Madam Speaker, I hope I have as much time to answer as the member had to rant and rail.
I addressed most of the answers in my speech. I was very clear to underscore that I did not want this to become a spitting match to see who could run up the highest score. Obviously we can talk about a lot of ways the wheat board has failed. That is not the purpose of the motion. The purpose of the motion is to break the log jam we are currently in.
The hon. member for Malpeque talked about his great experience with western agriculture-I am sure, coming from Prince Edward Island. He suggests that only through the Canadian Wheat Board do we have reliability. That is a slap in the face to canola producers who have had to leave wheat to keep their farms above water. They would have gone broke during the tough years of the eighties and nineties had they not been able to market outside the Canadian Wheat Board.
My father was a pioneer on the prairies. When he was a lot younger than I am now he had to load 60 bushels into a wagon and pull it 26 miles with horses. There was one buyer at the end of that trip. Whatever that buyer offered him for the grain was the price he had to take. If he did not want to take it, he had to drive the 60 bushels all the way back to the granary. It did not make sense. He could not even phone ahead. There were no fax machines. There was no modern method of communication. That was in the 1920s.
Now we are almost in the 21st century. We have fax machines. We have more marketing options available than my father could have dreamed of when he was driving those bushels to market.
Dual marketing has been done and it can be done. The member has the attitude that it cannot be done. I guess he cannot do it. That is fine. That is his problem, not the problem of the prairie producers. I mentioned that Australia uses dual marketing. It has been done in Canada. It has worked. It has not been a problem.
The member said that if we do not market through the Canadian Wheat Board the mark will be set by the lowest price. That is not the case in other commodities. It certainly was not the case with canola. It certainly was not the case with peas. It certainly is not the case with potatoes. I wonder why it happens to be the case with wheat. It does not make sense. What is it about wheat? Is it because it is a different colour than potatoes or flax? Is it because it is a different weight than barley or oats? Is that why it will draw the lowest price? I wish the member would get his facts together and be a little more forthright with members in the House.
I mentioned there is a log jam. There is a big fight going on in the prairies. The minister of agriculture is upset because people are crossing the border without getting wheat board permits as required under the wheat board act.
Why do we not do something positive to fix this mess rather than continuing the fight? Why do we not let these people out of the wheat board if they want to market elsewhere?
There was a member of the Liberal Party who was not very happy with what the Liberal Party was doing about the GST. That member had the right to get out of the Liberal Party and sit as an independent member, but the Liberals will not allow prairie producers in western Canada the option to market on their own. If they do worse, that is their problem but they should at least have the same right as the hon. member for York South-Weston who got out of the Liberal caucus.