Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in the next grouping of motions that are before the House this afternoon. Specifically, we are looking at Motions Nos. 2, 31 and 41 as has already been outlined by previous speakers.
As I listened carefully to the mover of two of those three motions, it was clear that on Motion No. 2 what the mover of the motion is seeking is the ability of a province to opt out of the Canadian Wheat Board. Motion No. 31 deals with a contingency fund and Motion No. 41 deals with the exclusion clause as well and obviously the inclusion clause is part of both of those, as has been pointed out.
What is beginning to become clear is now that we are past the words in the preamble, the support by the members in the opposition for the Canadian Wheat Board is like Liberal support on the prairies, a mile wide and an inch deep. That is particularly true of some of the speeches that have been coming forward.
With respect to Motion No. 2, clearly what is at play here would be, as the member for Prince George—Peace River pointed out, that a province such as Alberta could opt out. Obviously a move like that would totally cripple the Canadian Wheat Board. We certainly would oppose any reference to an opting out provision.
Of the three motions that are before us, Motion No. 31 is critical. It would delete clause 8 which deals with using any profits from bonds, debentures, notes or other evidence of indebtedness in payment of expenses incurred by the corporation or putting money into the contingency fund.
It seems to me that some members of this House, in particular members of the Official Opposition, want to eliminate any reference to a contingency fund and so does our caucus, but I think we have different motives in mind. What is at stake here is to delete any reference to the contingency fund and not to have any borrowing contingencies from the federal government. In other words, the Canadian Wheat Board would stand or fall on its own.
We are not supportive of that. We do support the wheat board and recognize that there needs to be government guarantees along this line. In fact, we want to see the government guarantees be the same as they have always been for the Canadian Wheat Board. This has not been a big drain on Canadian taxpayers to have had that kind of support.
It seems to us to be a very difficult argument to persuade western Canadian wheat and barley growers that a new, improved wheat board bill is going to be good for them and at the same time have significant increased input costs, costs of production, to maintain the contingency fund.
We tried during committee stage to have some estimate of how big that contingency fund might be. We never did get a satisfactory response from government officials, although some people have put it as high as $575 million. Whether that is 10% of the value of the Canadian Wheat Board, I do not know where that figure comes from, but it is from usually reliable sources.
We do not know and farmers obviously do not know how big that contingency fund is going to have to be or how much they are going to have to pay for it. We certainly reject the idea of a contingency fund.
As I said earlier, we would like to see the Government of Canada continue to have the borrowing authority for the Canadian Wheat Board, more correctly, to be able to go through the government for its borrowing requirements on an annual basis.
The Canadian Wheat Board, it seems to me, is a classic example of farmers in this case banding together to create an entity which would allow them to do collectively what they could not do individually or separately.
Because there has been a lot of chatter about the history of the wheat board and how it was invoked on an unwilling farm community in western Canada, I would like to quote from an eminent Manitoba historian, Gerald Friesen, who says that Prime Minister Bennett's cabinet was under enormous pressure to relieve the burdens of farmers and to judge by the leaders of prairie farm movements, the prairie preference was for a national wheat marketing board.
Farmers supported the wheat board in the dirty thirties and they are still supporting it in the nebulous nineties as we saw from the vote last year, to the member from the Reform Party. Sixty-seven per cent, as a matter of fact, of the barley growers voted to have the board continue marketing their crop.