Mr. Speaker, I was under the mistaken impression growing up that this was a free country. I listened to what the hon. member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands was saying about the Gulag Archipelago and the treatment of Soviet citizens who dared to challenge the government. That was their crime. It was not that they challenged another member of society. It was not that they committed serious criminal acts but that they dared to challenge the government and paid the price.
That is why we see the disparity of treatment in this country. When anybody dares to challenge the government by directly defying what the government has ordered shall be, they will pay a very severe price indeed. I started out by saying that I thought this was a free country. As I grew older, I began to recognize that we actually live in a police state, and we do. We have environment police, we have tax police, we have land police, we have regulatory police. We even have in this country egg police and milk police.
Can you imagine the serious circumstances of the Canadian people if by God we did not control the production of eggs and we did not control the production of milk, butter and cream? What a threat to our national security that would be.
The only thing that we do not have is pork police. We should have because we know about all the pork that goes on on the other side.
As a person who lives on the west coast of British Columbia, and there is virtually no grain farming taking place in the riding I represent, I come to Ottawa and I get to understand the grain issue a little more. I find out that we have grain police and we have a country where a man or a family on their own piece of land, which they own and have bought and paid for, grows a crop, reaps that crop and sells it where the government tells them they are not allowed to sell it. What does the government do? As my hon. colleague said, it takes them away in shackles and chains, fines them tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, confiscates their equipment and just about drives them out of business.
This is not marijuana or heroin or cocaine. We are talking about grain. What does the government do? It takes the people and treats them like that.
I suggest, Mr. Speaker, that you can get away with this kind of treatment of your citizens for a time. The Liberal Party members are the ones who dreamed up the egg police, the milk police and the grain police. They want the government to control all aspects of our lives. There are also the gun police—