I thank all hon. members for their kindness.
I wanted to deal with the inequity of the situation in agriculture because it lies at the heart of the problem, at least from the Quebec viewpoint. There are numerous examples of inequities between Quebec and western Canada.
Grain transportation is a case in point. Grain traffic on the St. Lawrence seaway is constantly being eroded and diverted to west coast ports. Since 1984, the volume of grain moved through the seaway has been halved, dropping from million 12 to 6 million tonnes.
In 1993 the volume of goods shipped through the seaway was 32 million tonnes, a 50 per cent reduction compared with 15 years ago. Glen Stewart, the chairman of the St. Lawrence seaway authority, says the Western Grain Transportation Act encourages producers to ship their grain through Pacific coast ports. That stands to reason since we have more buyers in the far east, but why is it that millions of tonnes of grain shipped to Africa and Europe also move through West coast ports and Panama?
The dice are loaded because westbound grain shipments are subsidized all the way to the Pacific coast whereas subsidies for eastbound grain stop at the lakehead, which is still thousands of kilometres from the Atlantic ocean. Would it not be normal that such subsidies apply a mari usque ad mare, from coast to coast?
Why should western Canada get better treatment than eastern Canada? Right from the beginning, Canadian agricultural policies were developed mainly to meet the needs of western grain producers and worked against the interests of farmers in Quebec. To make up for the deficiencies of their policies and the unfairness of federal transfers to Quebec, we Quebecers have had to develop our own programs adapted to Quebec's realities.
It goes without saying that this situation is very costly for Quebec's taxpayers. The taxes paid by Quebecers for agriculture have mostly benefited western farmers. As I already said, the prairies' share of federal funds rose to 64 percent from 42 per cent, while Quebec's share diminished from 30 per cent to 10 per cent.
Of course the federal government spent money to help the west diversify. In the last five years, hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent to diversify western agriculture, while the federal government never contributed anything to the diversification of Quebec's agriculture.
There are a vast number of cases in which we can very clearly see that the federal governement is less and less interested in Quebec's agriculture. Maybe this is good for Quebec's producers because they are very well organized. In fact, I believe they will benefit in a big way from sovereignty.
This may be good but let us take the example of UHT milk made in Quebec, a high quality product which held 40 per cent of the market for this kind of product in Puerto Rico, where the Americans tried to block Quebec exports of UHT milk and succeeded. We are not selling any more UHT milk in Puerto Rico. In this case, the federal governement did nothing to protect this $40 million production. However, at the same time in the beer dispute between Ontario and the USA the federal government intervened very rapidly.
I mentioned diversification of agriculture, but there is another example, the railways. In the west we maintain close to 25,000 kilometres of railway lines for the sake of national unity, while we are abandoning thousands of kilometres of lines in the east, particularly in Quebec.
Here is another example. New Brunswick potato growers know that their production is subsidized. Transportation for their potatoes is subsidized at 50 per cent.
No other producers are subsidized at 50 p. 100 for the transportation of their potatoes, so New Brunswick producers can sell their potatoes in Quebec cheaper than Quebec producers.
The same goes for Prince Edward Island, and there are more examples like that one. It is as if the government wants to crush Quebec. Once again poor negotiation strategies at the GATT talks have contributed to scaring Canadian producers. We have the feeling that the federal government does not want to protect farmers, but rather create a very serious instability in quota production. And here we have that crisis in the Ontario chicken market where production is being considerably increased, jeopardizing all quota production in Quebec.
I will conclude with these very brief words. I am convinced that Quebec's farmers will be the first to benefit from Quebec's sovereignty, because when Quebec recovers the money that it is paying to the west to subsidize agriculture, that money will go directly to the regions and toward social and economic infrastructures, schools, education and services. That money will reinforce Quebec's regions, promote agriculture and even enlist Quebec into a democratization process, which is what we wish for everybody.