Dick Proctor

[Canada Elections Act, February 18th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, we are here this afternoon debating the Figueroa decision: that the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the current requirement of a political party to field at least 50 candidates in a general election as a condition of registration.

The court ruled that this 50 candidate rule treated small parties unfairly by denying them three key benefits that are granted to larger parties, namely: the right to issue tax receipts for political contributions; the right to receive unspent election funds from candidates; and the right to have a candidate's party affiliation listed on the ballot.

This treatment was found to be unequal and to infringe upon the right of citizens to participate in a meaningful way in the electoral process, as protected by section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

As was pointed out by the government House leader, the court did suspend its decision, or the effect of its judgment, for one year until this June 27 in order to allow Parliament time to bring forward the necessary changes to the Canada Elections Act.

The government is telling us that it believes the bill before us strikes an appropriate balance between fairness to the parties and the need to preserve the integrity of the electoral system.

The prerequisites are that the party have at least 250 members who have signed statements declaring that they are members of the party and support its registration, and that one of the party's fundamental purposes must be to participate in public affairs by endorsing one or more of its members as candidates and supporting their election, and that the party leader make a declaration to that effect.

That is the background to why we are debating this today. Of course with the prorogation of the House last November, the bill had to come back to be dealt with in order to meet the Supreme Court's requirement. It will require the amendment of the Canada Elections Act and the Income Tax Act.

I agree with the Supreme Court decision that fifty is too high a threshold, but I also wonder at the same time whether the number one is not too low. I will raise some of that as I go through the remaining moments that I have available.

As I said before, the fifty rule was struck down because small parties were treated unfairly and that did infringe on the rights of citizens to participate in a meaningful way, but if fifty is too high, is one too low? Let me delve into the example of the member for Saskatoon—Humboldt. It may be instructive for members of the House to consider it in that light.

Here is a member who appears to be a total political misfit in the House. He was elected as a member of the Reform Party in 1997. He was not welcome in the Reform Party, he was not welcome in the Progressive Conservative Party, and he appears, so far as we can tell, to be unwelcome in the newly formed Conservative Party. One assumes, because we are all trying to maximize the number of members we have here, that his views are simply too extreme for any political entity, for any political party in the House. That is the background.

Under the proposed bill as it has been laid out, there is nothing that would prevent this individual from continuing to raise money, to retain any unspent election funds and to continue on in his way, a way that is more destructive than instructive. It is fair to say that it is difficult for independents to win re-election, and the odds of this oddball member returning to Parliament Hill after the next general election are probably not very high.

Let me just stop here and say that I am one who very much favours freedom of speech. I basically agree with the notion that I may disagree with everything the member says but I will go to my grave in order to give him the right to say it. However, I am not sure that in giving him the right to say it we should necessarily be funding it. I do not think I would necessarily go that far in my libertarian view of the world.

My concern is that the bill is going to give more oddballs an opportunity to gain notoriety and have the right to raise and keep money. It certainly does not mean that they are likely to win political office, but it will do little to enhance the idea that more good people will want to seek office because of them.

The member from the Bloc Québécois who spoke before me referred to the Supreme Court decision as a unanimous decision, or at least that is the way it came across in the translation; perhaps it was an error. It is my understanding that it was not a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. It was a five to three decision on the idea of this business of reducing it to one.

I am saying that fifty is too high, but I am clearly not arguing in favour of one. I like the arguments by the members of the Supreme Court who stated that it would be possible to enhance democratic values without so large a threshold, without reducing it all the way down to one member.

I think that perhaps twelve is too high a test, as the member from the Bloc Québécois said. Perhaps four or six members would meet the test, but I am not sure why we went to the lowest common denominator of just one. I agree with the court that this rule can be over- or under-inclusive and is potentially subject to manipulation. Fifty is obviously under-inclusive, but one may very well be over-inclusive.

Fifty, as pointed out in Bill C-24, has a disparate impact in that registration of a single political party at the federal level can occur only currently in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. If we had a political rights party, for example in Saskatchewan or Manitoba where there are only fourteen seats available in each of those provinces, the fifty rule is obviously too high a threshold and would not apply. Obviously we need something that is considerably lower than fifty, but one, to my mind, is too low. In fact, it reminds me of the Groucho Marx line: “I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”.

I also recall Churchill, who said:

It may be that vengeance...is sweet, and that the gods forbade vengeance to men because they reserve for themselves so delicious and intoxicating drink. But no-one should drain the cup to the bottom. The dregs are often filthy-tasting.

I think reducing the number to one means that there will be far more dregs and drudges in the political system, and that is not going to encourage informed debate and make more informed political discussion.

In conclusion, let me say that we support the bill, but we have serious concerns about the reduction to one. We are glad that it is going to committee where these arguments can be made in an endeavour to improve the overall content of the bill.

[Petitions, February 18th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, on the same subject, I too have the pleasure of introducing petitions signed by 7,097 people from across the country who are concerned about the Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis having filed application with the Canadian government on genetically engineered wheat.

The petitioners note that a majority of Canada's wheat exports would be affected if such a dramatic change were made and call upon Parliament to immediately institute a ban on the environmental or commercial release of genetically engineered wheat and the use of genetically engineered wheat in open field trials.

[Final Offer Arbitration in Respect of West Coast Ports Operations Act, February 16th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise and speak on private member's Bill C-312, an act to provide for the settlement of labour disputes affecting west coast ports by offering final offer arbitration. The bill has been put before the House this morning by the member for Wetaskiwin.

The legislation says that the Minister of Labour would have the authority, without coming back to the House of Commons for any debate, to suspend the right to strike or lockout in the west coast ports or, where a strike or lockout has occurred to direct the parties back to work. Then, any outstanding settlement differences would be settled by final offer arbitration. The findings of the arbitrator would be binding without recourse to appeal.

I thought the member for Whitby—Ajax explained the shortcomings of the legislation quite well. She pointed out quite clearly that with this kind of a process there is a winner and loser environment that is inevitably created.

I am pleased to speak against Bill C-312 on behalf of the NDP caucus and indeed on behalf of working people across the country.

If there were 100 things that farmers in Canada would be worried about today, final offer arbitration would be 101 on their list of priorities. They have drought, low commodity prices, grasshoppers, mad cow, the fear of genetically modified wheat affecting their ability to export and they have incredibly high input costs. Final offer arbitration is not even on the Richter scale.

The NDP caucus contacted the president of the International Longshoremen's Association when Bill C-312 was coming back for discussion to see if there was something that we had missed in the process, some activity at the west coast ports that would lead to a labour disruption. We found out that, not only is there no strike or lockout being contemplated at the port, but for the first time since 1967, almost 40 years, all agreements between the longshore workers on the west coast and the employers have been negotiated without either a strike or a lockout. This is truly a case of trying to fix something that is not broken.

We are opposed to the bill. We continue to strongly believe that the right to withhold services is a legitimate and peaceful means of protest and has been for centuries. It is one of the most important democratic rights and freedoms of all working people. We are firmly opposed to any legislation that would erode any of these fundamental rights, as the bill certainly would do.

Nowhere in the bill are the parties encouraged to continue meeting to resolve their differences after the final offer arbitration process has begun. It does, as other members have noted, set up a winner and loser situation.

I say to the member who moved Bill C-312 that final offer arbitration may work for hockey and baseball stars who are negotiating whether their contract should be $8 million or $10 million. However, it will not work for ordinary people who have a whole lot of other concerns besides the size of the pay packet that they will receive.

I want to remind the mover of the bill that negotiators already have the options, if they so choose jointly, to move to final offer arbitration in any round of bargaining that they see fit. It is another arrow in their quiver. By introducing something like that, the other arrows are being taken out and it is saying that this is the way that the negotiations will continue henceforth.

It has been pointed out many times in the House, including last spring by the Minister of Labour, that almost all negotiations under the jurisdiction of the Canada Labour Code are resolved with no time lost, no strike, no lockout, and no labour unrest whatsoever. About 95% of all collective bargaining agreements are settled peacefully and amicably with both parties getting what they need out of the collective bargaining process.

It is a myth that the country loses significant productivity due to strikes and lockouts. There have been confrontations in the past. Changes sought by producers to address the needs of farmers were made to the Canada Labour Code. Section 87.7 of the Canada Labour Code prohibits secondary picketing at west coast ports.

As members have heard from other members of our caucus in the past, we think that far more time is lost on the job due to workplace accidents, injuries, and illness, than as a result of work stoppages.

We in the NDP are opposed to Bill C-312 for all of the reasons that I outlined. We think it is an imposition on the parties. They need to have more opportunities at their disposal and more arrows in their quiver than this straightjacket of final offer arbitration.

For all of those reasons, the New Democratic Party caucus will oppose Bill C-312.

[2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, February 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I too wish to begin by congratulating the minister on his portfolio. It is something that those of us who have been here for a little while know he has been interested in for many years.

At the same time, I wish to acknowledge his predecessors, the member for Bourassa, now President of the Treasury Board, and the member for Simcoe North, both of whom have also worked hard to develop sports in Canada.

The debate about priorities for sports funding always seems to me a debate about more money to develop the elite athletes and the coaches who train them, or more money to build facilities for the masses. Therefore I want to congratulate the minister for stating his overriding goal in his statement earlier this afternoon to have more Canadians participating in sport and physical activity and to ensure that the barriers to participation are reduced, although we in this caucus note no reference at all to seniors in this discussion. There is lots of reference to young people, and we recognize the importance of the association of youth and sports, but we recognize that we also have to get our seniors more engaged in physical activity.

We see this debate about priorities even today. The minister is using the countdown six years from now to the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver-Whistler to inform Canadians that his overriding goal is indeed mass participation. On this point he talked about the marginal and the disadvantaged. I would encourage the minister to look carefully at private member's Bill C-210 by the member for Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore which would offer tax relief for people who help offset rising costs of participating in sports for young people by giving them a tax deduction similar to what Canadians currently are allowed for charitable donations.

I am reminded of Grantland Rice, the great American sportswriter who said, “When the one great scorer comes to write against your name, he will ask not if you won or lost but how you played the game”. Too many of our younger people, and the minister to his credit referenced it, are not participating because they do not have the wherewithal to participate. They do not have the facilities. They do not have the equipment. We need to recognize that and do something about it.

In the minister's opening remarks on this topic, he said that he was fortunate to have such an amazing group of dedicated people at Sports Canada. In agreeing fully with that assessment, I want to pay tribute to an important individual who no longer is with us but who made a significant contribution to sport in Canada. That is the late Jim Thompson who was the chief executive officer and secretary general of the Canadian Olympic Association.

As the House may recall, Jim died very suddenly and unexpectedly in Vancouver 18 months ago. He was there to help the Vancouver-Whistler committee prepare what turned out to be an eventually successful bid.

Many years earlier I had the good fortune to work with Jim Thompson when he was a young production assistant and later on a very young producer at CBC network sports. He went on to become eventually the president of The Sports Network before taking early retirement. He was persuaded to come out of retirement and assume responsibility for the Canadian Olympic Association and the Vancouver-Whistler bid.

Although our paths had crossed very infrequently over the years, I happened to meet with him at the Toronto airport as he was leaving to go to Vancouver in August 2002, less than two days before his untimely death. We talked about the chances of the Vancouver bid and his views on where Sports Canada emphasis should be in the debate about funding elite athletes versus the general funding for participation.

Jim Thompson was an integral part of sports development in Canada over several decades. He certainly deserves to be recognized on this occasion because it is not just the athletes and the coaches who make immense sacrifices. In this instance Jim Thompson made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of his country, Sports Canada and the Canadian Olympic Association. To his wife and children we thank them for allowing Jim Thompson to work for something he truly believed in.

We in this caucus congratulate the Vancouver-Whistler committee for its successful Olympic bid. We look forward to a well run Olympic Winter Games six years from now.

We look forward to more Canadians availing themselves of the opportunity to join in the fun of participating in sports and the health benefits they will derive from such activity. In wishing our elite athletes every success in their international competitions, we in the NDP caucus also recognize that involving millions more Canadians in sports, physical activity and reviving the Participaction program will also be worthy of a gold medal for this country.

[Reinstatement of Government Bills, February 10th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the House and today is no exception. We are talking about the reinstatement of legislation that resulted from the prorogation of the House back in November. It is interesting to go back to where the ball went into motion to where we are today.

The House was scheduled to take its adjournment for one week on November 8 prior to Remembrance Day and we were scheduled to return on November 18. The weekend after Remembrance Day was the Liberal leadership convention. Unlike the rest of us who occasionally take a weekend to elect a new leader then come back to work the following Monday, the new administration took a little over two months to return.

The previous House leader had indicated that the House would come back on January 12. Almost immediately the new leader of the Liberal Party said that the Liberals would not be ready at that time because there was a throne speech to write and work had to begin on a budget, et cetera. It was not December 12 nor was it January 12 when we came back. The House came back on February 2 to hear the Speech from the Throne.

The idea that this is a new government and that it is putting a new stamp on everything is difficult to reconcile. We are faced with, with closure today for the 80th something time, the reintroduction of legislation that technically died on the Order Paper, but is being revived and brought back without any changes. That is the problem the government has in its early going. It is trying to portray itself as something new and something different, but it keeps getting caught up in the same old situation.

One thing the new Prime Minister has talked about is the democratic deficit and his concern about it. He claims to want to engage parliamentarians in that. Not only do we see closure being introduced here today to get these bills through, we also saw an example outside the House at two o'clock this afternoon. Rather than come into the House and explain to elected members of Parliament how the government would respond to the serious report of the Auditor General, which was made public earlier today, the Prime Minister chose to hold an impromptu scrum just outside the doors and deal with the media. He then came in here later to respond to questions from the acting leader of the official opposition and all opposition parties. We do not see very much new or exciting in all of this.

The member for Toronto--Danforth spoke earlier this afternoon. He looked in our direction and said that we should be concerned about this because there were some bills on the list of 28, which were before us in the reinstatement motion, that the New Democratic Party would want. I agree, there are some. However, as my colleague for Windsor--St. Clair said very eloquently yesterday, we are not prepared to abdicate our responsibility and give a blank cheque to the government to introduce the whole list.

I would have thought that a government that was interested in addressing the democratic deficit might have sat down with the House leaders to talk about which specific bills they might want addressed and those the government might want addressed. I agree with the tenor of other speakers who have preceded me in the debate. A lot of work has gone into legislation in terms of standing committees and the like. That would have been one way to address the matter of democratic deficit rather than have the government House leader say that this would be way it would be handled, and introduce the 28 bills. We are not sure, but some of bills have already been introduced and many others perhaps will not be introduced. We simply do not know. We are being asked to sign a blank cheque.

As a look at the 28 bills, the prize in all this undoubtedly is Bill C-49, the electoral boundaries bill, that would give the government the ability to move up the election after April 1.

As the House knows, under the rules when redistribution takes place there has to be a full year after the redistribution process is completed before a general election can be held. That would have put the election not earlier than the middle of August of this year. However, the Chief Electoral Officer wrote to the government last summer and said that if there were quick agreement on this by all parties and we put a bill through the legislature, his office could ensure that the country would be ready for a general election after April 1.

That legislation did not get through. It got through the House of Commons and it went to the Senate where it was one of about 18 bills that was left in the Senate. That was the largest number of bills not dealt with by the Senate since 1867, since the very first Senate was appointed.

I do not know whether that was a failure of the then House leader in the Senate or whether the senators simply were tired. Maybe the Liberal senators wanted to go to the convention in Toronto and did not want to come back to deal with them. Who knows. It is one of the great mysteries of the unelected Senate. That is why this party favours a thorough house cleaning in the way we deal with that. We need to abolish the unelected Senate and find a much better way to elect senators or have proportional representation. If we want to talk about the democratic deficit and the appointed Senate, that is not a very good beginning.

That is the situation. We have difficulty with the government wanting to portray itself as being brand new, but seemingly unable to escape its past. The Liberals want to portray themselves as a government seeking a first mandate when really I think Canadians see them as a government about to embark on wanting a fourth mandate, from their first election back in 1993.

Several people ahead of me have spoken about the situation in rural Canada. I want to speak for a few moments about that as well. In the throne speech, which was delivered on Monday of last week, it stated:

The Government is dedicated to Canada’s farm economy and to taking the steps necessary to safeguard access to international markets and to ensure that farmers are not left to bear alone the consequences of circumstances beyond their control.

On Friday Canadians heard the horrific report about realized net farm income in 2003 and that it was a negative amount of money, $13 million, the lowest ever recorded since the country began keeping records back in the 1920s, and certainly lower than what we saw during the depression. If we subtracted what federal, provincial and territorial governments have put into assisting farmers over the last year, the negative is almost $5 billion. It is absolutely incredible.

As the president of the National Farmers Union, Stewart Wells, said, “This is the most spectacular and damaging market failure in the history of Canadian agriculture”. A large part of that was caused by the one cow that was affected in Alberta on May 20. Just when we thought we would get out of that and the U.S. market would reopen to live cattle, probably about this time, then we had the Christmas eve disaster where the cow in Washington State was identified. Quickly thereafter we found out that it had a Canadian connection to it.

BSE is a large part of it but not all of it. We have had drought. We have had low commodity prices. These are the sorts of things that people in my area want to talk about. They would much rather be talking about what the government is going to do and how it will go forward to address the issue.

As the member for Red Deer said very well a few moments ago, this is a crisis of incredible proportions and most people are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. There is a real fear that if this drags on much longer, many of the small producers, cow-calf operators, backgrounders and the like, will not be able to continue to exist with the prices falling to the levels that they have sunk to.

As the NFU notes, the government over the last couple of decades has taken away hog marketing agencies. In the 1990s it cut the Crow benefit, which was extremely important. Farmers in western Canada recognize the loss of that more with every passing day.

The government has ended the two price wheat system, deregulated grain handling and transportation, presided over the destruction of many co-operatives and tied its own hands with trade and investment agreements. At the same time, the transnational corporations have merged to the point where only a handful are left controlling each and every link in the agrifood chain.

These corporate and government policies collectively have pushed family farms and farmers to the edge of the cliff. It appears, by the numbers we saw last week, that in 2003 many of the farmers simply fell over that cliff. In fact, the numbers are so bad that the government, which normally does a two year forecast, its Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food is not able or prepared to come out with numbers now. Of course up until May 20, although we had the drought and low grain prices, we did not have BSE. I think the last half of 2003 would have been very bad compared to the first half, so we can imagine as we go forward into a new calendar year how much worse it is going to be.

As we heard last week in the so-called take note debate on BSE, I do not think anyone realistically expects our borders to reopen until after the November presidential election in the United States.

As a young farmer from the Mossbank area told me on the phone last night, as difficult as this was for him to say, he felt that the time had come for us to consider whether we should be closing our borders to American cattle coming north on the eastern seaboard if they are not prepared to take our animals. He tells me that the boxed beef, which has been allowed since the end of August of last year, has slowed to a trickle as the Americans deal with their exporting countries that have closed their borders as a result of the Washington State case.

We, the government, all of us, have an obligation to do one of two things. Either we have to subsidize or support our farmers, although they are not looking for subsidies except to continue to keep their operations alive, or we need to perhaps close the border to the American industry and start shipping cattle from western Canada into Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada. We could move cattle and begin to firm up some prices in the process.

It is good that the Prime Minister spoke with the president about the BSE issue, and about softwood, but it is extremely important that we deal with the BSE issue because farmers are on the edge in terms of knowing where to go.

The big news today of course is the report of the Auditor General. I want to read into the record something that was said in 1993:

Nine years of Conservative government have brought our political process into disrepute. A Liberal government will restore public trust and confidence in government.

That quote is from “Creating Opportunity: The Liberal Plan for Canada”. It goes on to state:

If government is to play a positive role in society, as it must, honesty and integrity in our political institutions must be restored.

A Liberal government will take a series of initiatives to restore confidence in the institutions of government. Open government will be the watchword of the Liberal program.

We have a long way to go to live up to those lofty expectations. The findings from the Auditor General, findings that have been available, by the way, to the government since November, even though they were just made public today, indicate that the Liberals hid the objectives of the sponsorship program from Parliament. The Auditor General was unable to find answers to key questions. The report goes on and on.

Those are the kinds of things that Canadians want Parliament to deal with. They do not necessarily want to go back and grapple with many of the bills from the past.

As I look at what the government is doing and how it is going about doing it, it seems to me that it is very much like the dog that caught the car, and now that he caught it he is not sure what to do with it. It is similar to Robert Redford in The Candidate : What do I do now? I think this is the question and these are the problems that the government will have as we head into March and, undoubtedly, the election in April, thanks to the proposed changes that will come back as a result of the reinstatement of bills.

[Petitions, February 10th, 2004]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for saving the best for the last. I am pleased to present a petition today suggesting that star wars would undermine Canada's proud tradition of supporting arms control and acknowledging that Canada will not participate in a star wars missile defence program. The petition strongly condemns the destabilizing plans of the President of the United States. The petitioners urge parliamentarians to work with our partners in peace for more arms control and to bring an end to the production and sale of weapons of mass destruction and any materials used to build them.

[Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, February 4th, 2004]

I was not aware of the situation in Bosnia, Madam Chair, but it does speak to the need. We have a crisis in the country. We have to support one another. We have Canadian troops in Afghanistan, Bosnia and other places. We have to go the extra mile and try to ensure that we can move more of our product to those people, recognizing that our beef is currently banned in a number of other countries.

I understand about supply lines. It is funny on free trade the Americans still have a buy-America policy. We do not seem to have a buy-Canada policy and we definitely need one.

[Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, February 4th, 2004]

Madam Chair, yes, I think there is an argument to do more testing. The point that I have been trying to make in my remarks is that we are too wedded to the American market for our own good. We should be looking beyond the American border. Yes, it has been fine over the past while, it has looked good, and I think the industry said, “Let's just keep it going”.

I would like us to be in a position where countries like Japan and European countries would want to buy our beef because they would be satisfied, they would be persuaded that we had an excellent product that people around the world would want to buy. So far I do not think the industry sees it that way and that is the unfortunate thing.

I do not know about the spontaneity. I think animal feed is the reality here.

The other thing I would say to the member in passing, and I am looking at the Chair, is maybe we need a lawyer on the agriculture committee to help us with the Competition Bureau or other challenges.

The reality is with 330 million people in the United States, they can eat their way out of a lot more problems than we can, with 30-odd million. The fact of the matter is that our industry is predicated on exporting 60% or 70% of our product, most of it to the United States. We should be diversifying.

[Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, February 4th, 2004]

Madam Chair, in answer to my colleague's last question, I was actually a bit surprised last year that there was not more uptake from the government to the offer from the cattlemen's association and others in the industry that some money go to them, especially on the cull cattle, but that they be given the option of whether they wanted to market that cow or that animal today or whether they wanted to hold on to her until the market improved.

For whatever reason the governments, because the provinces were involved as well, did not want to follow that option. I think what the cattlemen were saying was that if they all had to market their cattle immediately obviously that would depress the prices. If they could have spread it out over some time, that would give the industry an opportunity and prices should go up accordingly.

I do not know what the rationale for that was. I think in hindsight that frankly it was a mistake that they did not proceed in the manner.

The intervenor mentioned the Competition Bureau. A half a dozen members of my caucus had written to the Competition Bureau last October requesting it to look at what appeared to us to be price collusion, and we wanted it investigated.

Subsequently, the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food put in a similar request. I am sad to say that from the acting commissioner, we both got the short end of stick. I will quote the last paragraph. It says, “With respect to requests that the Bureau of Competition agree to an immediate and thorough review of the BSE recovery program, in order to determine whether the more than $460 million from taxpayers was fairly and properly distributed within the industry, I should point out that this falls outside the scope of the Bureau's mandate”.

I think that is highly unfortunate for a lot of Canadians and certainly for cattle producers.

[Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, February 4th, 2004]

Mr. Chair, I want to begin by congratulating the minister on his appointment two months ago. We all recognize that he has been thrown in at the deep end with this second case of mad cow.

It needs to be pointed out that the tenor of the debate tonight is in part a reflection of the number of emergency and special debates that we have had in the House of Commons over the last seven years dealing with agriculture. We seem to come back to it time and time again because we do not seem to get the resolutions to the problem. I appreciate that BSE is a separate issue but I think it is a reality, whether it was the AIDA program, CFIP, or some of the other problems we have been going through, drought and other things, we talk about it but we do not ever seem to come up with a solution that would satisfy people and allow us to move on.

What has happened obviously has amounted to an annus horribilis . We had one Canadian cow last May and then just at a time when it looked like the border might be on the verge of reopening to live exports, there was the cow in Washington state that also had a Canadian connection.

There is some optimism. The minister reflected it again tonight in his remarks about the peer review panel in the United States. Many farmers believe that it will not be until after the election in the United States in November that the border will reopen to live cattle exports.

Someone who is very knowledgeable on the mad cow issue said to me earlier this week that BSE is a disease that has had little effect on animals and little effect on human health, in fact none that we are aware of in this country, but has had a massive negative effect on the economic health of rural Canada. That is why we are here tonight. We are talking about the devastating results, the $2 billion hit and counting. The young cattle over winter which have been referred to by others, calves are selling for 50¢ a pound and cull cattle are perhaps fetching 7¢ a pound.

We have seen hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government and other provinces pour in to try to fix this. We acknowledge and recognize that precious little of that money has actually reached the people who need it most. My colleague from Acadie—Bathurst referred to the smaller farmers, the cow calf operators, the people who background and finish the cattle, seem not to have received the money whereas the packers appear to be laughing all the way to the bank.

Last June the federal government agreed to step up the testing. That was one of the recommendations from the international panel of experts. Brian Evans of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency talked about inspecting between 60,000 and 80,000 head of cattle. While we are moving in that direction, we are certainly not going to be anywhere close to it. In fact three or four years from now, we may be at 30,000 as I look at the statistics.

There are some different ideas about what kind of testing for mad cow we are going to use. Currently we are using what is referred to as the gold standard. There are some that take up to a week and for the industry, that appears to be too long. The Swiss rapid test is also being considered which reduces the time significantly. As I understand it, the CFIA is committed not to do testing at the slaughterhouse; it wants to do surveillance testing and that should start with older cattle and obviously downer cows.

More and more people are saying that we should follow the Japanese and test every animal. Perhaps they are right, although I tend to think that we do not need to test animals that are younger than 24 months, perhaps 30 months. The U.K. test at 24 months; France and a number of other European countries test every animal over 30 months of age.

The National Farmers Union has forecast that BSE testing of all animals would actually add less than 1¢ per pound to the price of a hamburger and insisted that is a small price to pay to be assured of safe food. Who could argue with that, given the hit that has been taken by the industry.

In addition to more testing, the international panel of experts also called for a ban on specified risk materials which was implemented promptly by the government. It also recommended banning all animal to animal feed. As everybody here is aware, the ban on animal to ruminants came into effect in August 1997. It is interesting to note that both of the cows that tested positive for BSE were born in 1997 but prior to the August date.

As was noted earlier, the Americans did ban the blood protein to cattle along with poultry litter and table scraps. The latter two were banned by Canada sometime ago. We have not yet followed up on the blood protein but I gather that our scientists are looking at that issue.

Let me turn for a moment to the integration of the North American cattle industry. I think that Canadian cattle producers are fond of saying that it is a North American herd but I am not sure that a lot of American ranchers feel that it is a North American herd. I would supplement that argument by referencing what Senator Tom Daschle said which was read into the record earlier, and that is why I think we are going to have some difficulty seeing the border open before the U.S. presidential election in November.

It seemed to me last summer in the early rush after the first mad cow was discovered that our farmers and ranchers did not want the Canadian government to do anything that would put them out of step in any way with what was being done in the American beef industry. The Canadian Cattlemen's Association and others are quite happy to go in lockstep with whatever the Americans are doing. They would not want, for example, to eliminate the bovine growth hormone or test a lot more cattle or ban all animal to animal feed.

In summary, I think that the industry is far too integrated for its own good or probably for this country's own good.

The agriculture minister once removed used to brag about Canadian products being the safest in the world. Most of us believed that and perhaps we still do. While Canadians still have tremendous confidence in food safety as evidenced by the rise in beef consumption following May 20, I do not think we are bragging about it the way that we used to. We recognize that there are some difficulties. Time does not permit me to make reference to the Vancouver Sun access to information on the conditions of many of our meat packing plants but it should be required reading because it is very sobering material.

We in this party have been very concerned for a long time about the reduction in meat inspections and inspectors and the trend to more self-regulation. A lot of members on the agriculture committee are here tonight and they know better than I do about the HACCP program that is coming in. That would result in actually fewer federal meat inspectors doing less frontline work and more auditing of the work being done by the companies' own inspectors. In the wake of this issue and the impact that it has had, we need to think very carefully about whether we should be reducing frontline meat inspectors who are employed by the government at this time.

In defence of the employees who work for CFIA and the department, by any objective standard our response to the discovery of mad cow last spring was head and shoulders above what happened in the United States in terms of identifying the other animals in those herds, in terms of ear tags and other things. It is important for that to be on the record.

What we need is money going to the industry from the Government of Canada to assist at this time of crisis so that the industry can go forward. We need to do that very promptly.