Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Unless I'm mistaken, this is the third meeting in which we've dealt with this motion. If we look at some of the facts that were presented to our committee, we see that in that period of time we've lost over 200 farmers in this country. In fact, the evidence in our own report indicates that every year we lose 10,000 farm families who give up.
I'm not sure, Mr. Chair, I heard a good number of long talks, but did anyone bring to this table the number of farmers that would be hurt as a result of the cancellation of that program? Was it 10,000, was it 20,000, was it 30,000, or was it nobody? I thought the parliamentary secretary might have brought to this committee a brief statement of the four, five, six or maybe fourteen reasons, as Mr. Devolin had in his talk, as to why that program was cancelled. But we didn't hear that.
It's rather disconcerting, Mr. Chair, that in addition to all of our time, we spent over $200,000 of the taxpayers' money travelling across Canada to make a report for the future of how the government would deal with agriculture. The report is apparently needed no later than next March. We have not made any progress on that whatsoever. I believe that our researcher has done a very good job in presenting a report, but I'm concerned that probably the most important part of that report is in recommendation 27. I'm disappointed that it isn't recommendation number 1, because without some idea of succession and some idea of someone being able to have enough money to invest to own a farm, the future of farming in this country is pretty well depleted.
I'm not sure what the parliamentary secretary has said about how long we are to continue before we are able to bring this so-called motion to a conclusion. In view of the talks we've had today, I would suggest, Mr. Chair, that for tomorrow's meeting we should have the clerk check with the rooms in the Centre Block and perhaps we should have these great debates like this televised so that the farmers across the country can appreciate all the discussions going on. If you, Mr. Chair, could instruct the clerk to do that, I'm sure that Room 253-D or one of those rooms would be open, and tomorrow we could continue this debate on Mr. Easter's motion or that of Mr. Atamanenko, and then the people across this country, the farmers who believe that this committee is doing something productive, would certainly be able to assess that belief.
Also, Mr. Chair, perhaps I'm one of the older ones on this committee, but years ago we had The Benny Hill Show. I don't know how many remember The Benny Hill Show, but Benny Hill was a great entertainer. I know that we have another document here by a Hill. I'm not sure if it's Benny who wrote the document, but that's the way we're following a procedure to screw this committee up. Maybe the clerk or researcher could look at Benny Hill and see if Benny wrote that report or not. Apparently there are about 200 pages floating on the Hill here that someone wrote on how Parliament can be upset and how we might achieve very little.