I hear a voice in the wilderness telling me that there have been substantive changes. I suppose that the reference will be to this remarkable new elected board, a board which will be ruled in effect by appointees from Ottawa who will tell them what to do, when to do it and how to do it. With 10 elected members, the government need only get three of those ten to agree with their appointed hacks and they will have the majority. This is democracy?
The CEO is a government appointee. Give me a break. This is not democracy. This is pseudo-democracy. This is a Soviet type of democracy, if I may use the term loosely.
This brings me to the point that we do not have questions and comments at report stage. I did want to make a comment to the hon. member for Wild Rose when he was expressing surprise at the discrepancy in sentencing of people who committed serious criminal offences and those who broke the wheat board regulations.
I would suggest to him that he should read a very excellent book entitled The Gulag Archipelago in which it is spelled out very clearly that in the prison system in the Soviet Union the people who were most severely dealt with were those who had committed political crimes. Ordinary criminals who merely robbed, raped, or killed people were treated relatively leniently even in the camps. However, it was the political criminals who were nailed to the wall. I think the hon. member should take that into consideration. It is very easy to explain if one stops and thinks about it.