Thanks.
I appreciate the sentiment that it's important that the things I'm bringing forward do relate directly to keeping families on the farm and keeping farming viable in Canada. This is not a random list of ideas. This is a specific list of ideas that deal directly with that issue of how we can make farming more viable in Canada, how we can get more farmers on the land, and how we can keep them there.
I was talking about genetics assistance. I won't go over everything I said yesterday. The bottom line is that there are a lot of farmers in Canada--I'm thinking primarily of dairy producers, but also sheep breeders, those who raise breeding stock, as well as goat producers and others--who were sideswiped by BSE. I think that possibly we should be looking at ways to help that industry get back on its feet, because it.... A cow that is sold overseas as breeding stock is worth a lot more than one going into a packing plant. And so I think that it's a smaller number of very high-value animals.
The third thing I touched on very briefly yesterday was biofuels and some of the opportunities that exist out there with renewable energy. The government has, over the past year and a half, committed significant amounts of money to biofuel. In my part of central Ontario, there's an ethanol plant going in, and I know that farmers, particularly corn producers, in my area are very excited about that.
But I'd like to move on, because I'd like to get through this list.
Recently when we were in Washington discussing the U.S. Farm Bill, we heard a lot of interesting ideas. If people actually take a look at the U.S. Farm Bill, what's interesting is that there are different sections in that bill that deal with different things.
One of them is conservation and conservation measures. I've heard it many times from farmers that they're in favour of protecting the environment as much as anyone. In fact, as stewards of the land, people who are on the land themselves and have their hands in the earth on a regular basis, they would claim in fact that they are more concerned with clean air, clean water, and clean soil than the average person is.
One of their complaints is that farmers can't bear the full cost of the public good, which is clean water, clean land, and clean air. As an example, here in Ontario the provincial government is barging ahead with the Clean Water Act. It's certainly hard to stand up and say that you're against clean water. It's a lot easier to stand up and say that the cost of ensuring clean groundwater and clean surface water in Ontario should not be the sole responsibility of farmers.
Farmers are required to spend tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of dollars on environmental structures on their land. These are improvements that are made to reduce the impact that it makes on the environment but that have no impact on their bottom line. They don't get any more money selling their product simply because they've spent $100,000 on some sort of a structure on their property.
The joke is, you pay people not to farm, but I think there are places where farmers own property that maybe is not ideally suited for agriculture. It may be an area, whether it's a ravine or a wetland or some other natural feature that has a significant natural heritage value, and there is indeed a public interest in preserving that. But the point is that the farmer shouldn't have to bear the whole cost of that.
That's something I think we, as parliamentarians, and the minister and the government should look at--how do we ensure that, on the one hand, we protect the environment and do everything reasonable to protect the quality of our water and our soil, and at the same time not create a situation where a small number of people, namely farmers, are asked to carry the vast bulk of that cost?
The end goal, which is protecting the environment, is laudable and I imagine everybody supports it, but there has to be some discussion about who pays for it. And that's an important measure that I think we could look at.
Another component of the U.S. Farm Bill is rural development. That's potentially a very broad topic. In our federal government as well as in, I expect, most provincial governments, there is a department or ministry dedicated to rural development. As my colleagues know, in a small community sometimes it's some sort of infrastructure or some sort of facility, whether it's an abattoir or whether it's a transportation facility. In the last few years the availability of high-speed Internet has become a major issue; farmers who run multi-million-dollar operations need to have access to the world and the information highway.
When I think of rural development, I think of the importance of quickly developing and implementing a strategy—