Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this motion as well, which has been brought forward by Mr. Easter regarding the Canadian farm families options program.
I oppose the motion Mr. Easter has brought forward. I suspect that comes as no surprise.
In fact, I'm just going to read the motion back onto the record here in case some have forgotten it:
That the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food recommend that the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food immediately rescind the changes announced to the Canadian Farm Families Options Program on April 20, 2007, and restore the provisions of the program as originally announced;
Mr. Chairman, I remember when the announcement was made about this program and I remember at the time having mixed feelings, because on the one hand I recognized that farm families need to have options, and for some of them, staying on the farm is what they want to do. There might be others who would like to move on and do something else. I could see the logic of the program and the intent of the program, but at the time, I guess on an emotional level, it made me uncomfortable, and from a communications point of view, I was concerned that it might be sending a message that we, being the government or the Parliament, were actually encouraging people to leave the farm.
That's something that made me very uncomfortable, because in my area in central Ontario, the Kawartha Lakes area and Brock Township and parts of Peterborough county, we have a lot of small farms, a lot of mixed farms. Farmers are struggling to make a living, and they're pressured from all directions. In our area, ironically, one of the pressures is urban development. The price of land is going up, so that small farmers can't really afford to buy more land to expand their operations. It's tough for them, and I certainly wouldn't want to do or say anything as a member of Parliament or as a member of this committee or as a member of the Conservative caucus to suggest that we were actually encouraging people to move off the farm. I was concerned at the time that that is how this program might be interpreted, even though, clearly, that was not the intent.
It's interesting that I also remember at the time listening to other members of Parliament, and those from outside Parliament, with their comments on the program and their complaints about the program. I have here a list of some of the comments made by colleagues sitting at the table here today. I'm not going to read them all, but the thrust of a lot of those comments was that they didn't support this program.
I don't remember opposition members saying that, by and large, it's a good program, but we should fine tune it. What I recall people saying was, it's a bad program and we should get rid of it and we should do something else with the money.
At the time, I remember feeling a tug back and forth between this program that I thought would help some families that were ready to shift gear in terms of their family and their life and the business they were in, how they made their living, versus, as I said, this concern about sending the message that maybe we were encouraging people to leave the farm. That was where this message sat. At the time I certainly thought the complaints that were being raised by opposition members were sincere and that they truly had the best interests of farmers and farm families at heart, and that was why they had brought these concerns forward.
I'm relatively new in this place, but it was interesting to see that the minister reacted to that, and when Minister Strahl made the announcement that he was making a change, it seemed to me at the time pretty clear that he had obviously been listening. He made the statement that the money was still on the table, so to speak, that those dollars were still there for Canadian farmers, but that he was going to free those dollars up to do something else and that there were going to be significant changes made to the program.
I remember thinking at the time that the reaction I was initially expecting to hear from the opposition was that he hadn't gone far enough. Given that they had been saying it was a terrible program and never should have been introduced in the first place, and he made a partial change, I presumed the calls would be for the minister to cancel the thing totally.
So I can't say how surprised I was to hear the opposite: that the opposition members basically did a one-eighty, going from savaging the program and saying it was terrible—and when an announcement was made that there was going to be a substantive change—