Mr. Speaker, I must express my appreciation. It is good to see somebody on the other side who knows something about agriculture. It is also reassuring to see the hon. member working at committee to recognize the difficulties that farmers are having. She talked about a third line of defence. I am glad she is willing to look at other things that work. Unfortunately she needs to inform herself a little more fully about NISA.
I would like her to reply to a question. How do we communicate the importance of this issue to all Canadians? The concern we have over here is that not enough people are made aware of the importance of agriculture to Canada.
I can appeal to Canadians by putting this in context by saying that we are talking at great length about whether we should give a 1% or 2% raise to our union members, postal employees, teachers, workers in the automotive industry, electrical, telephone and delivery services. We express grave concerns that these people are not getting a 1% or 2% raise but here we have farmers taking a 75% cut in their pay. That is very serious. It affects a large part of Canada and yet we are unable to get most Canadians to recognize the seriousness of the problem.
We can talk about $22 billion in exports and we know how important that is but if we go beyond that people's eyes glaze over at these numbers sometimes.