board should be allowed, authorized, or whatever the case might be, to prevent that from happening. There is no doubt about it that if the entire farming association in my riding wanted to use the board, I would be the first one to say that we have to defend the board, but that is not the case.

This is Canada. We have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and they are saying that under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, they should have the freedom to market their goods.

[Committees of the House, December 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster.

I am a little flabbergasted after hearing some of the comments and speeches this morning. When I first came to this country from the United States in the late 1960s, one of the first conversations I got in on with agriculture producers was with regard to how they market their grain and the Wheat Board. Where I came from as a farmer I used to load up my truck with grain and I would market my own grain and enjoyed doing it very much. It was instant cash. I had choices of marketing it in a number of places. My father and my brother, who were also in the farming business, and I managed to do that on a regular basis.

I was rather surprised when I came to this country that it was not how wheat and barley were marketed, and I began to pay a little more attention to what was going on. I thought it was rather strange. This is always a contentious point with a lot of members in the House.

From my experience as a farmer, when I go out and plant the seed, nurture the crop, pray for rain, hope the hail does not come, sweat, worry about being able to grow a good crop, then come harvest time, it is looking really well, so I am in a hurry to get it harvested and I want to get it into my granary bins. Then suddenly it is not mine. I no longer own it. It is as simple as that. I do not have the right to take that grain out of the bin in which I put it and decide to sell it in whatever fashion that I want and try to get the best price that I can for it. It now is the property of someone else with no guarantees of exactly what is going to transpire and no guarantee of price.

I used to get fluctuating prices when I was marketing my own product, but it seemed that we had a set thing where we were concentrating on getting an average at best, not the top dollar but a good average across the board where all these things could be levelled out.

After I decided to get into politics, I started attending a lot of meetings with various organizations, the barley growers associations and other groups of farmers throughout the riding. It became quite obvious to me very early on that following the open continental barley market that we had in the early 1990s where there was so much success for a great number of farmers and good success for the Wheat Board at the same time, that we did not continue down that path because it was really going well. I could not understand why they would want to bring an end to it until somebody pointed out to me that it was illegal for them to do that according to the Canadian Wheat Board Act and that it had to be changed back.

It is obvious now, after seeing the Liberal government in power for 13 years that it was changed back because that is exactly what the Liberals wanted to see happen. It was after the Liberals were elected in 1993 that the change returned to where barley was back in the Wheat Board with the concession that feed barley would not be, but the top grade malting barley would be under the Wheat Board.

During some of those years, I remember when Mr. Vanclief was the minister of agriculture and I remember when Bob Speller was the minister of agriculture. They spent a couple of days travelling in my riding and spoke at many farmers' meetings. Because I was there, I know exactly the message they got over and over again from the farmers in Wild Rose, where I happen to know there are several hundreds, if not thousands of farmers.

The farmers said loud and clear over and over, with the exception of two or three that I heard, hundreds testified to the minister and to the travelling committee that they wanted choice. Over and over again I hear in this House, particularly from the Liberal Party critic, that the majority of the farmers do not want that. I do not know what majority he is talking about, but in 13 years I have had ample opportunity to keep track of what my farmers in Wild Rose are saying and it is always 80% to 85% of farmers, who are mostly barley growers, who raise a good chunk of the great crop in my riding, they want choice. They consider it to be a matter of freedom.

That should attract attention on the other side of the House because I have heard lots of debates on freedom and protecting minority rights, that under the charter this should be allowed. It puzzles me why we would have the same group of people who would talk out of one side of their mouth in regard to the marriage law that we debated last week, and out of the other side of their mouth say that the farmers should not have that right to a choice, that freedom. That absolutely makes no sense to me. This is Canada. This is where we have freedom. This is where farmers do an excellent job of growing their crops. They put up with the sweat and toil. They want the choice of selling their product, but they do not have that freedom.

Regarding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the lack of giving that freedom to the barley farmers, because specifically that is what is grown in my riding and the majority of the crop that deals with the Wheat Board is barley, I wonder how they feel. In all aspects of society we continually push and push for the rights and freedoms of certain individual minority groups, but we do not do the same thing for all the farmers who go to the trouble of working hard to try to raise a good crop and make a decent living for themselves and their families.

If the farmers feel they could do that, I certainly believe they ought to have the opportunity. I know no one of that group who would want to dismantle or get rid of the Wheat Board. They simply think that it ought to be part of a marketing choice. Since when has it become a bad thing in Canada to allow choice for a farmer to do what he thinks he can do best with his own product? I am really puzzled by that. Besides, if it is such a good thing, why are the farmers from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario not all lining up to sign up for the Canadian Wheat Board? After all, it is not the western Wheat Board, it is the Canadian Wheat Board.

The Liberals continue to talk out of two sides of their mouths when it comes to that issue. Freedom; they have a right. I remember debating child pornography, but we could not do anything about it because people have the right to artistic merit and they have to be able to express themselves. We could not get anywhere with that issue. Then it had to be the public good and we could not get anywhere with that because they have the freedom and the right to do that.

Tell me, how can it possibly be that a few farmers who grow barley and who would like to have marketing choice do not have the freedom and the right in Canada? They do not have it in Canada because members of the party sitting across the way were in charge and they would never allow that to happen, but I could never understand why.

I also had the opportunity to talk to several members from the Toronto region who confessed loudly that they did not have the vaguest idea of what the Canadian Wheat Board was all about. They did not even know what the issue was about. I talked to them personally. Yet they would stand and vote against giving these farmers freedom. One would think that they would be interested in knowing that what they were doing was voting against a producer who works hard to grow his own crop, the 85% of the people in my riding who want the choice, saying no in a dictatorial fashion, “You will do with your product as we say”. That is just not right. It is just not right.

[Committees of the House, December 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to the member. I understand where he is coming from. What I do not understand is does he really know the results of what would happen if barley were taken out of the Wheat Board.

I believe that happened either in 1991 or 1992. Barley moved to an intercontinental open market. Access to information, of which I have copies, showed that the farmers never saw a better year in their years of farming than they did during that period of time. Access to information showed that the Wheat Board had increased its sales a great deal as well.

It appears to me that a little competition kind of spurred the Wheat Board on to maybe do a bigger and better than what it had been doing, and it was quite successful.

We have heard the member say that unless something is proven, we should never move in that direction. Does he not feel that the period of time in the early 1990s, when we had an open continental market on barley, showed there was a working formula there? It was a great year for all the farmers in my riding who simply wanted to have the freedom of choice.

[Points of Order, December 7th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, during question period I was concentrating on what was happening and I was rudely interrupted by my seatmate when he came in and proudly announced that he was the father of a new baby girl, named Vienna Fitzgerald, born on Tuesday. I think we should congratulate him, and the point of my point of order is: where are the cigars?

[Petitions, November 27th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition from the same area calls upon Parliament to reopen the issue of marriage in this Parliament in order to repeal or amend the Marriage for Civil Purposes Act to promote and defend marriage as the lawful union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.

[Petitions, November 27th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to table two petitions today from the wonderful town of Olds in my riding of Wild Rose. The first petition calls on Parliament to enact legislation which would recognize unborn children as separate victims when they are injured or killed during the commission of an offence against their mothers, allowing two charges to be laid against the offender instead of just one.