Jean-Guy Chrétien of the Bloc Quebecois. Jean-Guy on this side, not Jean on that side.
Mr. Chrétien pointed out that the government does not want the president to be appointed by members of the board of directors but by the governor in council. The Bloc is therefore moving that this appointment be considered by the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-food. We did not get the results we were hoping for when this bill was considered in committee, but we still believe in the strength of this committee and the interventions that must be made, and we think that the appointments should be subject to the approval of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-food.
This brings me to Motion No. 7. The proposed amendment would create a potential distinction between the powers, duties and functions of a director who is elected and those of one who is appointed. At this point, we have little or no idea of what this amendment would mean in practical terms, and in the absence of information, we are abstaining. We will therefore vote against.
Now comes Motion No. 8; I feel like a school teacher. In Motion No. 8, the proposed amendment would set the board's quorum at two-thirds of the board members and a ratio of two elected directors to one appointed director.
If we keep looking at what it wanted at the grassroots level, namely, greater control by grain producers, farmers and people who have a major interest in this bill, we do of course support an amendment that would see a quorum of at least two-thirds of the board members, thus twice as many elected directors. This is consistent with what we want, which is more board members who are producers. This is why we support this motion.
This brings us to Motion No. 9. Under this motion, the board, in consultation with the minister, decides the terms of removal of the president of the board and implements them. The amendment substitutes the chairman of the board for the president. We therefore support this amendment, because it puts power in the hands of the board. And as we want the amendments to increase the number of farmers to be agreed to, for reasons of consistency we support this motion.
This brings us to Motion No. 10. Under this amendment, in the bylaws for board members, the governor in council should give a vote to producers producing a certain quantity of grain.
I listened with considerable interest to remarks made in this House on this motion. However, the experience I have had in my riding of having many part time farmers and realizing that they provide strong and solid support to the agricultural community makes it hard for me to oppose their participation, however limited, in the Canadian Wheat Board. If the Canadian Wheat Board is there to efficiently market a crop—I heard some colleagues say this morning that it was a bit of a monopoly, but it is not a monopoly when it is in the hands of the producers, in my opinion—it is appropriate for all these producers, even the smallest ones, if the Canadian Wheat Board is a good one, to be protected by a structure for the marketing of their crop.
Of course, when a person has thousands of hectares, this may be an amusing question, but in real life we sometimes see part time farmers or small scale farmers end up as large scale ones. They all make a valuable contribution to agriculture and we find it very hard not to consider them all, to reject them. For this reason we will vote against this motion.
This leads us to Motion no. 11. Here the amendment makes it not the minister who makes regulations in consultation with the board, but the board which makes regulations in consultation with the minister.
This is a very subtle point, but basically the power is given to the people who have to do the administration, and not the minister. I have been surprised to hear very little reference to increased federal government power over the Canadian Wheat Board where there is a possibility of some difficulty with the rules of international trade.
This amendment returns much more power to the board of directors, and moves the minister onto the back burner. This may not be what our friends across the way are after, but I believe we must attain that objective if the Canadian Wheat Board is to be properly administered. That is why we will vote for Motion No. 11.
Motion No. 12 is much like 11. Moreover, in the motions that follow there are some things that overlap. That is why I will have far less to say about the following ones, for example, Motions Nos. 14 and 15. In Motion No. 14, the proposed amendment sets a limit for the mandate of the president to be determined by the board of directors, so in Motion No. 15 this should also be the board of directors and not the governor in council. We totally agree with this motion, which reduces the federal government's power to appoint someone to this position for an indeterminate period.
You can see that the same logic has been followed from the start and there is an attempt to give more power to farmers on the Canadian Wheat Board and the board of directors, and thus to move it a little away from the control of the federal government.
As for Motion No. 16, its purpose is to have the president implement measures no later than six months following the first election of the board of directors to include the Canadian Wheat Board as a signatory to the International Code of Ethics for Canadian Business. This, I believe, is self-evident. We will therefore vote in favour of this motion.
We shall do likewise for Motion No. 19, which is a consequence, or at least a corollary, of Motion No. 16, in which it is stated, as has already been mentioned, that the code of ethics governs the conduct of Canadian businesses abroad by ensuring that they do not exploit child labour and that they apply the same labour standards elsewhere as they do here. What this means, therefore, is that the Canadian Wheat Board must act as a good corporate citizen both here and elsewhere.
Now for Motion No. 17, the amendment on the absence or inability to act of the president, I think that this is a routine matter, this is normal. We will therefore vote for there to be a replacement when required.
Finally, to address Motion No. 18, where the amendment stipulates that the board members shall act in the performance of their duties with integrity and good faith, which I do not doubt. We will therefore vote in favour of this statement of good intention.