It is absolutely ridiculous. All they are asking for in the region of Wild Rose is an opportunity to market their own product, the same opportunity for every individual producer or manufacturer of any kind in the whole country.
Why are they being targeted as the ones who cannot? They are asking for that opportunity. They are not asking to scrap the wheat board. They want to keep the wheat board as an option, as one of the choices they may make in marketing their goods. If they choose to do that, fine. If they choose not to, they should have the freedom to do so. That is common sense.
When I was a young fellow farming and raising crops I did not decide where we sold our grain. My dad did. He shopped around. Although it was in a different country, we would load the truck and he would instruct me on where to deliver the grain. He had made some phone calls and had chosen the place where he would deliver his grain. Guess why he chose the place? It was because he was maximizing his profits. It was the best price.
I would drive to that place. Provided it passed a required test to pay the price I would deliver the grain. If the test was not quite as good as they wanted it, I would go to another place that would take the grain, maybe at a lower price. We had choices all over.
What those people did after they bought the grain, whether they exported it to China, to Japan or to Russia, we did not know. We had the choice on how to maximize our profits. That was fairly nice. We did not have a body of people accountable to no one to tell us what we should do with our grain. We did not have to get something signed by a group of wheat board individuals about whose expertise we were not too certain.
The government is asking farmers in the western prairies to continue the same process. Bill C-4 does not change anything. Even the agricultural minister from Alberta writes that it was extremely disappointing to discover the changes served only to continue government control of grain marketing, that no other industry or no other individual was being treated in this unique manner, and that in many respects it was something requiring close scrutiny before passage of the proposed legislation.
The minister of agriculture in Alberta pointed out a number of things in his letter that were wrong with the legislation. Much of it applied simply to the fact that they lived in a free country. When will they start giving people the freedom they ought to have to do with their product as they see fit?
They are the ones that sweat hard. They are the ones who put the seed in the ground. They are the ones who try to chase the hail clouds away. They do not even know if they will get a grain crop into the bin, but when they get there they should be allowed to own it and to choose how to market it. It is their crop.