moved that Bill C-266, an act respecting the orderly marketing of potatoes, be read the second time and referred to a legislative committee.
Mr. Speaker, I am proposing a private member's bill today that would have the effect of creating a national marketing agency for potatoes.
As I go through the reasons for the bill members will see that probably there are simpler ways of dealing with this problem. However because Parliament in the past 20 years has been loath to adopt a simpler way and has forced the dealing of national agencies commodity by commodity, I am following that process.
During the course of my remarks I will point out a simpler way. First let us recall that marketing boards are a relatively new method of dealing with the bargaining power vis-à-vis sellers and buyers. It dates back to the 1930s when New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom brought in marketing board legislation. Canada followed shortly thereafter with its first major marketing board, the wheat marketing board, introduced by a Conservative government in 1935.
The wheat board still exists. It has only undergone a few minor amendments and changes in the intervening years. Numerous provincial boards and agencies exist across the country with only a handful of agencies operating on a national basis. Chicken, turkey, eggs, hatching eggs and dairy products join wheat and barley, and western wheat and barley at that, as products marketed by national marketing agencies.
I argue this is a very slow progress. Agricultural producers are being forced to adopt very ancient means as private individuals in what has become a huge international market. Buyers have control in dozens of countries, being the principal buyers, and
the bargaining power between the buyers and sellers is not even close to equal.
Even though some people might argue that the new information technology permits people on farms to link into the latest marketing information. Information alone does not provide those farmers with the ultimate marketing power that they require, namely, to be able to fill a whole shipload of a product and to provide hundreds of boxcar loads of the product to a particular purchaser in the required time, of the required volumes and grades necessary. Only an agency acting on behalf of all of the producers can hope to perform that function.
The fact that information is a little faster now than it was in the 1930s does not address the real problem of marketing, which is the ability to put together large amounts of product to fit the needs of the very large corporate buyers that are buying internationally these days.
In the 1970s Parliament had an opportunity to put a bill before the country that would permit the various provincial marketing boards. These have to be put together on a provincial basis because, as members know, agriculture production is under the aegis of the provinces in our Constitution.
It is only when the product is marketed across borders that the federal sphere is infringed on and federal rights are taken into account. Therefore provincial marketing boards that wish to market product that is handled by a marketing board in another province have to apply to the federal jurisdiction for the power to go beyond their borders.
This is usually granted relatively simply. However it does not take away the problem that exists for all commodities not already under a national plan of competing one province against the other.
I was involved in the early 1970s in putting together a marketing board for hogs in the province of Saskatchewan. It was at about the same time that similar boards were put together in Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia. They each followed the example of Ontario a few years previous to that.
We had worked very hard to come together as those four western provinces to offer hogs to foreign and domestic buyers over one desk. We had political agreement. We had agreement from the farmers involved. Yet when the final signatures were required on all the multitude of agreements that this required, the heads of each of the boards found it very difficult to put their signatures to paper because that would have seen the demise of at least three of the positions. We do not need four presidents in order to run one regional marketing board. It fell down at that level.
We need some federal guidelines and federal guidance if we are going to be able to achieve the coming together that is required if producers of the various commodities are going to be efficient and useful in meeting the market trends that are out there right now.
The marketing board concept is really not much different for those who are interested in history of marketing than the power the state gave four and five hundred years ago to corporations. It is a power that over time has been granted to corporations simply on application.
Even up to 30 or 40 years ago to strike a new corporation, the provisional board of directors had to come to the House of Commons and the Senate in order for that corporation to be set in motion and to be created. That has not been the case for many decades.
Yet in order for farmers to form an organization that would have similar powers in the marketplace, this ancient institution still requires that a special bill be prepared and that special requirements be made. We still have to be very cognizant of the federal-provincial powers. We have to go through the process of proposing, as I am, a shell of an agency that would be able to function nationally that the provincial agencies can link into.
Passing this legislation would not instantly create a national marketing agency. It would only be an effective national agency when the provincial marketing boards decide to avail themselves of the powers that are there in the federal act which would be passed.
This slow, cumbersome process could have been sped up if in the early 1970s when the farm products marketing councils were established, and the national farm products marketing act which brought those agencies into effect had permitted the usage of national legislation for all farm products. However, there was some agitation on the part of mainly Alberta cattlemen concerning rights to establish an agency that would include management of supply, which is only a normal thing for any marketing agency.
Ask General Motors, Ford or Beatrice Foods. Any of the big players always have a good handle on their supplies. They are manufacturing the product. They make certain they do not manufacture or process more than they have sales for. They make certain they are able to manage the product so it arrives at the customer's door on the day the customer wants it; not later, not sooner, right on time. This is the kind of service the marketing boards have performed and can perform for producers who are part of a marketing agency.
The problem with the provincial agencies is that they often are not large enough to meet the kind of bargaining conditions of the corporations they deal with. Most of the processors and handlers of potatoes are huge international conglomerates. They have access to markets all over the world. When dealing with a
little potato board from Prince Edward Island or Manitoba the farmers very quickly find that they do not have very much clout when it comes to dictating terms of price and terms and conditions of how many potatoes will be produced, how they will be produced and what price the processor will pay for them. The people who are handling fresh potatoes to supermarket also have extremely large bargaining clout in that there are very few supermarket chains across North America that the producers must face on a day to day basis.
The marketing agency can provide the management of the product to the final destination on time and at the most beneficial price to the producer rather than always at the behest of the various buyers who can very quickly take advantage of a day when individual producers through their own unco-ordinated activities may be offering-usually they are offering-far more product on any given day than the system needs. Therefore they are always accepting a much less than optimal price because they are presenting for sale far more product than they are able to sell and deliver. As far as the buyer is concerned that surplus of product is always available to them. They take advantage of that, keeping the price lower than it would otherwise be.
Management of supply is more possible under marketing boards. I would note that we have other ways of managing supply. Notable and somewhat ironic, given their long opposition to any legislation that would permit supply management for all general farm products including beef, are the official cattlemen associations based in Alberta and to a certain extent in southwestern Saskatchewan. They have always argued that they are free marketers, that they do not want to have anything to do with supply management. It is ironic and somewhat instructive to note that they are probably one industry that has been very effective at controlling supplies into North America, particularly the Canada-U.S. markets. They have managed by other means to put political pressure where it matters and have limited on a consistent basis the amount of imports, whether from Ireland and the European economic community or whether from New Zealand and Australia. By setting quotas on those imports they are indulging in supply management.
The advantages of the seller versus the buyer are being eschewed by cattle producers in most areas right now. For some time there was a very effective marketing agency in Saskatchewan that was strictly voluntary where producers could market through the beef marketing commission and that gained quite a lot of acceptance and approval. However, for political reasons that was struck down by the government of Grant Devine a few years ago. Farmers are now back in the business of negotiating their own prices each day. They find, when they compare notes, that they are not being treated equitably for the same day's market.
I found when I began drafting this legislation that the simplest answer would have been to amend the Natural Products Marketing Act so that we pull out the sections the cattlemen insisted on being in there in the early 1970s which would have had the effect of permitting all fruits, vegetables, tobacco, farm products, honey, meats, cereals and oilseeds. Every farm product would have been the simplest solution but I was told that this would somehow impinge upon the royal prerogative because a small section of that act permits the government to finance such new agencies. Private members do not have the privilege of establishing a law or adding to a law that would perhaps cost the government some money out of the consolidated revenue fund.
I have had to resort to setting up what is, I admit, a shell agency that has no funds. It would simply exist and be funded by producers as the provincial agencies decide to become part of a national agency and use this as a forum or beginning again a debate as to whether producers of potatoes would have some benefit by using a national marketing agency.
This has been a program that many producers have engaged in several times in the last couple of decades. In the early 1970s there was a determined effort to put together a national marketing agency for potatoes. The legislation was being worked upon. The plan was being worked upon. A very detailed proposal was put forward. Somehow it fell apart. Twice since that time similar efforts have gone forward, only to be stopped at the political level.
I wish the new group of parliamentarians in the House now-almost 200 people who have never been here before-would again think about the issue, look at the possibilities here and bring agricultural marketing into the 20th if not the 21st century and bring us up to date with the corporate sector which for more than 500 years has had the ability to simply go to government and get immediate acceptance for its application to allow many people to come together under one agency and take advantage of all of the benefits that such a coming together reaps.
By persisting on keeping the old National Products Marketing Act which was flawed from the beginning on the books would be something like going back in time and saying corporations can be established but only to gather and market furs, because in Canada the Hudson Bay Company was one of the first corporations to function on our soil even though the idea of a corporation had existed in Europe some time before.
It is time for us to be brought up to date to permit our farmers to use all of the tools that their competitors and their opponents in the market have. I would urge members of Parliament to
consider giving that right to farmers to form national agencies for all products, but specifically here today for potatoes.