Mr. Speaker, I was not going to intervene on this motion until I heard the member for Vegreville. I wonder if he was speaking to motion No. 2 because he does not seem to have read it the way the hon. member for Frontenac wrote it.
We should remind ourselves that the research funding agency that is mentioned in the motion by the hon. member for Frontenac is to be the Western Grains Research Foundation. If members look at the section of the act where this all starts, the deductions for research portion on page 2 explains that the board collects the funds and then turns it over to this research funding agency.
The motion we have before us from the member for Frontenac directs that the research funding agency, which will be the western grains research fund, shall distribute funds to persons who will make the results of their research available to the people who contributed to it, namely the producers. I do not see anything wrong with that. This is something that should pass as a matter of course. However I realize the way some bureaucracies work and some funding works it does not always happen.
I do not know if the people who contribute to the check off for research in Alberta necessarily know what varieties of plants their deduction money has gone into. Neither do I know if the designation of research is the same in each case. In the bill it is quite clear that the funding will be for plant breeding research. It is not clear what the deductions are in some of the other provinces.
I hope the research granting agency, which is the western grain research fund, will make certain that it collects the same amount per tonne from producers in Alberta as is collected from producers in Saskatchewan, British Columbia or Manitoba. Whether it comes from a different collecting group should be irrelevant, but I hope that the same amount of moneys for a tonne of grain goes into the research granting agency from Alberta producers as is coming from Saskatchewan or Manitoba producers.
If that does not happen a lot of screaming and yelling will be going on by producers in Saskatchewan if this duality that the minister appears to be willing to support and which apparently the Reform Party is willing to support results.
If we cannot have fairness in the funding of research and openness to the point of allowing the people who pay for it know what the results are, then we are on a long, slippery slope into another form of taxation and another way for government to opt out of providing the kind of research dollars that it ought to have supplied in the first place.
I have one other thought as I look at motion No. 2. Since this money is being collected directly from farmers to finance this plant research I would hope that when a variety is developed that those same farmers will not be asked to pay fees under plant breeders' rights for the privilege of growing the variety they paid to produce.
I believe that is what the member for Frontenac is trying to avoid. If we know what varieties our money has produced as a result of the deductions from our grain sales then we should not have to pay plant breeders' rights on those varieties because we have already paid for them once, thank you very much.