Madam Speaker, the hon. member opposite indicates that he listened to me and my hon. colleagues say something different than what is happening now in relation to agricultural subsidies. It is quite obvious that he was not paying close attention to what was happening in Prince Albert-Churchill River if that is what he thinks.
It has always been my position that while we do need agricultural support programs, we need them at such a level where they are adequate and predictable, where they are not changing week after week as has been happening in Saskatchewan over the last number of years, where everybody is going to know what the rules are.
Specifically with respect to the Crow benefit, it was indicated during the election that what would happen with the Crow benefit was subject to what happened at the GATT negotiations which occurred after the election. This was clearly stated to the public, to the farmers. The GATT negotiations necessitate change and we are doing the change, which is exactly what we said during the election campaign.
With respect to the hon. member's talk about MPs' pensions, when members of the Reform Party opposite table in this House a letter from the Alberta government saying that one of its members no longer accepts a big pension while he is sitting here as a member of this House earning a salary, when the hon. Reform Party also sets forth a letter from national defence and the RCMP saying that members who are retired from those areas are not getting those federal pensions, then perhaps we can talk
about the views of the federal pension plans. There is a great deal of hypocrisy within the Reform Party on the issue of pensions.
This government said exactly what it would do in the red book with respect to MP pensions and has gone even further than it said in the red book. This government lives up to our commitments. We lived up to them before. We will live up to them in the future. The judgment has been made by the international monetary markets and all Canadians as to the success of our budgetary endeavours.