Everybody was here.
The CPC supported that program. I have been quoted by the minister seven times in the House as supporting that program. I did support the program on the basis that 75% of the hog farmers in this country could access it. To date we have three percent: three percent.
As a producer who participated in this, I'll say to my MP, and I'll say to you as members of Parliament, we should be ashamed of ourselves that we would allow a program to be that ineffective, to be that ineffectual in assisting producers. If they keep going, there will be 220 producers on that program by the end of the month when the program expires, and not all of the funds will have been used. There will be a surplus in that of somewhere between $150 million and $200 million, depending on what the final loans come in at.
I challenge you to get to the minister, to get to the government, and to make sure those funds stay where they were intended to be, in primary hog production. Do not let them just be recaptured and recapitalized somewhere else in the budget as found money. Those dollars were put here for the hog industry. Let's use them for the hog industry. They need to be rededicated.
Somebody up here in Ottawa told me many months ago that if all the dollars in the program were used, the program would be a success. If we have three percent of producers accessing money, I would suggest then that the gun registry was a blazing success because it spent a billion dollars. We have the emergency advance payment program. Thank you for the money. It kept me in business. It kept my farm afloat, but we have some issues with that, and I think we need to address them, and I'm sure that my friends here on the Canadian Pork Council will do that.
I have one final issue that falls a little close to home, and on behalf of a number of producers who have contacted me as their Ontario representative on the Canadian Pork Council, I'm going to bring it forward. In the 1980s, Farm Credit Canada was very innovative in how it dealt with the crisis that this industry went through. They used things like debt set-aside, and they used trailer mortgages because everybody finally stood up to the plate and recognized that property values and equity were gone. There's nothing we can do to change that. We have a dollar at par. We have an industry that has changed.
As for that barn that is worth 25¢ on the dollar today, or less than 25¢, I will never recover that money and neither will the bank. Neither will Farm Credit, but they will move that debt on to somebody else who will be allowed to compete with the investment that I made at 20¢ on the dollar. Now I realize that Shylock has to have his pound of flesh every once in a while, but I suggest to you that there are other ways we could deal with this.
The larger issue I have--and it's an issue directly with Farm Credit Canada--is their unwillingness to disclose public information. When Farm Credit gets into negotiations with farmers, they do an internal appraisal. They use comparable sales, which are a matter of public record. I've had at least half a dozen farmers contact me and suggest that Farm Credit will not release to them even the lot and concession of those sales. So these farmers are told to go refinance and come back and pay off their debt, but in the meantime Farm Credit is using sales and sales comparables that the appraiser I used can't find.
It's public information. I'm not asking for these producers. I'm not asking for Farm Credit to show us their analysis. I'm not asking for Farm Credit to release their internal documents. I'm saying that the sales are a matter of public record and Farm Credit Canada, when asked, should release the lots, concessions, and rural numbers of those farms so that farmers don't have to spend thousands of dollars on appraisals, they can spend hundreds of dollars.
Thank you.