Mr. Speaker, on October 3, I rose to put a question to the minister of agriculture asking him to justify the apparent changes in policy direction that have occurred with regard to the $1.6 billion ex gratia payment to offset the decline in farmland prices that would result from cutting the Crow benefit. It was contained in the budget. It appeared that the $1.6 billion would go to land owners free of current capital gain tax. It would simply accrue to the land and therefore would not be taxable in the year received.
Since that time a number of changes occurred. Some of them were hinted at in the budget speech but others were simply outright decisions that were made, notably changes to permit people who were renting the land to apply for some of the payment. However there was no similar treatment for those people in terms of a share they might negotiate from the land holder. Any share they might negotiate from the owner of the land would be taxable as income in the year received.
They could not apply it to any land or property they might own now and were therefore treated differently. Because about 40 per cent of land in most provinces is rented it seems to some observers like a rather clever and devious way for the government to collect income tax on money it had announced was to be paid out on a non-taxable basis. That is one complaint that I raised.
The other was that there seemed to be a very ill defined standard for what lands would be eligible. It looked as if all farmland, presumably land that was cultivated at one time or now and used for crops, would under the government's estimation lose value. Therefore this payment was presumably to go to those lands. Yet as the nature of the program became clearer land seeded to permanent crops, forage, alfalfa and so on, were not eligible simply by definition somewhere throughout the system.
Yet crops that were to be used for forage, such as barley or oats for cattle feed or livestock feed either as silage or as grain, are eligible. Even stranger, summer fallow which grows absolutely nothing was eligible on the same basis as land that was growing crops. This seemed to run contrary to everything the Department of Agriculture had been attempting to convey to farmers over the previous 10 or 15 years, namely to get into a diversity of crops, to plant crops that would hold the soil in place and keep down wind erosion. They were encouraging continuous cropping to keep stubble. I would submit that forage crops are also a form of continuous cropping. They hold the stubble and the ground. They are part of the diversification program, not only for use within the country but also for export.
The government and perhaps some of the farm organizations that were negotiating with the government left those farmers off the list. I wanted to raise that in question period and again this evening in the adjournment debate.