I don't know if I'll need all that time, Mr. Chair, but I will begin. Maybe I'll share my time with my colleague, if we have some time left.
We're still not satisfied, Mr. Minister. If you want to give farmers more choice in how they market their grain, why don't you let them vote on it? That's what we keep coming back to.
When the legislation was crafted, they contemplated the fact that at some time we might want to add the grains that fall under the act, or remove the grains from the act. Therefore they put in place a section in the act that made it mandatory to consult with farmers before any unilateral action was taken. You tried to act unilaterally and the courts slapped you down.
When you talk about spending money, the board members have a fiduciary obligation to act in the best interests of farmers and to return all proceeds to farmers. Mr. Minister, you were carpet-bombing the prairie region with taxpayer-funded misinformation and propaganda. All of your MPs were blitzing with ten percenters, and at the same time a gag order was imposed on the Wheat Board so they couldn't even defend themselves. They had no right to spend a single dollar correcting your misinformation.
To this day you're cranking out this stuff. I don't know what it costs to print hundreds of thousands of copies of this glossy coloured thing that says: Wheat Board bad, marketing freedom good; Wheat Board monopoly, one buyer, versus marketing freedom many buyers. At the very bottom, with a little asterisk in print so fine you can hardly see it, it says, “Subject to parliamentary approval”. That's how much respect you have for the parliamentary process.
You're spending taxpayers' dollars blitzing this PR campaign, following your own narrow ideological and anecdotal notion that there's going to be some kind of nirvana in the free market as soon as you do away with your nemesis, the Canadian Wheat Board. I want to ask some questions about this myth you're propagating about how this windfall of value-adding is going to start.
Isn't it true that in the last 10 years, the milling capacity in the prairie region of western Canada has increased by 11% with four new processing plants? We have the figures and we can table them with you before you go. In malting, up to 75% of all malting takes place in western Canada, up from 50% 15 years ago.
In actual fact, value-adding has been taking place under the Wheat Board's regime. The examples you keep harping on are narrow and anecdotal, and these may be generated now because they think they'll be able to buy product for less. If they buy product for less, doesn't that mean the farmer will get less, as in selling it for less?
Are we misreading this altogether? Does it not mean that hundreds of millions of dollars that used to go into the pockets of prairie farmers will now go into the pockets of the shareholders of the grain buyers who are going to take over this market share?