Mr. Speaker, this summer I watched as the prairies produced one of the best crops I have ever seen or ever heard about. Wheat, oats, barley, canola, peas, lentils and even the hay crops were good.
Prior to the harvest the sun came out and baked the fields for several days.
These were marvellous pre-harvest conditions. Farmers across the prairies began their harvest in earnest. Then the rain hit. For almost three weeks during the time when the combines should have been running full out, very little harvesting took place.
According to official records, about 50 per cent of the crop came off the fields and got put in the bins before the rain came. Just as the rain stopped and the weather forecasters predicted clearing and warming, the frost hit and then it snowed.
As members have seen on TV, more than an inch of heavy snow hit my part of Saskatchewan on the last weekend in September, a time that is a traditional prime harvest period. Now, during the past two days, more than a foot of heavy snow has hit standing crops in Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba.
Farmers are beginning to worry. The summer had produced a lot of optimism at a time when optimism was sorely needed but hardly deserved. Farmers know they had just come off 10 very bad years. Incomes had dropped substantially, crops had been poor, interest rates were high, prices were depressed and bankruptcies were occurring too frequently.
More recently, Tory governments in Saskatchewan and Ottawa had changed the way agricultural emergencies were financed. In other words, what used to be a federal responsibility became a shared responsibility. The province had less of an ability to finance agricultural emergencies than did the federal government.
Therefore a new safety net program, the GRIP, came and went in a flash as a result. When the government changed, the Liberal government in Ottawa maintained the cost sharing principles and is currently negotiating with the provinces to establish a new crop insurance program.
The changes to be made to the crop insurance have not yet been agreed to, let alone implemented. At the same time, the new Liberal government did away with the Crow benefit, a program designed to share the cost of transporting grain from the farm gate on the prairies to the ports on the coast with all Canadian taxpayers. This move immediately increases the costs of operating the farm.
Other input costs have increased. As a result, a lot more money than usual has been put into the ground or paid to railways this year in preparation for the year's harvest.
A good crop this year was necessary not only to pay the bills but to make up for the debts created from past years. Let us face it, everyone was looking forward to a good crop and is still hoping that little damage has been done by the weather.
Yes, we may take in a good crop but we cannot ignore the fact that farming depends on the weather. If the weather does not co-operate, we as a nation cannot afford to just let farmers go. We cannot afford to lose our capacity to produce food for the world and to generate the revenues necessary to maintain rural populations.
Therefore even in good times it is important for governments to ensure that contingency plans are in place just in case there is a crop failure or something happens to reduce the incomes necessary to produce the next year's crops.
I ask the minister if these contingency plans are indeed in place so that we can reduce the stress already being felt in the farming community.