Then there is the story of Dexter Schmidt, a constituent of my riding of Peace River. This government has been telling farmers they should diversify. He has taken their advice. He has diversified into organic grain, but the wheat board does not sell organic grain because as soon as it is pooled with all the other wheat it loses its distinctiveness. He wanted the ability to sell it himself.
Of course the board cannot get these niche markets. They sell in boat loads and there is not enough production at this time in the organic grain market to make 20,000 tonnes. What has to happen to Mr. Schmidt? It is too much hassle for the board to administer the container loads. Is Mr. Schmidt allowed to do his own marketing? Only if he goes to the Canadian Wheat Board.
Here are the steps he must go through. First, he has to go to the elevator to sell his grain on contract. The elevator writes out the sales ticket. Mr. Schmidt writes out a buy back cheque for $36.94 a tonne. He also pays the elevator $5 a tonne administration fee. Now he owns his own grain. That is a major step. Now he can sell it as he pleases but he still has to wait a year to get back his original $36.94 a tonne and he may not see any of it at all, depending on how the board does on its marketing.
If he tries to bypass the board he commits a criminal offence and has to pay a penalty of $12,000 plus spend two years in jail. Does this make any sense?
Canada and Russia passed in the night about three years ago. Russia is going to a market system and where are we going? We are continuing with a very regressive system. This is an example of the type of thing we would hear from communist Russia 20 years ago.
These are just two examples of why I think the Canadian Wheat Board needs to be overhauled. I would start by ensuring that the commissioners are democratically elected by producers. After that, I think the board would change in the ways it needs to meet the 21st century.
Today's generation of commercial farmers want to substitute their management skills for the collective approaches that have dominated the past few decades. They see new opportunities in hot new markets like organic grains. Using their own skills and their own comparative advantages, they want to be free to grow crops and market them as they please, just the same as any other industry.
I want to take a moment to talk about the reports that were done for the Canadian Wheat Board and for the grain marketing panel. The Kraft report was referred to earlier. The Kraft report was done with selective information from the Canadian Wheat Board. It fed the panel certain information. That is a strange thing. Nobody else can get any information out of the Canadian Wheat Board.
This group was paid a certain amount of money to do a very selective report for the Canadian Wheat Board and was spoon fed the information. What did the report say? It was very complimentary to the board. It said that the board gets about $13 a tonne more for the grain when it sells all around the world than any other country or any other market would get. Does that make sense? If a company in Brazil was buying grain from us, why would it pay $13 a tonne more to the board than it would pay to anybody else? Maybe there is a quality issue here. That could be. But that same quality would exist whether the board marketed the grain or not. I think this Kraft report has to be discounted completely.
There was another report done by Colin Carter and Al Loyns. Their report states that they found just exactly the opposite. They said that the grain marketed by the board is costing farmers about $20 a tonne. The report was compiled without any benefit of Canadian Wheat Board information. In fact, they were stymied every step of the way trying to get information from the board.
This Canadian Wheat Board is acting very much like the department of defence these days. It has a bunker mentality and is hunkered down behind the barricades.
Then we have the famous Deloitte & Touche report. These are the people who are the Canadian Wheat Board's auditors. This firm was asked in 1992 to look at the board's management operations. What did it find? First, I have to say that the report was kept secret from 1992 until it was finally leaked and saw the light of day this winter. The report said that the Canadian Wheat Board has no corporate strategic plan, no formal marketing strategic plan, no clear plan for budgeting and managing information. Furthermore, the report reveals that the board is currently not conducting any value for money type reviews.
The minister of agriculture has told us all those things are being corrected. Who would know? The board does not report to anybody but the minister of agriculture and sometimes I wonder if it even reports to him.
My colleague has moved a motion that the auditor general should be able to review the Canadian Wheat Board books. This is a crown corporation. However, the Liberal Party voted against the motion on accountability to government. The Canadian Wheat Board is a crown corporation of government that cannot be audited by the auditor general. Shame.
This leaked information is especially disturbing because Deloitte & Touche is the Canadian Wheat Boards' own auditor. If it found that kind of incompetence, it would have to be fairly guarded in what it said. Imagine what it must have really looked like.
I do not have much time but I want to talk for a moment about the grain marketing panel that has been referred to here today. This is a whitewash. Mr. Molloy is heading up the grain marketing panel. He is a buddy of the minister of agriculture. What did this grain marketing panel do? The panel came to my riding. It had a facilitator go around and say: "Give us the information and we will tabulate it". Then there was a consensus at the end.
When a group of farmers in my area said they wanted to make a direct presentation to the panel, the facilitator said: "Okay, you can do that, but you have to come to Winnipeg". Imagine, they would have to travel all the way to Winnipeg from Grande Prairie, Alberta.
Then we called for the panel to hold hearings in the capitals of the three provinces, to at least make it easier for those people to present information. We had a major fight to get that to happen. This is supposed to be an open process. It was a major fight.
What did we find when we got to the grain marketing panel? A bunch of political hacks, in most cases. One member is a former member of the Manitoba pool. His sole contribution to the debate was: "Things cannot be too bad under the Canadian Wheat Board. I was out in the country the other day and I saw some farmers driving new pick-ups".
The Liberal government in this very House, less than a month ago, talked about a monopoly. It talked about a monopoly in the gas and oil industry. It said that gas prices are being controlled by a monopoly. It pales by comparison with the monopoly that the Canadian Wheat Board holds over farmers. It is a monopoly on the buy side only. There is only one buyer for wheat and barley that goes to export and that is the Canadian Wheat Board. Any other industry could not be controlled this way. Nobody would want it to be so.
I ask the question again: If the Canadian Wheat Board is so good why do we not have it in Ontario, Quebec and the maritimes so that the potato farmers can experience the joys of having the Canadian Wheat Board?
To whom does the Canadian Wheat Board answer? I had a discussion with a Canadian Wheat Board field representative in my riding recently. I held a series of meetings in my riding and people were concerned that they were not getting very good shipping of wheat out of the Peace River area. I phoned the Canadian Wheat Board and asked what the shipping schedule was for the next two or three weeks.
The next time I met this man he was quite offended that I had not talked to him. He asked me what was my interest in this. I answered that as the member of Parliament, the government representative, I represented these constituents who are concerned that they are not able to move their product. He then asked me what it had to do with me as it was not a government matter. When I mentioned that the Canadian Wheat Board is a crown corporation, he said: "Technically that might be so, but we do not answer to the politicians". I said: "Who do you answer to? Do you answer to the farmers?" He said: "No, we do not answer to them either". There is the answer. They are completely unaccountable.
Let us try this system and let the farmers choose what they want. If they want the Canadian Wheat Board working alongside with a dual marketing agency, that is fine. If they choose the Canadian Wheat Board alone for their product, that is fine. If they choose the private sector completely, that is fine too. The choice should be made by the farmers, not by the Liberal lawyers on the other side who have no experience whatsoever in this area.