Gerry Ritz

[Budget Implementation Act, February 8th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of rhetoric from the Liberal side especially about balanced budgets for the last five years. If Canadians did the math they would realize that these guys have been in power for seven, going on eight years now. The first year was a little tough. A big deficit was brought forward and the Liberals had to deal with that, although they did it in certain ways we did not agree with. Then they kind of missed a few years. Probably the reason was there was no budget. A lot of us missed the chance to harangue them last year when they did not bring one down.

Since that time the loonie has basically tanked. There are a couple of quotes by the new Liberal member, the member for Richmond, which I would like to share with folks. On December 11 just after the budget came down he talked about the Liberals strangling the Canadian economy. That is his quote. He also talked about condemning Canada to a bargain basement dollar. I wonder if he still shares those ideals with folks now that he sits in that caucus. It would be very interesting to be involved in some of their caucus discussions to see if that is still the rule.

In balancing the budget, which the Liberals claim they have done, a few things stand out as glaring errors or omissions in the numbers that have kind of been fudged to make that happen. An EI surplus of almost $40 billion has disappeared. There is no money in that account. It went into general revenues. Some $30 billion has grown legs and walked away from the civil service pension plan. In that same timeframe, $25 billion has been pulled out of health care and social transfers to the provinces. Add that up and there is $95 billion of funny money creative accounting to help balance the budget.

We always have to pay the piper. Somewhere down the line we will have to put some of that money back in. Where is it going to come from? We are barely squeaking by now. We saw a surplus this year of $1.5 billion. That is not going to cover a $95 billion asset that will have to be put back at some point in the future.

In its political spin, the government branded it as a security budget. Canadians do not feel very secure with the economy in the tank like it is. The government branded it as a security budget, yet just days before the budget came down, the auditor general in her report talked about $16.5 billion of wasted, mismanaged spending in various government departments.

The auditor general pointed out that defence alone needed $2 billion to get ratcheted back up to a standard that would not leave us limping behind places like Luxembourg and other world powers such as that. The auditor general called for $2 billion. What did the government deliver? Two hundred million dollars.

It is a pittance compared to what the armed forces need, especially now that we have sent them off to Afghanistan in funny coloured uniforms, with half of their equipment stuck in Germany which cannot find its way to Afghanistan. They are borrowing rations from the Americans. They are rationing water. We are one of the richest countries in the world when it comes to clean water and our troops over there have to ration it because we cannot get their supplies to them. The government has absolutely ridiculous accounting practices. Our troops do not have stoves and they are bumming candles from the Americans to heat their borrowed food.

They have rigged up latrines out of fuel barrels, planks and tarps. It is a coed army. I am sure some of the ladies are doing an exemplary job by simply being over there. Our troops are limping along because the Liberals will not supply them with what they need to get the job done in a way which lets them hold their heads high. Our troops are doing a tremendous job.

In talking about government priorities, one of the major priorities over the last number of years has been the long gun registry. The Liberals have put between $650 million and $800 million into that bogus program, depending on whose numbers one looks at, and only $200 million into the military. They are targeting the wrong folks. Let us get the money to where it is needed. If we are going to fight a war on terrorism, let us target the terrorists, not the farmers and duck hunters.

As I said, the auditor general pointed out there is over $16.5 billion in waste and mismanagement across this great country. That is a huge statement. Not one thin dime of that was addressed in the budget. It all disappeared. There is no consensus or drive by the government to find out where that money went and whether we are getting a bang for our taxpayer dollar. The auditor general says no, that it is very questionable. Canadians are saying it is very questionable.

There is a lot of talk about the Minister of Finance forwarding the big tax program he talked about just before the fall 2000 election. People should look at their January paycheques. I looked at mine and my net pay is down. No one is going to cry for a member of parliament; we are overpaid and underworked. My paycheque is down so that tells me that all the folks whom I represent are facing the same dilemma.

With regard to the Canada pension plan, there is a 14% increase to maintain a program which has been gutted by lending money to provinces that have not paid it back.

There are huge unfunded liabilities. These are huge dollars. We are mortgaging our future on to the next generation and the generation after that. It has to stop.

When I first became involved with the Reform Party we had a saying that if we wanted to stop digging a hole, the first thing to do was to quit digging. We are digging ourselves further and further into debt. The creative accounting we see in budget after budget does nothing to address that huge hole which has been created.

There are a couple of decent things in the budget when it comes to my riding. The government announced that it is going to target fetal alcohol syndrome. That is good news and is long overdue. Let us get it done, but let us go to the source. The budget is long on dollars but short on detail. Apparently $60 million has been allocated for that but how is the government going to do it? How is it going to make the program work where it needs to work? It does not say in the budget.

The finance minister was in North Battleford the week before we came back to this place. He was harangued by the crowd about the government's lack of vision for agriculture. That is our bread and butter out there. It is everybody's bread and butter across the country. Anybody who enjoys eating has to thank a farmer somewhere along the way.

Yesterday was food freedom day. Yet it is only nine days into the year that producers themselves are paid for their hard work and their sweat equity and all the overhead costs they incur to give us the safest, most secure food supply in the world. It is just unfair.

The budget showed what the government thinks about agriculture. There is one line which talks about the long term sustainability of agriculture. There is no idea of how to do it and no dollars are allocated to it. There is no program, no plan and no strategy. There is zero, absolutely nothing.

The agriculture minister cried about the AIDA program. He said it was great, that it was going to be the answer and would do wonderful things. It was a huge disappointment.

The only thing that angers people in my part of the world more than the long gun registry is the way the government treats agriculture. A Liberal could not get elected out there. If they tied pork chops around their necks, the dogs would not even play with them. That is how bad it has become out there. People do not trust those folks at all and that is their absolute right because they see that these programs are long on rhetoric and short on substance.

The agriculture minister said that they will redo the safety nets. I started farming in 1972. I have heard that line again and again and they are still a dismal failure. There is no way that people out there are ever going to buy into that type of rhetoric.

Huge dollars, $2 billion, have been allocated to infrastructure. That is great news. The problem is the asterisk beside the figure in the budget and the little note at the bottom of the page which says it is only going to apply if there is a surplus and money to do it. Again, it is long on rhetoric and short on planning.

In the past year my own community of North Battleford suffered a severe blow with a water problem. We applied to the government for emergency funding. There is a program in place to build a new sewage facility. We cannot trigger the money to speed that up and get us over the hump when it comes to safe infrastructure, water and sewers and so on across the country. This is another huge glaring deficit.

Highway 51 is in my riding. A group in my riding formed a committee. Saskatchewan has seatbelt rules and they are a necessity for anyone who drives down that highway. People would be thrown out of their trucks if they were not wearing their seatbelts. That is how bad it has become. Small vehicles cannot drive down that road because they would disappear into the pot holes. We would drive right over top of them. Volkswagens are good because they have a nice and smooth curved roof.

It is absolutely ridiculous that these guys cannot understand that Canadians are finally catching on to their unfunded, undelivered promises. The budget is a glaring error of omission. It is long on rhetoric and short on substance.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2001, February 7th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. There have been discussions among the House leaders that we go back to Bill C-49. There are a number of questions we would like to raise and speakers we would like to add to the list. If you would seek unanimous consent to get us back to Bill C-49, we would deem it not put and continue debate at second reading on the bill.

[Government of Canada, December 14th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the travel wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that when we discover we are riding a dead horse the best strategy is to dismount.

However, with this Liberal government a whole range of far more advanced strategies is often employed, such as: appointing a committee to study the dead horse; arranging a visit to other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses; lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included; reclassifying the dead horse as living impaired, which is politically correct; harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed; providing additional funding aimed at increasing the dead horse's performance; doing a productivity study to see if a lighter rider would improve the dead horse's performance; declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy; lowering the expected performance requirements for all horses so that dead horses are included; and finally and most important, promoting the dead horse to a Liberal cabinet position.

[Gopher Control, September 19th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to discuss the motion brought forward by my colleague from Lakeland.

A lot of verbiage has gone on about should we compensate, should we not compensate, what the levels should be and so on. The bottom line for producers is that we do not have anything that will do the job properly. There is culpability with the federal government and provincial governments as well. Some of their departments recommended doing away with strychnine in the way it used to be handled and maybe that was not all wrong.

The end result is that the gopher populations have had eight or nine years of absolutely free run. There was some discussion as to the amount of damage that could be caused and a figure of $1,000 for a quarter section was bandied about. The damage is actually more in the neighbourhood of $16,000 on a quarter section, or $100 an acre.

When we talk of forage crops and so on, an average infestation of gophers costs around $120 per acre. Those 120 hungry little guys can do away with almost a tonne of good forage a year. Right now that forage is worth $100 a tonne. That puts the damage across that field at $16,000. No farmer or rancher can afford that type of a hit. No one has that type of infestation on a long term basis to that degree. There are some isolated quarters in my riding that are that bad, but they are not in forage; they are in a pasture type of thing. People are usually able to pasture 50 or 60 cows in that application. This year they could not put any on it. Because of the drought and so on and the gopher problem which compounded that, it was useless ground.The taxes are still due on that.

There is a lot of discussion on the type of bait that was taken away, the strychnine and so on. There were reasons for doing that. The non-target species was a big thing. There are some products that have been mentioned, and I will get into that later, which do not target the non-target species.

A big problem was found with the old strychnine, or the new stuff that was brought out--it was called new but it was reintroduced. It was weaker, but there was a shelf life to it that nobody even considered. A lot of the baits that had been out there in the last little while were five and six years old and the grain product that was mixed with it had gone mouldy. These little guys are persnickety eaters. No animal in the wild that has a choice between lush forage and mouldy grain is going to eat the mouldy grain. They bury it in the dirt regardless of how the bait is placed.

Farmers and ranchers in my part of the country and across Canada are stewards of the land. They were environmentalists long before the term was even known. They do not hurt their own land. They know they need that productivity year after year. The very conception that they do not know how to mix the bait or do not know how to handle it is ridiculous.

My grandmother mixed bait for years. She died at 96 years of age. The strychnine did not get her; it was a lot of other things, but at 96 I guess she had a pretty full life.

The problem with the baits as we know them is their availability. There is never enough when we need them. There is a very small window of opportunity to place those baits. Gophers hibernate again during the summer. The gophers we see on the surface are the young that come out and roam around and the odd female, but the males tend to hibernate for the summer. There is no opportunity to get them at all. An average female will live to be four years of age and an average male will easily live a year. They are pretty tough on their males.

On an average piece of ground with average growth rates, they will have a litter of five or six young in a season. On good forage with good feed they will double that. There will be twice that many. In a lush situation there will be nine or ten little guys running around. Again that ups their amount of consumption.

It has become a huge problem in the eight or nine years that we have had no proper poisons available to keep the problem down. They have had free run. That is where the government's culpability comes in and we are asking for compensation, and I think rightly so. It should be added to the crop insurance lists that cover wildlife damage, ducks, geese, deer, elk and other types of wildlife that were covered for a time. Some provinces still have it, some do not. In Saskatchewan it has been really short and hard to get but we need this type of coverage added. The crop insurance program is a joint federal-provincial application. Somebody puts in the money, somebody administers it and they are always arguing over who does what and the farmers end up on the short end of the stick.

Some of the counties in Alberta applied for emergency registration. They knew that the only thing they could do quickly in the short term was go back to what had worked before and that is strychnine. They were granted the opportunity to get the 2% strychnine that is fresh, comes in a little bottle and is worth about $8. When that is mixed up, the amount that each farmer is allowed to use in my area ends up to be about a 20 litre pail.

By the time it is mixed up it has cost the farmer about $150. If there is a major infestation, the pail of bait that the farmer is allowed to get will do between five and ten acres, depending on the infestation of gophers. It ends up costing roughly $15 an acre to do that. If a farmer has a problem on 1,000 acres, he or she would be looking at a $15,000 investment, plus the time to do it. In a lot of instances it is just not feasible to do that along with all the other chores that are required.

It was mentioned earlier that we need to look for other solutions. One solution that has been developed comes from my riding. Maze Innovation from Unity, Saskatchewan has invented what is called the gophinator. It has all the CSA and ULC stamps and all that good stuff to apply an anhydrous ammonia, which is basically a fertilizer, into the gopher holes and it gases them. There are a lot of pluses to that application. For starters, it is much more humane than strychnine, which should speak well to everyone. It does not target the non-target species. It only goes after the gopher in the hole. There is nothing left on the surface for the hawks, eagles or coyotes to drag away.

When we talk about other animals, we did a short study this summer. We had a meeting sponsored by Senator Herb Sparrow, from North Battleford. Herb is actually a recognized environmental conservationist farmer. He has actually won an award to that end, and good for Herb. He sponsored a meeting that over 300 farmers, ranchers, municipal people and others attended this summer. He had a lot of quick facts that he put together, including the fact that 123 gophers per acre will eat up a tonne of feed, which equates to $15,000 to $16,000 a quarter in damage. He talked about the size of the litter, the lifespan and so on. The body weight of a gopher will double over the summer as it gets ready for the winter hibernation.They take in a lot of feed because they are hyper little guys.

When we talk about non-target species, such as foxes, coyotes, eagles, owls, hawks, and so on, he actually did some research on those species. A fox or coyote would have to eat 40 to 50 strychnine poisoned gophers at one sitting in order to have enough poison to do damage to that fox or coyote. Well they are hungry but they will not eat 40 to 50 gophers at one sitting. There is not a hope. They could not wash it down for starters.

When we start talking about hawks, eagles, owls or whatever, depending on the size of the bird, we are talking about five, ten or even fifteen gophers that these birds would have to eat in order to be damaged. That puts into question the whole idea of a non-target species, other than someone deliberately targeting coyotes with a deer carcass or something, which is a criminal offence.

The problem is we have to come up with a different way of doing it. I know the Maze boys have developed the gophinator. It works like a darn. We can target the animal in its lair. It can be done while they are hibernating. It does not have to be done during these small windows of opportunity as with the strychnine targets. It can be done at any time, even in the fall when they are hibernating. We can plug off one end of the hole and put the hose in at the other end, tapping the dirt in and giving them a shot of anhydrous and the job is done. There is no need to come back for carcasses. It is finished and very clean.

The other plus is that this can be used under barns while there are animals in there; pigs, chickens, turkeys, cattle or whatever. Dairy barns and so on tend to get rat infested and anyone with those types of barns will say that it is a problem. They cannot set out bait because the animals in the barn would be attracted to the bait. So this type of application works extremely well.

We are always worried about our kids and contamination from pesticides, insecticides and so on in parks and school yards. Again, it is the ideal answer.

We have pointed out all these pluses over the years to Health Canada, Agriculture Canada and so on. In fact, the Maze boys finally got off their combines on August 19 of this year and came to Ottawa. They arranged a meeting with Health Canada to find out what the problem was. There were a lot of hoops and hurdles. The pest management control agency wants the testing done on anhydrous ammonia to say that it is okay to put it in the ground and then it will give it a pest control number but the cost of that is $150,000. What an absolutely ridiculous and horrendous cost for a product that has already been accepted for use in the ground. If I go out and fertilize my pasture with the shanks, rip up the ground and put the anhydrous in that kills the gophers, that is okay, but if I use their machinery, which is CSA, ULC and all that approved, I cannot do it. Can anyone explain the logic in that to me. It does not make any sense to any of us out there.

There are applications and alternatives out there, but it is up to the government to get off its collective duff and make these things available to people. We are saying that there is culpability and that there should be compensation worked into the crop insurance program in the short term, and in the very short term we should look at registering this Maze Innovation gophinator.

[Farm Credit Corporation Act, June 7th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to be recorded as voting yes to this motion.

[Petitions, June 4th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, in my second petition hundreds of my constituents are calling for a defunding of public spending on abortions.

[Petitions, June 4th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present two petitions on behalf of the constituents of Battlefords—Lloydminster.

The first one calls for a reinstatement of the strychnine levels of poisoning that we used to use on our gophers. It is an epidemic this year, with the drought as well. They are growing faster than we can control them. With the new stuff they are giving us we actually think it makes them a little more virile rather than causing them any sort of problem.

[National Drinking Water Standards, May 8th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, we already know what the problem is and it will take $20 million to fix it.

I want to ask the government to do something today. Will it step up to the bar and come up with some emergency funding to help us avert this crisis? It will take $20 million. Is the government up to the challenge?

[National Drinking Water Standards, May 8th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the Prime Minister would care to stand today in his place and make a commitment that communities in crisis, such as North Battleford, will get immediate emergency, and I stress emergency, federal funding to resolve their water crisis. Will he do that today?

[Supply, May 8th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I guess the point that is being made is withdrawing funding; kind of a carrot and a stick attitude. I think we draw more flies with honey than we do with vinegar. Certainly no one out there on the ground wants to destroy the water system that feeds their families, friends communities and so on. They all want to do a good job.

When we talk about the free testing that was available, I guess there is testing and then there is testing. It is like doing a litmus test and doing a couple of things for specific areas in the water. The problem is we have gone way beyond that with a lot of the pollution and so on that we are seeing generated.

We need tests for this crypto. However, as I said, it takes tankers of water on an ongoing basis to a provincial lab. The costs are just prohibitive. We need to somehow come up with ideas where the testing can be refined and done in a way that is affordable.