Gerry Ritz

[Agriculture, November 25th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the government continues to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding about the growing crisis in rural Canada. We in the west have come to realize that this government does not care. Tough love the minister calls it. Imagine my surprise today when members opposite voted against committee hearings for Ontario producers. Is the government now practising tough love for Ontario producers as well?

[Agriculture, November 16th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberal government does not care. So said Janice Archdekin of Landis at a kickoff meeting in Biggar, Saskatchewan to gather a wide spectrum of opinions and solutions across the prairies.

The Reform Party will be sponsoring a series of meetings to gather rural people together to get their input and urge the Prime Minister to tour the west and hear from those Canadians who have been hardest hit in recent years from rising input costs and falling prices in the agriculture sector.

We would like to see the Prime Minister come to the small towns and local halls to hear about the issue firsthand. Of course, he can send his entourage ahead if he likes. They should probably avoid the four star hotels and the PGA golf courses. That is not likely where the farmers or the answers will be found.

We intend to gather a wide range of opinions from producers and suppliers as well as their families on how to put agriculture primary producers on a permanent track of prosperity and sustainability. We know we will hear about foreign subsidies, taxes and user fees. What we do not know is if we will ever hear from the government that it recognizes the problem, let alone that it cares.

[Agriculture, October 29th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has a terrible habit of ignoring the tough problems thinking they will just go away, that they will disappear. The only things disappearing are farm families.

Yesterday the Prime Minister dealt the farmers another blow. He told the premiers “Do not worry. It is not as bad as you think. We have got brand new numbers, but you cannot see them because the ink is still wet”.

That is very small comfort, or no comfort at all to the thousands of farmers who are facing the nightmare of losing their homes and their livelihood. There are going to be 16,000 to 17,000 farm families out on the streets.

What gives the Prime Minister the audacious right to think he can judge this crisis when he has not even been there and seen it for himself? How arrogant.

[Agriculture, October 28th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, just a few minutes ago the Prime Minister categorized the AIDA program as complex and difficult to manage. That is their best shot at this program.

The agriculture minister used to be a farmer, yet he shows very little compassion for farmers. His best advice is for them to quit and retrain, a TAGS program for farmers. We know how well that worked.

Only 15% of the money is getting out there to farmers. If AIDA had worked, the premiers of Manitoba and Saskatchewan would not need to be here today. Why is the AIDA money sitting on the cabinet table instead of on the farmer's kitchen table?

[Agriculture, October 28th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, western farm families have their backs against the wall this fall because of weather and foreign subsidies. These are hardly programs or conditions which they have any control over.

The government is in a position to help. The Prime Minister could put his foot down for once and fight those foreign subsidies. The finance minister could announce some tax cuts on inputs. The agriculture minister could start by announcing assistance for farmers that actually gets to them.

Why will the Prime Minister not take any concrete action to assist farmers?

[West Central Pelleting, October 27th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, in the great western tradition of private enterprise and finding opportunities, the West Central Pelleting company of Wilkie, Saskatchewan has built itself into a successful, value-added operation.

Five hundred shareholders, consisting of retired and active farmers, small business people and other citizens, raised $2.2 million to start this operation. The company takes in screenings. That is the plant material left over after the grain has been cleaned and processed. Though screenings have long been known to have nutritional value as animal feed, they have usually been shipped elsewhere, along with the employment opportunities.

West Central Pelleting uses nutritional consultants to provide its growing customer base with made-to-order feed products. According to Bonnie Stephenson of Grainews , “West Central has met its first year goal of 20,000 metric tonnes of production and has just completed an expansion that has tripled its storage capacity”. There are 15 employees there now and I predict a lot more jobs to come as prairie people apply their know-how and determination to succeed.

Congratulations, West Central Pelleting.

[Supply, October 25th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Selkirk—Interlake for his intervention. I agree. Large corporations can follow the example of the banks and give farmers a break. There is no way that they can buy back land that is coming up this year with the low commodity prices. No one has had a chance to put any kind of cash reserves aside to make the down payment required to buy back the land.

Farmers do not want to lose any of their land. It is part of the viability of their operation. Whether one loses a quarter, five quarters or all five sections really does not matter. It is a chink in the armour. It is a chip away at the bottom of the dike and everything else will break loose from there.

We need to revisit that situation. We need to look long and hard at avenues that will allow farmers some breathing space to put a few nickels back in their jeans and make that down payment to stay viable.

[Supply, October 25th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his question. I certainly agree with him that part of the problem has been provincial. As I said in my speech, Saskatchewan is seeing huge disparities where Saskatchewan farmers have bottomed out compared to those of Alberta next door and even those of Manitoba, which is somewhere in the middle.

The Alberta government created a program called FIDP which not everyone loves. That is the nature of the beast with government programs. It certainly has held its farmers at a better level than those of Saskatchewan. We have been in a free-fall. Our crown corporations have been building kingdoms elsewhere in the world without staying at home and looking after the little guy. Our farmers have taken a hit at all levels and will continue to do so.

The premiers are coming here. That is great. They can talk and be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. I look forward to the interventions at committee stage.

The GRIP program disappeared out of Saskatchewan. The provincial government disappeared with about $140 million. The federal government saved about $230 million. All they have to do is put that money back and we would have about five times what the AIDA program will do for us.

Let us go back to the future. We do not have to reinvent anything. We saw just a short time ago what rural voters in Saskatchewan thought of the agriculture policies of the NDP government. They turfed the NDP government out of rural Saskatchewan, and rightly so. It was not listening. It has to get out there and start to help with the situation, not add to it. Rates for SaskTel, SaskPower and Sask Gas and Energy will go through the roof. It is compounding the problem and not helping us.

We have infrastructure that we can hardly afford to drive on. We have a seatbelts rule in the province just so we do not get bounced off the seat. It has nothing to do with safety. The situation we are facing in rural Saskatchewan is absolutely ridiculous. It just gets worse and worse.

All levels of government, municipal, provincial and federal, must get in there and work together. Let us forget the partisan crap. Let us all get in there and make it happen.

[Supply, October 25th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it is certainly with mixed emotions that I rise today to speak on behalf of my constituents of Battlefords—Lloydminster, Saskatchewan regarding the crisis in agriculture which is raging across this country, most critically in the west. In Saskatchewan and Manitoba we have seen incomes at an all time low. I say mixed emotions because my constituents are increasingly frustrated by all levels of government. Everybody takes a little blame for the seeming lack of understanding of the magnitude of this crisis.

They are angry with governments over the ineptitude they have displayed with their pat answers. It is always someone else's fault. If they wait a little longer the program will work. It has almost been a year and we are not seeing any results.

The federal agriculture minister has told farmers to quit or to walk away from farms that have been in a family for generations, or to walk away from years of blood, sweat and tears building and maintaining a dream that has been in a family forever. What advice to give to farmers who like to roll up their sleeves, get in there and solve problems. What an absolute insult. I have had farmers calling me, saying that this fellow just does not understand what is going on.

The harsh reality is that it is not just the farm families any more that are in trouble. It has gone past the farm gate. It is now encroaching into Main Street, Saskatchewan, into Manitoba and other parts of the country as well. It is affecting all of the agriculture related businesses, whether we are talking about inputs, farm fuel, fertilizer, chemicals or the seed companies. Everybody is starting to feel the pinch as their receivables escalate and skyrocket into numbers they have never seen before, with no end in sight.

I have received hundreds of calls over this past year at my constituency office and not just from farmers. It is escalating into the businesses supplying the farmers and their input costs. It is escalating into veterinarians supplying services and so on to cattle and pork producers. It has gone on to affect just about everybody out there in rural Canada.

Why is this? Why are we facing this crisis now? It has been building for a number of years. The main culprit was and continues to be an agriculture minister and his government that just will not move very far on this issue. He promised us a bankable program by last Christmas. That is almost 10 months ago and to date there are too few farmers qualifying for too few dollars to make any difference. We have heard numbers like $220 million out of a $15 billion program that has actually reached the farmers out there. It is just a little too late and not nearly enough dollars. Just in the nick of too late is what a lot of people are saying out there.

Farmers that I have talked to are averaging five to six months for a response from the complicated forms they have sent in. Their accountants are frustrated by filling out the forms to the best of their ability and coming up with a number that seems acceptable to everyone, only to have it rejected by the AIDA committee working with the NISA committee and the Revenue Canada committee. By the time the circle is done and they have jumped the hoops and hurdles that are tossed in front of them it is a bureaucratic nightmare. It goes on an on.

A good percentage of farmers that applied in April and May last year are still waiting to receive some money. They have received nothing. It has certainly been a problem.

Bankers in western Canada, to their credit, have been great. They have turned out loans and taken interest only payments on those loans to try to help farmers stay put. It is a bit of a different story when it comes to farm credit, that old boondoggle that was created federally years ago. They have been a little more hardhearted when it comes to tossing farmers off their ground.

This mess is compounded in Saskatchewan because our input costs have gone up with the demise of the Crow rate and with a provincial government that kind of let things slide a bit further than they should have done. We are seeing a tremendous disparity between what the net incomes of Saskatchewan farmers have bottomed out and our neighbouring province in Alberta. It is creating quite a controversy out there.

We have this crisis in agriculture. What it comes down to is that no one has a magic wand. What will we do about it? How can we address these issues? Everybody blames a different villain. We had the Asian flu a year ago and markets collapsed. We have European and American subsidies. We cut but they did not. They have actually increased their funding to farmers. We have to go to the WTO and the GATT negotiations with a little bigger stick.

We have a low dollar. All of our inputs are based on American currency. The fertilizer, fuel, chemicals, farm machinery, repairs, everything that comes out of the States and up here with 67 cent dollars buying it. Not totally. A lot of inputs are based on American money whether or not they are manufactured because there is a lot of that trade back and forth.

We have had both flood and drought in Saskatchewan, opposite ends of the scale, which has led to a lot of farmers getting little or no coverage by crop insurance because of that multiple year problem. Their premiums have gone sky high and the coverage they are able to get has gone way down. There is no way to add or make use of a NISA with negative margins. New farmers that do not have a three year average and so on do not qualify for any type of AIDA program.

A combination of low selling prices for agricultural commodities and escalating input costs have put people into jeopardy. There are six billion people in the world now. We had a big celebration a short time ago when the six billionth baby was born. There is a tremendous amount of hungry people out there. We grow great product here. It is safe. It is ready to go to market, ready to be used, but we cannot seem to find buyers for it even with a 67 cent dollar.

The Prime Minister said that a low dollar was great for trade. We do not see that stimulant adding to Canadian exporters. It just failed to deliver anything out there.

Another thing that has added to the situation is an agricultural system that has been in transition. Farmers followed the buzzwords of the government. They diversified, changed the way they did things, upgraded, worked the land a little differently and so on. They are extremely vulnerable at this time. A lot of people made those changes and were kind of caught in a catch 22 situation with payments to make on the new way of farming and no commodity prices to support it.

What can we do? What can governments do? In the short term I guess we have to prop up Canadian agriculture with a subsidy, cash in hand. It is the only way to get everybody back to the starting line. Canadian farmers are starting out a relay race 10 yards behind everybody else, so we have to give them some cash in their hands to get them back to the starting line.

We are also looking at tens of thousands of jobs that can be affected because agriculture is definitely a primary industry. It affects everybody on the input and on the purchasing sides. We need an aid program that delivers cash, not platitudes.

The program should be simplified. I know that goes against the grain of a lot of government bureaucracies that like to control everything to the end, but we have to simplify it. We have to get the money out there in a timely fashion. No more studies. No more excuses. Let us just get it done. We have Christmas coming up again and I would hate the agriculture minister to be the grinch two years in a row.

In the mid-term let us rethink government involvement in agriculture. Taxes on input costs are exorbitant, as the last member talked about. The major input cost of a lot of fertilizers is natural gas and 50% of that is taxes. Last year the fertilizer institute talked about 20% of its costs being government taxes on its product. All that comes off the bottom line of farmers.

We know what taxes on fuel amount to. Some $5 billion or $6 billion a year. A lot of that is coming right out of the pockets of farmers. These are not profit generated taxes, much like property tax. In Saskatchewan we have seen property taxes go up by 52% in the last little while and the bulk of that is paid by 57,000 farmers paying two-thirds of the property tax. We have to look at the way that is done. Interprovincial barriers to trade should be removed. Another $5 billion disappears from people in the west every year because of trade barriers that we have developed between the provinces.

In the longer term I guess we have to take a bigger stick to the next WTO and GATT negotiations. We cannot and should not tolerate unfair subsidy practices. They are killing us here at home. We have to go with more people, with a bigger group, to get our ideas across.

Let us get serious about implementing value added processing in the prairies. We have seen freedom of choice on marketing and delivery of our products being non-available to people. The Crow rate is gone but we did not see deregulation. This government and the provincial governments must look at all existing programs and propose changes and updates to and based on what is in the best interest of producers.

Farm families are hardy. They are good pioneer stock. They are adaptable folk. They have a proud heritage of standing up to the challenges, rolling up their sleeves and finding a solution. Let those of us in government at all levels be part of the solutions rather than a major part of the problems.

[Supply, October 25th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, if you will pardon the pun, the member was saying that Canada is small potatoes when it comes to international trade. He talked glowingly about needing to convince the Europeans and the Americans and to use incentives to convince them to give a darn about the situation of Canadian farmers.

Could he give us a brief outline of what those incentives would be if we are such a small player?