Madam Speaker, before I commence my debate with respect to this issue I wish to raise a matter that arose in the House on Monday. It pertains to the member for North Vancouver.
He made a comment in the House to which I responded from my chair. The matter he raised was a suggestion that the whips order their MPs how to vote. I wish to withdraw a comment I made in respect to his comment on that.
I do not believe that is the case in every party, especially not in the NDP, but at that time I used the word lie, and Hansard picked it up. I wish to withdraw that word out of respect for this institution, but I still maintain that his comment was not accurate with respect to the NDP. I wanted to get that on the record at this time.
The NDP at this point, as most people know, believes that Bill C-4 before the House is flawed legislation. It undermines the Canadian Wheat Board as we know it. The NDP tried to improve the bill in committee, but the Liberal majority refused to accept our amendments.
Bill C-4 proposes a number of issues which we do not support. As a result of three or four key issues, we will not be voting for the bill. I wish to take some time right now to inform the House of why we will not support the bill, in particular the clauses we are discussing right now.
First, the bill proposes a cash buying option. In our view this will destroy a fundamental pillar of the wheat board. It will undermine farmers' confidence in it. The wheat board would buy grains under cash buying from anyone, anywhere, any time at any price. We believe this disrupts the board's long practice of buying grain from farmers at announced prices and distributing profits to all on an equitable basis.
The second reason we are opposed is that Bill C-4 proposes a contingency fund which would cost farmers as much as $575 million in check-offs. It is our view that is not needed at this time, particularly because farmers cannot afford it. A contingency fund is not necessary if Ottawa continues to provide financial guarantees to the board, guarantees that have been seldom used.
My constituency of Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre has a significant number of farmers. They are squeezed right now with input costs. They have fuel cost crunches for spring seeding. They have fertilizer cost crunches for their inputs affecting this coming season. They are very concerned about the transportation increased costs as well as a result of the minister responsible for the wheat board doing away with the Crow benefit, which has taken about $350 million to $375 million dollars a year out of the Saskatchewan economy.
This was taken out of the economy after the bill which established the railway to the west coast, passed by parliament over a century ago, provided for a Crow benefit in perpetuity. The reason they did that was not because they were shortsighted in terms of their forecast for inflation or value of the dollar. They gave the CPR billions and billions of dollars in alternating sections of land across the western part of the country. They gave the CPR the mineral rights to those lands so that in future the revenues from the land and the minerals the mining and oil companies produced would have provided more than adequate compensation to the railways in a very generous way.
The Liberal government and its predecessors, the Tories, allowed the CPR to hive off the land and sell it to Marathon Realty. The profits have gone away. They have allowed, persuaded and encouraged the CPR to take its Comincos, its mining companies, its Pan Canadian oil company, the second largest oil company in Canada, and hive them off into subsidiaries and not use those revenues or profits to sustain the railways and the transportation to western farmers, to our western population.
Literally billions and billions of dollars have been hived off. All we have left is a stand alone branch line kind of railway system in western Canada. The railways are now saying that they are not sustainable on their own.
If the billions and billions of dollars in assets are returned to the CPR there will be more than adequate transportation in they country. That is where we have a problem. Canadians do not understand the fact that Liberal and Tory governments in the last 100 years have allowed and encouraged assets to be removed from the CPR which were meant for, intended and provided by the House of Commons and the Parliament of Canada for the maintenance of the railways and a transportation system for western Canada.
Now we see CNR going south and expanding in the United States at the expense of what is happening in Canada. Billions and billions of dollars were hived off into Marathon Realty, Pan Canadian, Cominco, the shipping and airlines. They are all gone. All the assets are gone and the poor old railway says it cannot make a profit.
The Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food is now the minister in charge of the wheat board from Saskatchewan. He encouraged all this. He put the nail in the coffin in terms of some of the transportation problems that western Canada now has. Farmers will never forget that.
Another reason we oppose Bill C-4 is that it claims to put farmers in control of the wheat board's destiny. The Liberal government will continue to appoint the chief executive officer. This makes talk of a farmer controlled board in our view a travesty.
How can a farmer controlled board not have accountable to it its chief executive officer? Anybody in business will know that the chief executive officer has to be accountable to the board. The board knows what is going on and the CEO reports to the board.
The government has made it a political issue. The minister who has screwed farmers on the Crow rate will now screw them on this matter with respect to the wheat board. I do not think farmers will be very happy about that.
We support many parts of the bill. We support the provision for a possible inclusion of more grains under the wheat board's jurisdiction. This inclusion allows farmers to decide in a vote to remove grains from the board's authority. It is only fair that farmers can vote to include extra grains as well.
Agribusiness and the Reform Party are a bit concerned about this matter. The Reform Party embraced the referendum principle. It should understand that if there is a referendum among producers to exclude or include something perhaps the referendum decision should be honoured.
Reform philosophy is always do as I say and not as I do. Reformers say one thing to one part of the country and the opposite to another part of the country.
One of the fundamental principles of Reformers is that they believe in referenda. Yet, when it comes down to the inclusion or exclusion referendum, they think it is bad. They only want one as opposed to both. They want the exclusion referendum but not the inclusion referendum. Reformers believe they know better than farmers, that they know better than the 60,000 farm families in Saskatchewan. I do not believe that for one second. Neither do the 60,000 farm families in Saskatchewan nor the farm families in Alberta or Manitoba.
We have a bit of a problem. The organizations that are opposing the Canadian Wheat Board, a strong institution supported by our party, are good farm organizations like the National Citizens' Coalition. One Reform member used to work for the National Citizens' Coalition. I challenge the member to name 10 citizens.
I will name a few citizens who belong to this organization: Conrad Black, Imperial Oil and Pan Canadian that has just plundered and raped our oil resources from railway system and hived them off for its shareholders all over the world. These are the real citizens of Canada that support the National Citizens' Coalition which supports the Reform Party. Its chief executive officer is Mr. Harper, former Reform member of Parliament from Calgary. I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Harper but his philosophical and ideological position is in lockstep with the Reform Party.
That is one example but there are other significant examples. The Winnipeg Commodity Exchange, the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, oilseed producers or processors and Cargill are all great people who support the abolition of the wheat board. They want to see the wheat board totally dismantled so they can go in there and finish the plundering of farmers that the CPR has undertaken and the Liberals, the Tories and the Reformers are all partners in.