Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today and address this issue. We have looked at different types of legislation and I know that a lot of the farm problems are not just in one or two of the bills. The problems we have tried to address are in at least six, seven or eight acts that the minister of agriculture has jurisdiction over. We have to take into account that just by addressing a few of the acts does not resolve the problems that farmers have.
The parliamentary secretary mentioned this act more or less amalgamates three acts, the Advance Payments for Crops Act, the Prairie Grain Advance Payments Act and the Agricultural Products Co-operative Marketing Act. Amalgamating these four programs is going in the right direction. There is no doubt about that. If we can take the bureaucracy out of farm acts or out of farm legislation it is only going to be a benefit for farmers.
The Reform Party is very much in favour of reducing the costs of administration, reducing the bureaucracy and the red tape that farmers have to deal with when they conduct their business. I think I made it clear yesterday in committee that harmonization of chemical registration and food inspection is a very important issue as well as these acts.
It is only fair to show how unfair sometimes our legislation deals with farmers. When I look at the millers' testimony before the standing committee here just a few days ago they were allowed to import U.S. grain without wheat board control and as far as milling or processing their product was concerned. But when farmers find a market for their American unlicensed grains they are growing in the U.S. at $2 a bushel higher than in Canada, they are thrown in jail.
That is not a fair way to treat one sector of our economy. We allow one thing to happen that is beneficial to the value added industry but then the producers of the raw product who are trying to capture the market are denied access to that market. Those are things that farmers object to and those are things that farmers will take into consideration when they go to the polls in the next election.
We support maintaining the advanced payments for crop programs since they are shown to be a stabilizing influence on the marketplace while maintaining an acceptable level of default
exposure for taxpayers. Farmers are pretty honest generally and try to do their very best to keep their end of the bargain.
We see that the Liberal government is very short on keeping promises. It is very easy to make quick promises but to implement them is a little harder to do. One of those promises was there would be a spring cash advance which should be interest free. I know the member for Malpeque argued for it strongly but being a Liberal backbencher he does not seem to have that much clout in having his own government listen to him.
We in the Reform Party were supporters of that issue, saying it should be increased at least to $50,000 and included in the other advance programs so that farmers were treated equally. There are some Liberal backbenchers who do get the right idea sometimes but because there is not a democracy on the government side of the House they have very little clout or impact.
We saw that happen on the backtracking issue when every member on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food said that it should be stopped and it was costing us millions and millions of dollars. We wasted something like $60 million of taxpayer money by backtracking grain before it finally was done away with by scrapping the western grain transportation act.
Those are things that farmers would appreciate action being taken on when brought before the House, and not just a quick promise before the next election that we will look at this in the September sitting of the House or in the new Parliament, which is what I heard yesterday when I was talking about the pilotage fees that were charged to grain transportation.
The Reform Party proposed some amendments to this bill which would have ensured a more responsible implementation of the bill. One dealt with regulations made by governor in council that dealt with government contingency liability in the legislation. We see that it is the direction this government seems to want to take, that more things should be done by order in council rather than by the House itself. This is a very bad direction in which we are going. In the next election taxpayers and voters will make that message very clear to this government.
We wanted to have the regulations presented to the House of Commons, but no one would listen. No one seems to care. The attitude is "we are the government and we do as we please".
We wanted farmers to have access to that emergency advance but no, as we heard, the government would not allow it. We wanted the government to eliminate the purchases program and treat all agriculture organizations equally.
When I look at certain issues that have come before the House it astounds me that at times we just look at one of the industries and forget that it is affecting the other industries.
When we saw offshore beef coming here a year or so ago, increased from the GATT allocations of something like 75,000 tonnes to 115,000 tonnes, we forgot how many jobs that took away. Our farmers had to export their cows into the U.S. to get them slaughtered. That took away at least three jobs to every one we created by bringing in this extra offshore beef.
Not only that, the countries that were shipping this beef into our country have an export balance that is positive. We had to borrow that money to finance these imports. To me that is not the way to run a business or a country.
When we look at running this country, it should be run on the basis of a business. If it is not going to show a bottom line that is in the positive then we should scrap it.
Also one of the Reform amendments was voted down because it was not really very advantageous politically at that time. It may be different now.
This shows that the Liberal red book promise to give MPs a greater role in drafting legislation is a hollow promise and one more broken promise that Liberals will have to explain to the electorate.
We wanted to have the committee become more democratic. We wanted to have the committee read the red book and then implement the promises. The record is there. It will be of real advantage to us on the campaign trail to once in a while wave it and say here are the promises, see how they were kept.
It will be a pleasure to have the back-up material that we will really need in this next election. Sometimes these promises, if they are put down in writing, have a disadvantage for people later.
I have to admire my colleague from Yorkton-Melville when he started mentioning a few things on the wheat board issue. We see again that in the last six months or so we have a real problem in getting our grain moved.
The wheat board blames it on the railways. The railways blame it on the weather and the Liberals probably blame it on God, the last one who seems to get blamed by this government when there is no other excuse.
Where we will wind up, who will take the responsibility remains to be seen. It was astounding that in the last year, in the spring of 1996, the Canadian Wheat Board cancelled the C quota on barley because it said that there was a shortage of grain, that there was nothing to sell.
We had thousands of hopper cars sitting empty on sidings, not knowing what to do with them. All of a sudden when a new crop comes in we find out we have a record carry over of feed grains, a record carry over of durum. We have had all these empty hopper cars sitting around doing nothing and nobody taking any action.
We were promised when the WGTA was done away with that the Liberals would guarantee our grain would be moved. They would keep track of the situation and they would put on certain regulations or rules that the railways would comply with.
It has not happened. Reading the latest report from one of the railway companies, it says that in the last month it shipped around or backtracked 2,000 empty hopper cars from terminals that were never loaded in the first place.
We can see what a mess the whole transportation system really is in. This government is failing to correct it. We are trying to correct some of the problems with these bills. We will have a partial success but I do not think it is nearly what farmers desire or what is needed in the industry.
We now have a situation where the transportation system is not working. Canadian farmers who are within trucking distance of the U.S. could have a viable market opportunity there but it is denied them because we have a monopoly that does not want to co-operate when certain situations are run into or when market conditions develop during the year.
I know for a fact there is a tremendous demand for our feed grains in the U.S. In my little area of Morden-Winkler, over 200,000 bushels have gone into the U.S. by truck in the last week or two because of a market that was found by a few farmers. They have developed that market to a point where it is becoming quite lucrative.
This is the type of farm policy we need, where farmers take control of the situation and direct the government to provide through regulation the guidelines that make it fair to everyone. That has not been happening. Again I point to the witness we heard from just recently, the millers. They can import their grains from the U.S. without any restrictions while farmers do not have that freedom because they have to go through the buyback program. As we heard at the standing committee hearings, the buyback program is not what farmers want. It is not fair to all farmers and should be changed.
It is really sad how much farmers distrust government and bureaucrats. It is very hard for them to believe what is happening in the House. A very humourous incident happened on April 1. I do not know if the House has heard about the story in Grainews which stated that the the agriculture minister had announced a new bio-diesel initiative and created a government crown corporation called Petro Canola.
I received a number of calls from my constituents wondering whether this could have really happened in Ottawa. When I first heard about it I thought it had to be crazy. I wondered why anybody would even believe something like that.
I will read a few comments from that article so members have an idea how the farm community feels about Ottawa and how much trust they have in politicians. The article states that the Prime Minister has a better plan than the old national energy program from the early 1980s. "We are setting up refineries near Ottawa on both sides of the Ontario and Quebec border to provide a balanced industry. The western farmers get the benefit of growing canola and eastern Canadians get the value added benefit of a new industry. It is an everybody win situation".
It really sounds like it could be something that is viable, something some bureaucrat or politician dreamed up. The article then goes on to say: "The PCB"-which is this new Petro Canola crown corporation-"will buy canola from western Canadian farmers at an average of 15 per cent below the world price but they will have the benefit of a guaranteed market". I guess after having been tied to a monopoly under the Canadian Wheat Board farmers really believe that they will be asked to sell their products under lower than world market prices.
I could see them maybe falling for that bit of bait but the article then goes on to state: "The board will then ship the canola east at the subsidized magpie rate, refine it and sell it back to western farmers and other users of diesel fuel". On reading that everyone should have realized that it just could not happen and, if it did, I am sure that we would have more provinces wanting to separate.
However, this is the kind of problem that we as farmers have been living with for a lot of years. I just want to make it clear to the parliamentary secretary and to members in western Canada especially that the farming industry is still the industry that drives the whole economy.
Once we lose the farmers and the farming industry there will not be much left to save in the western provinces, or probably in the whole country. That is why it is very important that we start to work as a unit in the House to protect farmers, food processors and marketing agencies in a manner which will put more money into the pockets of farmers.
The cash advance program, as far as interest free loans on certain amounts are concerned, in my opinion, is the right direction. But when a farmer has a disaster and is probably in dire need of some cash in the spring, to make him pay interest on the first $50,000 to me is totally ridiculous. I do not think that is what farmers really want or that it will benefit the farming industry as a whole.
The Reform Party is very strong on making agriculture a very viable, market driven industry and farmers should be paid for their labour and should get a fair price for what they produce.
When I see the cost of producing a bushel of grain today and I see how much more efficient farmers have become and how their production has increased every year and their increased capability of feeding the world population and then they get hammered at every corner by government or by regulations, things must change.
One example I brought forward yesterday was past management and the harmonization of rules and regulations between the U.S. and Canada. Last year I noticed an article in one the farm papers which said that Ontario farmers illegally brought into the country about $11 million worth of chemicals to use on their corn production and a blind eye was turned to that. It did not seem to bother law enforcement officers or government officials that this was happening.
Then another farm paper stated that farmers went to jail to try and get an extra dollar for a bushel of grain. Something is wrong in this country.
Bureaucrats and politicians have been doing this for a lot of years. In 1992, before I was elected to the House, I know Grandin wheat was being smuggled into the Canadian system. Some farmers were for it and others were against it, but a blind eye was turned to the breaking of the law.
When customs officers wanted to intervene and uphold the law because some farmers were not just breaking the law but probably making huge profits, they were told by Ag Canada and by other officials in government to just turn a blind eye to the issue. "We will not prosecute".
I came to the House to make sure that it was run in a fashion that upheld the laws of the country. When I see certain issues such as that one not being addressed and issues such as advanced payments again nailing the farmer who has had a disaster in his production cycle, we need a different government in Ottawa. Over the past 25 or 30 years we have discovered that Tories and Liberals are the same. They are only concerned about getting the bucks into the east. The west might as well disappear.
That is why 52 Reformers are here. The slogan was: "The west wants in". We are here and we are going to stay here.