Mr. Speaker, I will focus on a fairly narrow area.
The member for Peace River did an excellent job encapsulating the trade situation and what did not happen and what should have happened in that area, although when it came to the North American Free Trade Agreement and its predecessor, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, Canadian negotiators in those agreements did an excellent job of negotiating.
We are very thankful for what they did. When it came to the GATT negotiations that ended in 1992 and were signed by the government in 1993, Canada took a very weak position. They did not negotiate in agriculture anything like they should have. As a result we ended up with a very weak result that is harming Canadian farmers right now.
Reformers came to the House in 1993. The campaign started in 1992, the year before the election. We came with a comprehensive agriculture policy which, if it were examined today, would demonstrate that it would deal very well with the problem that farmers are in. During that campaign and in the House Reform MP after Reform MP spoke out on what we saw as a policy that would have prevented the situation we see today.
I am not only talking about tough trade negotiations. I am talking about a specific program that we called the trade distortion adjustment program. This program would have taken part of the value of the Crow subsidy. We called for the subsidy to be eliminated. The Liberals eliminated it but they did not do a key thing we proposed they should do. They did not put a part of the capitalized value of the Crow subsidy into the trade distortion adjustment program, which would have provided money for the situation our farmers are in today. It would have provided money to directly compensate for damage to commodity prices which could be attributed to unfair trade practices and unfair subsidies in other countries.
The major cause of the crisis in grain farming, the single major cause, is unfair trade practices in Europe and to some extent in the United States, combined with import restrictions into Japan, Korea and other Asian countries. Those things more than anything else have led to the crisis we see today.
In my first speech in the House I proposed that the Liberal government adopt the trade distortion adjustment program. Dozens of times Reform MPs throughout the following years raised the issue until the Crow benefit was eliminated. However the money did not go into this program. There was a $1.2 billion political payout to farmers which did them very little good. I would argue that it split the farm community between renters and farmers actually farming the land.
The Liberal government is facing a situation right now that must be dealt with. It ignored what I believe was very good advice over those years, presented again and again and again. A strong sensible position was presented, a position which would have clearly helped deal with the current situation.
Under the plan that we proposed the capitalized value of the Crow benefit would have been somewhere between $7 billion and $9 billion in total. We recognized the deficit situation. Reform more than anybody recognized that the deficit had to be removed and pushed for it. We recognized that taxes were too high. Reform more than anybody called for tax reduction. Recognizing all of that, we called for only part of the capitalized value of the Crow benefit to go into this fund. Possibly $3 billion or $3.5 billion.
With the interest that would have accrued on that we would have a good sum of money in place right now which would have been available for farmers to compensate them not just in an ad hoc way. That is not what farmers want. Farmers do not want handouts. They want fair trade. When other countries are not trading in a fair way, farmers want some help to deal with that. That is precisely what the trade distortion adjustment program would have done.
The Liberals did not take our advice. It was not just advice coming from Reform MPs. It was coming from the farming community. They did not take our advice and as a result we are in a situation today where we are talking about another ad hoc payout and nothing to deal with the long term problem.
This type of a situation cannot recur every 10 years or so. That has happened for too long. Farmers should not have to face that time and again. I know in my life before politics I worked as a farm economist and I did business consulting with farmers. I sat across the table from 100 to 200 farmers, farm families at their kitchen tables, families facing a crisis just like this one today. Most of them lost their farms. There is nothing I want less in my life than to have to sit at the kitchen table with families that are losing their farms again.
What is to be done? The Liberals have to come up with the answer. Knowing they did not act in a responsible way over the last five years, it is up to them to come up with an answer or a solution. It cannot just be a short term payout. It has to be a long term solution to the problem. That is what they have to do. I will be watching. Farmers in my constituency will be watching to see what they do.