Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the member for Vegreville's comments concerning the Canadian Wheat Board. In my former life I also farmed, admittedly in Ontario. I also grew wheat and I also shipped it and was quite happy to ship it to the Ontario wheat marketing board.
I listened with great interest to the member talking about the need for flexibility. I live in an agricultural community. Most of my farmers are involved with the marketing board. They are all happy. They fought long and hard to establish those boards. There was one basic reason. Generally speaking in agriculture there are many producers and there are very few buyers.
The member talked endlessly about the international market and so forth. The reality is that with 125,000 producers there will not be that many buyers. Invariably what happens when that situation occurs is buyers start to conglomerate and pick off these producers. That has actually been the history of prairie grain farmers and farmers throughout the country. That is why so many farmers, whether out west or in Ontario or Quebec or whatever, have formed producer organized marketing systems.
It seems the member wants to go back in history and create a free market economy where there really is none. There is none because we do not have the same number of buyers as we have producers. All the profits from the Canadian Wheat Board go back to the farmers. It is obvious to me and I do not know why it is not obvious to the member. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot have a pool marketing system on the one hand and also have a whole bunch of other farmers outside of it.