Mr. Speaker, the answer is yes, it is having a very marked bad effect on our competitiveness in the agricultural markets.
One of the main reasons that farm input costs are so high is the tax component they contain. It does not matter whether one is buying a tractor or a litre of diesel fuel or repairs for something on one's farm, the tax component if one tracks it backwards through every stage of production in many cases, I would suspect in most cases, amounts to some 50 per cent of the cost when the farmer goes to buy it from his agent.
If we were not being taxed to death in order to maintain this excessive debt load, then the prices of farm inputs would automatically go down and we would be more competitive on the world stage.