Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed the hon. member's remarks but I have questions on two issues that he raised.
One is the deregulation of transportation which he has been advocating. I wonder what the arguments are in favour of doing that given our experience this past crop year in shipping into a deregulated market, namely the United States which is relatively deregulated in transport. Our hopper cars hauling wheat and durum into the United States have a turnaround time of something in the order of 40 days or more before they are dumped and returned in a deregulated system. In Canada under regulation the turnaround time is 13 to 15 days.
I wonder if he would comment on the advantages of deregulation given that experience. Would he also explain a little further why he was so critical of the proposed high tariffs on butter and dairy products between ourselves and the United States and
other countries. In reality most of the likely trade in dairy products will be between Canada and the United States.
Given the fact that it is impossible for us to export anything into the United States by way of dairy products, the reality is that its tariffs will be as high or higher than ours given that it has had a GATT waiver all these years on dairy products.
This is one of the reasons that Canada was very loathe to implement the GATT ruling that the U.S. got prior to these last negotiations forcing us to open our markets to its yogurt and ice cream. The facts of the situation are that if we had opened the border we could have bought ice cream and yogurt, put it in the freezer or fridge of our motorhome in order to go down to Arizona and hit the border only to find that we could not take those American products into the United States because it was absolutely illegal to take dairy products the other way.
I wonder if the member would tell us about deregulation and if he does not recognize that there may be some fairness to the high tariffs on dairy products.