Madam Speaker, yesterday I rose in my place and put a question to the government which was answered by the Minister of Transport. However I believe he failed to catch the full impact of the question. He treated it as a pre-budget question which it was not.
Essentially the question concerned the government's intention with regard to the Crow benefit under the Western Grain Transportation Act, something that the red book forgot and which the Liberal Party ignored during the election. It is time the government became more clear as to what its intentions are with that Crow benefit because it is very important to the continued development of the economy of western Canada.
For those who do not know, the Crow rate was established to encourage settlement of western Canada. Settlement would not have occurred at the levels it did at the turn of the century without the Crow rate. In 1982 a previous Liberal government decided to kill the Crow and put in its place a Crow benefit which was supposed to continue into perpetuity.
The previous Conservative government under Brian Mulroney decided to begin dismantling that Crow benefit 10 per cent starting August 1 of this crop year and tabled a bill from the Ministry of Transport which would have the effect of doing away with that financial benefit entirely in four years.
That means the government will save somewhere between $650 million and $730 million annually. I suppose that is why it causes great fear in my heart to think the Minister of Transport would only see it that far.
Essentially this Crow benefit and the Crow rate that preceded it have been the underpinning of land values in western Canada. At the moment farmland values amount to something in the area of $35 billion. Doing away with this benefit will essentially make that land worthless.
If the government wishes to do away with the benefit, it will be taking away about $35 billion of equity in western Canada's economy which cannot be easily replaced and is being used now to finance the restructuring of that western economy. People borrow against farmland to build small and large plants in their own communities to diversify the economy of that part of the country.
If the Department of Transport has its way this opportunity for diversification will be cut off right at the knees. Not only will it be cut off but government will be cutting off all hope of future diversity financed from within the region. It will be killing the hopes and dreams of people and sometimes four generations of work of the people whose businesses will go bankrupt as a result of this policy.
If the government does not understand how the economics of this work, it should simply take a quick look at my own community where the Crow benefit amounts to something like $29 a tonne. We produce about one tonne per acre and the cash rents in that area are about $25 a tonne. Doing away with the Crow benefit means that cash rents have a market value of minus $4 per acre. I can assure the spokesman for the government that minus $4 an acre return means that the land is not worth very much.