I have a couple of minutes. I'm going to read the first paragraph of a letter from Ken Larsen, from Alberta. I'm not going to read everything, because I'd like to keep it as civil as possible.
I also know that we should learn from history. A lot of us are concerned about what's happening. We're concerned about what's going to happen in the future, and I wonder if we're learning from the past. So I'd just like your comments on this.
He states that Brian Mulroney removed oats from the Wheat Board in 1989, and that now this minister is resorting to all sorts of tactics to cover up the resulting disaster. He asks us to please let this farmer--that is, Mr. Larsen--explain how it worked for him:
At the Leslieville, Alberta Pool elevator, oat prices immediately dropped from the CWB's initial price of $140.90 per tonne in June of 1989--with a later final payment of around $45 per tonne from the CWB--to $67.02 on the new private market that September. By February of 1991, oats had dropped to a mere $51.34 a tonne. This is a disaster that played out across the prairies. It was almost seven years, after a radical decline in oat acreage and other international factors, before prices recovered to something like what the CWB had gotten for farmers. The background to this disaster is instructive for farmers contemplating their not-so-secret ballot on barley marketing.
I'll stop. I just would like to get a couple of comments from each of you, if you feel this is relevant to what's happening, if it's something in the past. In other words, should we be careful of where we're going?
Mr. Arason, please.