Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question.
My experience with the farm community is they can use as much help as they can get. Farmers often tell us that they are not getting enough access to capital and they wish the government would do more.
It seems incredible to me that the member for Frontenac would try to minimize the amount of access that the farm community in Quebec has to the financial institutions in that province.
Farmers can never have enough. The more people who are active in the business of financing farms the better. Certainly the federal government has shown for as long as I can remember its commitment to farming from sea to sea. I do not believe that the farmers of Quebec would want to lose that benefit.
The second point that the hon. member made was the concept that people cannot be represented here because of one language or another. I do not apologize but I am unilingual English. I have attempted to learn French from time to time but I have not been very successful. I guess I am not a good scholar in languages.
The Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food represents all the farmers of Canada and has done so ever since I have been here. He has been to the GATT and NAFTA negotiations. I know he negotiates in the best interest of Canada from sea to sea to sea, which includes those interests which affect the farmers of Quebec.
I am very honoured that the minister of agriculture represents the agricultural community as well as he does. He has a very balanced approach. He very much tries to balance the interests of the agricultural sector in Quebec within the country as he does with all provinces. I have heard him on numerous times talking about a balanced approach, that we do not trade off one sector of commodities against another. That is nothing but good for Quebec and Canada and the operations of stable agricultural markets within our country.
I must confess I do not know the name of the agriculture minister in Quebec. I do not know the one in Ontario either. The one I do know is the federal minister of agriculture who represents us so well.
(Motion agreed to, bill read the third time and passed.)