Madam Speaker, on October 28 I posed a question to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food. As the House will recognize, that was more than a month ago. I would have hoped that the issue I raised would have been dealt with by this time and that we would have a policy and a program in place that would in fact help the agricultural producers in the country.
But I am very saddened to say that still the government is waffling. It has not put anything concrete forward so that farmers can take some solace in the fact that there is actually a government that cares about agriculture in the country.
My question was quite simple. It stated that producers in the country right now have incomes that are down 55%. This is a huge industry, involving some $50 billion.
The United States at the time dealt with the issue by announcing a $6 billion program the week before this question was posed. The U.S. question was not “When will?” or “Will we put forward support for our farmers?”, it was “How much?” The question of how much was answered the day I posed the question. It was some $6 billion.
It is difficult to say, but Canada is now the second lowest, if not the lowest of the OECD with respect to support for its agricultural producers. Our government seems to be fiddling while farm incomes not only burn, but unfortunately farms are being lost right now.
The reason I tabled this late show is because the minister came back with some very facetious answers concerning the policy and the platform of the Conservative Party in the last election campaign. He talked about the amalgamation of the departments of the environment, natural resources and agriculture.
I mention that because the parliamentary secretary some days later, during an emergency debate that was instigated by the Progressive Conservative Party, took 10 minutes of the House's valuable time to spew nothing but political rhetoric. He did not deal with this very important issue, but only with the political position of his party.
I would like some answers from the parliamentary secretary with respect to what is now happening with the proposed program that is to come forward. Today in the House I asked if the program will be announced before the House rises for the Christmas break and if there will be criteria associated with that program which will allow cash to flow to producers who require it before the spring seeding which will begin in the new year.
In dealing with that I would say that we do have some experience we can point to. The previous Progressive Conservative government put into place the well respected and received NISA program which is still in place for agricultural producers.
In 1991 we also put forward the GRIP program, the gross revenue insurance program, which this government in its wisdom decided in 1995 to do away with. Why did it do that? It did it because there was short term gain for some very long term pain. We are recognizing that today. The pain is now only showing up at the farm gates and farmyards.
If the government had any vision it would have maintained that program or, at the very least, put in a program that would have had the vision to see the problems that could present themselves.
The parliamentary secretary is going to get up now and probably not answer any of those questions or any of these issues. If he wants to talk about policy—