Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today to be speaking on Bill C-50, a bill to amend the Canadian Wheat Board Act. In my presentation today I will talk about the bill itself, what is in the bill. I will talk a bit about the improvements that should have been made to the bill, some of the amendments that were put forward but unfortunately were not made. I will talk about the missed opportunity at a time when the Canadian Wheat Board Act has been opened up to change and the real missed opportunity because there were not more substantial changes made to the bill.
I will start today by talking about the bill itself, Bill C-50, the bill to amend the Canadian Wheat Board Act. The purpose of the bill is to amend the Canadian Wheat Board by allowing refundable check offs on wheat and barley on sales of wheat and barley to the board.
This refundable check off is to be used for plant breeding research. I will summarize some of the provisions of the bill. The bill would allow for deductions from the farmer's final payment checks for each pool period, unless the farmer filed each year to the Canadian Wheat Board to be exempted from the refundable check off, from the deduction. The bill places this revenue in a fund with the Canadian Wheat Board which will be distributed to the Western Grains Research Foundation.
The Canadian Wheat Board must estimate how much money it will take from farmers per tonne for the grain to provide the $4.7 million it wants to raise from this bill for research, again funding that will be directed to the Western Grains Research Foundation.
The research funding agency would distribute the money to people or organizations for research based on what the board of directors for the foundation determined.
There will be an additional reserve account set up which will put money into a special fund, a contingency fund intended to cover shortfalls from any particular year, shortfalls in funding, in case of a higher opt out rate or poor production on the prairies or just lower shipment levels through the Canadian Wheat Board.
There is to be an annual report provided to the minister from the Western Grains Research Foundation each year and under the present provisions of the bill, the bill that we are going to vote on, this report must be presented by the minister within six months. One of the amendments I will talk about later states this report should be made public more quickly and the report should be made public as soon as it is presented to the minister from the foundation.
In terms of the rationale behind the bill, the purpose for the bill, it is assumed that the benefits will be accrued to farmers for the following reasons. It will give farmers a role in supporting and directing research into new varieties of wheat and barley. It will link more closely the wishes of the agriculture industry, in particular farmers but others as well. It will give them more responsibility in directing where the research funding goes. I think this is an important part of this bill.
It will provide $4.7 million of additional research for development of new varieties of wheat and barley, varieties which will be grown in western Canada.
It may improve the development of new marketing alternatives, new marketing opportunities through the development of better varieties that are more readily marketable. Hopefully it will improve farm income through increased returns to farmers and a higher profit margin to farmers.
That is the intent of the bill. Reform does support this bill. I support this bill and the Reform Party supports this bill for the following reasons. We believe that research does benefit farmers and we believe that research money collected through the Canadian Wheat Board presented to the Western Grains Research Foundation will benefit farmers. Not only do we believe that but many farm groups believe that and have supported this bill.
In talking to individual farmers in my constituency it seems that most individual farmers also support this refundable check off that will go to research.
There are some conditions put on this and really some hesitation on the part of farmers, I have found. They hesitate because the number of check offs on the sales of their commodities is increasing all the time and they are concerned that there are too many.
Farmers do recognize very well the importance of research. Farmers are willing to do their part in directly funding research. Farmers are also becoming concerned about the number of check offs, and this is another one.
I believe the support is there but it is becoming hesitant and I think with new check offs there will be strong resistance at some point.
This bill would have been improved substantially through amendments that were presented. I would like to speak briefly first about the second Bloc amendment, Motion No. 2. I believe the intent of that amendment was good. Reform did not support that amendment because the interpretation which we got from the legislation was unclear. Because of that we just found that we could not support the amendment.
I think the intent would have been to ensure that the Western Grains Research Foundation funding is not duplicated, is not already done somewhere in Canada or somewhere else. Overlap and duplication would have been prevented.
I think the intention of that motion was good but again, because of the way it fit into the legislation, we found that it was unclear. We were afraid that the Canadian Wheat Board would have been given the responsibility of making sure that money spent by the Western Grains Research Foundation was not on research already being done.
We were afraid-I was certainly concerned-that the Canadian Wheat Board would be given that responsibility. We do not want the wheat board to be involved in any way other than providing a convenient collecting mechanism.
Reform put forward two amendments to the bill, both of which I believe would have strengthened the bill. The first one was accountability. What we proposed is that the minister's report which he receives from Western Grains Research Foundation would be made public in a very short time through this House. I believe that accountability is needed. The hon. member for Malpeque on previous bills has pushed for a very similar type of accountability.
Our second motion was to simplify the process that farmers would go through to opt out of making their contributions to the wheat board and ultimately to the research foundation through this check off. What we proposed was adding one small box to the Canadian Wheat Board's permit application form which a farmer could check off if they wanted to opt out of the program for that year.
Some in the industry and some other members in this House opposed that method of opting out because they said that it is too easy to do. I am very concerned when government supports action whereby a bureaucracy interferes unnecessarily with decision making.
In other words, in this case the people who opposed our amendment to make this easy said let us make it more difficult for farmers to opt out through added bureaucracy. I believe that is morally wrong.
In too many places in our lives and especially in the lives of business people we have government interfering through the bureaucracy to make business more difficult to do. I am really quite upset that this motion was not supported, especially considering the reasons that were given for not supporting this motion.
I believe these two motions and the intent of the second motion would have substantially improved this bill but they did not pass.
What I would like to talk about now is the missed opportunity. The Canadian Wheat Board Act was opened. Why did we not make substantial changes to the act?
My colleague, the member for Moose Jaw-Lake Centre, and I went to a Canadian Wheat Board rally in Regina about two weeks ago. What did we see at this rally? Did we see a bunch of radical farmers out to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board, this body which has been a very important body in western Canada for marketing grains? No, that is not what we saw.
We saw very reasonable people speaking on changing the Canadian Wheat Board to improve it, to make it better for farmers. After all, this organization exists for farmers and it is funded by farmers. It is their organization. They wanted improvement.
I want to just talk about what a couple of speakers said at this rally in this regard. One gentleman talking about needed changes talked about how the Canadian Wheat Board was established in the first place. It was established originally in the 1930s. It disappeared and came back during the war under the War Measures Act as a monopoly.
That is when the wheat board first gained its monopoly power. It was in 1942 under the War Measures Act. It gained monopoly power so that Britain in particular could buy cheap food from Canadian farmers. Like so many pieces of legislation, instead of having a grandfather clause which would have the legislation end after a certain period of time it just continued.
Again I want to say that the Canadian Wheat Board has served a useful purpose. When the Canadian Wheat Board was set up we had a situation in the world first of all in western Canada in which farmers had a very poor communication system, very poor transportation and the grain buying companies were taking advantage of farmers because of the world they lived in, with poor information, poor transportation.
The Canadian Wheat Board, as did the wheat pool, served a very useful purpose in dealing with this problem. Back then we were dealing in a world where we had central desk buyers and central desk sellers. It worked well having a central desk seller selling to a central desk buyer. What wheat really was at that time was basically one commodity with a few different grades. This wheat board was marketing a fairly uniform commodity to a world that was not all that concerned with getting exactly a certain quality or a certain type of wheat. Under those conditions the wheat board worked well.
What has happened is that the marketplace has changed. The world has changed. Now we have farmers who have extremely good communication systems. We have wheat which is no longer just wheat but is dozens and dozens of different commodities.
Buyers buying wheat want a very specific product and we are looking at dozens of different products. Are we selling to central desk buyers any more? No, we are not. There are very few central desk buyers in the world so what we have now are mini-sellers because farmers want to become more active in selling. Grain companies servicing farmers want to become more active in selling outside of Canada as well. We have these mini-buyers and mini-sellers funnelling through the Canadian Wheat Board and the Canadian Wheat Board not selling to few buyers but selling to many buyers.
We have the wheat board now which has become a funnel which takes a product from mini-sellers and sells to mini-buyers and again it is not just wheat or barley. There are many different, very specific products that these buyers want. We live in a different world.
I believe that the Canadian Wheat Board still can serve a useful purpose and so did these farmers at the rally. They said they were not out to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board, they were out to improve it. They talked about a voluntary wheat board and I thought they presented their case for a voluntary wheat board as they called it very well.
There was one other farmer who really explained very well some of the problems we have with the board as it is. This story is going to sound really silly to anyone familiar with the grain industry but it is true. This farmer talked about his own situation. He had built a flour mill on his farm. He was processing flour, wheat, strictly from his farm. He was selling flour all across western Canada but he was selling specialty flour so he had to mill this flour from a very select type of wheat, his own wheat.
The problem is that to operate within the law he has to market his wheat through the Canadian Wheat Board to sell to his mill. It is absurd but it is true. Not only that, he would only be allowed to sell as much wheat as the quota levels would allow. In spite of the fact he is milling his own wheat in his own mill he would be restricted by a quota level. It is absurd but that is what has happened.
This story I believe demonstrates very well why we need to open the Canadian Wheat Board to change, to positive change, to changes that farmers support.
This rally in Regina would have been an excellent meeting for the minister to have attended as it was in the minister's riding in Regina. It was really unfortunate I think and the farmers felt really cheated that the minister was not there. They were very pleased to see us there. They saw MPs who do understand there is a need for change to the Canadian Wheat Board.
I want to ask a question of farmers and other small business people, managers, owners. Would a farmer or another small business person allow a government agency to come in and manage their farm? They own the farm and they fund it. How many small business people would allow a government agency to come in and manage their operations? I say very few.
The Canadian Wheat Board is owned by farmers, funded by farmers and is supposedly for farmers. Then why on earth is it managed by government appointed commissioners? That is exactly what is happening and it does not make any sense.
With regard to the Canadian Wheat Board, farmers want to be able to elect a board of directors. Recent polls have shown that over 90 per cent of western Canadian farmers want an elected board of directors to replace the government appointed commissioners. Does that sound so unreasonable?
The minister must act very quickly to allow for a farmer elected board of directors. After the farmers have elected the board of directors, the farmers should be allowed through referendum to determine what type of wheat board they want to serve them. They could choose to keep the board as is, which they certainly will not do from everything I have heard. They could choose to eliminate the board completely, which they certainly would not do from everything I have heard.
There is a new movement to completely eliminate the board. I do not believe it is a strong movement. I do not believe a majority of farmers support it. I believe the options that would be chosen are somewhere in between. The first option would be to open the wheat board to competition on a continental basis. A continental market in barley and wheat is the first realistic option.
The second realistic option would be to open the Canadian Wheat Board to competition anywhere in the world. More and more farmers are supporting this all the time.
Another possible option would be to open the board to competition but allow the Canadian Wheat Board only to buy in export positions. It would eliminate the interference that the Canadian Wheat Board has in our transportation system, car allocation system and grain marketing system. It would let it stay in place to do its job in the export market. I believe it could serve a useful role in that regard.
Let farmers decide that. It is not for me to decide. If they have another option that suits them, let them put the option forward to be voted on in a referendum. Let them choose the option they want.
I would like to ask a rhetorical question: Why is the minister so opposed to making the changes that farmers want? I am not going to try to say what his motives are for refusing this change.
I would like to end today with a story. It is a story about a farmer I know who is the anxious type. Some say he has an attitude problem. To relieve his anxiety, on Sunday mornings he goes out to his road. He calls it his road because he was the one who pushed to have it built and the one who pushed to have it paved. He likes to go to the end of his driveway and on to his road on his five-speed. On Sunday mornings the road is his. There is a curve down the road. He likes to get the car going about 100 before he gets to the curve and by the time he hits the curve have it up to 140. It makes him feel good; it relieves his anxiety.
One Sunday morning he went out on his road, started to accelerate, and what does he see around the bend? A car was coming down his road on Sunday morning. He was upset. He was more anxious than ever. He started down his road and the approaching car swerved. He said: "My God, a drunk on my road on Sunday morning". As the car got closer he saw that it was a lady driver. He said: "Oh my, a lady driver on my road on a
Sunday morning". As the car got closer, the lady stopped the car and opened her window. He slowed down but did not stop. As he went by he heard the lady shout "pig". He was really anxious then and said: "sow" and he went on. He was more anxious than ever and hit the curve at 120 and as he started to accelerate into the curve he hit the pig.
When that story was told to me it was to demonstrate how an attitude problem can interfere with the ability to change, but I am not so sure that is the only way to interpret the story.
I believe that pig in the way of that farmer is in fact government. The biggest interference farmers have with doing business is government. Certainly, if that pig is not government, that pig and other pigs are being dropped in front of farmers by government and are interfering with them doing business. I believe government must stop dropping these pigs in front of farmers and other business people.
In closing, we support Bill C-50, an act to amend the Canadian Wheat Board. We would have liked the bill amended, but I believe it is supported widely by farmers and I am looking forward to the legislation being enacted.