Mr. Speaker, I am rising to speak at third reading of Bill C-50. I note several of the previous speakers have wandered considerably off the topic of the bill.
I want to make a quick allusion to the story we just heard concerning the man who presumed it was his road and all the problems he got into as a result of that false assumption. That is one of the basic problems of many people who are opposed to the wheat board and want what they call change. They too fall into the trap of making false assumptions about reality.
The man presumed that it was his road and that no one else should be on it on a Sunday morning. What they presume is that the wheat board is just another buyer, just another grain company in the market, when in fact it is marketing the grain for all growers in western Canada. Once they get their heads around that space it will begin to make a lot more sense. That is one of the difficulties of my friend from Vegreville and his colleagues.
The bill deals with how to finance plant breeding. It is a further proposal by government, following some proposals of the last government and some that were put forward in the Trudeau administration, to extract itself from publicly financed plant breeding. Publicly financed plant breeding has a long history in Canada, going back well over a hundred years. When John Wise was the minister of agriculture we celebrated a hundred years of plant breeding under the Department of Agriculture in Canada.
In my region of western Canada it was an extremely exciting initiative that was taken more than 100 years ago. Without the publicly sponsored plant breeding effort that occurred at the central research station in Ottawa and the varieties that were developed for early maturing hard spring wheat, my region would not have had a reason to exist in the world of agriculture.
The varieties that existed prior to that time were not suitable for my region with its relatively short growing season. The development of Marquis wheat attracted the population there and made it possible for it to be economically viable. It made agriculture on the prairies the bread basket of the world, according to publicity at the turn of the century. Of course we were never that big.
Many countries grow more wheat and more grain than does Canada, but few countries export as much of their production as we do. We export about 80 per cent of our production. None of the other countries are forced to do that because they have larger populations and consume it at home.
Because of this we developed the marketing institutions to which some of my friends in the House have been referring. Essentially we built on that success by continuing the publicly financed breeding program to get around diseases that came up, rust that developed and insects that developed over time. As the region continues to grow grains, some of these pests and hazards insert themselves into the land and into the environment. It is a constant struggle to change varieties so they will be resistant to insects, pests, rusts, fungi and so on.
I noticed the minister made reference to the fact that it was possible to get as much as a 15 per cent increase in yield due to plant breeding. It is on paper and it is in the test plot. However when we go on to the farms and start dealing with the exigencies of the overall environment and the climactic changes that occur over time, it requires a lot of other attendant improvements in agriculture to keep yields up. Some older varieties will still yield almost as well as the newer varieties by using the techniques available now.
The advantages have been better but have not been terribly dramatic. They have been incremental to the point of producing huge benefits when compared to the pittance invested in them. Any economic research on the cost and benefit of plant breeding shows that for every $1 put in there is as a conservative estimate a minimum of $7 to other estimates that run as high as $15 or $20. The payback is extremely high. In spite of that, previous governments, administrations and popular wisdom have it that government has to get out of plant breeding and there has been a constant cutting back of share of the department's investment in that area.
We have not kept up publicly financed plant breeding and because we have not done so government has come up with various ways of assuaging its conscience about it. During the late seventies and early eighties they talked about plant
breeders' rights. The last government finally implemented plant breeders' rights. That has paid the developers of new varieties for their cost and trouble by virtue of giving them what amounts to a patent to extract a fee from anyone who uses their varieties of seed during the next 15 years.
On top of that we have the bill before us proposing to extract what some people call a voluntary payment and what others call a refundable payment from each tonne of grain sold in the wheat board region through the wheat board. The act does not say so, but the government indicates its intention is to extract $20 per tonne on all wheats and $40 per tonne on all barleys from the final payment paid out in January, following the closing of the previous crop year's pool. Producers would have the option before the end of February to inform the board that they wanted their deductions sent to them rather than to the research foundation if they disapproved of the activities of the research foundation.
It is difficult to oppose a proposal that permits individuals to make up their own minds on whether they want to submit payments to such a scheme.
I want to make it quite clear to the House that what we are doing here as governments, as politicians, as ministries of agriculture, is layering one more cost on to farmers that was not there 20 years ago. Farmers are now financing plant breeders, first as taxpayers through public financing albeit not quite as adequate as it could be because of government cutbacks. We are asked to finance plant breeding through the payments under plant breeders' rights for the use of the newly developed seeds. Now we are being asked to finance plant breeding a third way by a check off on our sales of wheat and barley through the Canadian Wheat Board.
I think that we have a right to ask how many more times we have to keep up this financing. The clear beneficiaries of this increased productivity are the consumers of the product. My friend from Frontenac indicated that it is the last bushels that create the profit, and that is true, but it is those last bushels that are used to depress the price. As we increase our production the supply is increased and the price for all of the production begins to fall.
The beneficiary of this increased production is always the consumers. They have been getting cheaper and cheaper food. The cost of groceries and basic foods that go into the groceries has been falling all through this century.
That has not been the case for a whole lot of other commodities and things that we use. Even housing has gone up in that period of time. With regard to transport, I hark back to just 15 or 20 years ago in making comparisons since today at the agriculture committee we were talking about cattle prices. In 1977 I remember buying a new car. It cost me I think seven 800-pound steers to buy a brand new car. It was a full size car, had everything going for it. Today that car would take something in the order of 25 or 30 800-pound steers.
We were being told in the committee that cattle prices had held up pretty well. They certainly have, have they not?
The technology for cars has changed somewhat. I saw an article in the press recently which said that because of demands from government for environmental improvements to the emission controls and other requirements by government, the cost of a car is now about $4,500 more than in 1977. This was for all the technical improvements. If everything else were equal the car would be about half the price that it is now.
When I look at what labour received out of that car between 1977 and today, it gets about the same amount of money. The input in hours has dropped dramatically but labour gets about the same amount of money. Somewhere there has been a doubling of the real price of that car and the beef has dropped in what it will really buy to about a third. It has dropped two-thirds. Eight would buy a car and now it takes 25.
I just present that to show that consumers have taken real advantage of the productivity of agriculture. I do not see the rationale for farmers to continue to have to pay a bigger and bigger chunk of the research to make productivity gains that consumers are going to benefit from.
I think there will be a great deal of angst among farmers when they see the amount of deduction that there will be on their final payment cheques after January 1996.
A lot of them will have to think long and hard whether they want to have their research deduction returned to them or go into the research group. One of the things that will be a factor for farmers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba at least will be the fairness of the extraction process.
Members will know from the debate yesterday that there has been a special dispensation granted to Alberta and some B.C. producers because they have a different form of deduction already in place. Their deduction is for research in general. It is not for plant breeding research specifically.
All the funds from this deduction will go into developing new plant varieties. We are told that perhaps 2 per cent will be used for administration purposes. The rest will be transferred directly for scientific work on developing new plant varieties.
We know from the public annual statement on the Alberta check off for instance that much less than 50 per cent of the funds collected are even allocated to research and there is no distinction made as to whether the research is economic research, marketing research or actual plant development research.
We have one set of oranges and one set of apples coming in for these deductions. Yet the government refused to make a change yesterday and so did the established parties in the House. They did not see any problem with this. They seem to be quite happy that Manitoba and Saskatchewan producers will pay 20 cents a tonne for plant breeding research. Alberta producers will pay an unspecified amount for research. They will pay the 20 cents for wheat but not for barley research.
We will be paying 40 cents. What will they be paying? Nobody seems to know. As long as that stays very fuzzy, there will be a lot of people saying: "Why should I contribute? If Alberta farmers are going to be getting the same benefits from those new plants as I am, why can they not pay the same amount?" We were trying to have that dichotomy straightened out in the act. Yet the government refused to take any action on it.
One of the problems that this federal government always has is a problem of treating people in each region the same within the region. I would argue that it failed this test miserably yesterday when it proposed to continue with this bill.
I find it very difficult to see why we should be pushing for support for this bill. I find it very difficult to go out and tell my producers that this is a good bill for them when I see that we are simply taking step three as a way of continuing to back off public responsibility for plant breeding and put it on to the hands of producers.
It is really a form of government offloading on to producers. It becomes a form of additional directed taxation that is a bad precedent to begin with. I have great difficulty supporting the whole concept that has been put forward in this bill.
It is laying out a system that is inequitable. It is treating some farmers different than other farmers who live in the same region and who will all benefit the same from the research. It is putting what amounts to a third tax on producers who have some interest in upgrading the genetic material that they work with.
It is also true that the final consumer is the one who reaps all the benefit from that new research. I find it very difficult to justify making an additional charge to the producer in those instances.