Mr. Speaker, I am certainly very appreciative of the minister of agriculture for sharing his time with me. I am sure some of our viewers are wondering why the member for Durham would be speaking on the ice storm but it has affected me and my riding in a multiplicity of ways.
When the ice storm first struck I immediately received a phone call from friends and associates living in the Winchester area. The minister just talked about Winchester and the devastation of the storm there. The call was that they needed generators and generator capacities.
We have an agricultural community in my riding, a dairy producing area. The call went out to ask some of our constituents if they could find generator capacities to share with these people in eastern Ontario. I am very proud of the people in my riding who immediately rose to the call. I was fortunate enough to take a truck and to have the local chamber of commerce provide a trailer. I took my staff and we went into the area of Winchester to drop off a number of generators.
It was my good fortune to go to some of the farms affected by the storm and physically take these generators off the truck and install them. It was not so much the mechanics of all this but the human interest.
I remember a particular dairy farming operation in a place called Moose Creek. I drove into the driveway. The house was totally in darkness. Little children were looking out the drapes. This was their first contact with the outside world for over a week. Just the smiles on their faces and the fact that they knew other people cared about their problems were certainly uplifting for me. It was uplifting for all the people in my riding and others who tried to help and create those bonds which make us a truly great nation.
I said that the storm had affected me in a multiplicity of ways. I mentioned the hamlet of Moose Creek in the riding of one of my colleagues, the member for Stormont—Dundas. I went into its local community centre which was being used as a shelter and talked with the people there. There was a lot of anxiety. These people had been without hydro for about a week. As a matter of fact, by the time this had culminated we had about 30 generators in the area under my control or under the control of the people of Durham. It was interesting to talk to some of the people in the shelter and to hear about what they had gone through and their anxieties.
We live in a so-called modern world and we take a lot of things for granted. We will go home tonight to sleep in a nice warm bed. We will get up in the morning and turn on the lights. This is what we expect. All these things had been taken away from these people which caused a great deal of anxiety in their lives. The connection was the human beings who tried to reach out and make a difference. There were military people from the regular forces in Petawawa in the community centre. They told me how they were trying to pump out people's basements that were full of water because their sump pumps had failed to work. They were making a tremendous commitment.
I have two sons in the reserve forces, one with the Cameron Highlanders in Ottawa. I lost track of him for over a week. They were down in Maxville and Vankleek Hill doing the same thing I was trying to do, but they were doing it a lot more effectively and efficiently than I was. I was allocating generator capacity between households by moving one generator between six households. We had to move it every two or three hours so all the houses could have a bit of heat.
This all seems rather absurd as we approach the 21st century. I am sure people will look after the fact into how we could have handled things differently. We could have had manual overrides on our furnace systems to prevent such occurrences. The fact is that people were thrown into the situation. As we speak here tonight many people are still without hydro.
My son was involved in the command operation in Maxville. People were suffering. A fellow named Richard who was helping him said that it would be nice if Maxville had new Canadian flags. A lot of its flags were old and tattered. They felt much more a part of the country than they did before this happened.
The Reform Party often criticizes our flag campaign. I was very pleased to approach the Minister of Canadian Heritage to say that the people of Maxville needed 20 flags. I asked her to give us 20 flags to make those people feel a little happier about being part of this country. I am happy to say she forwarded them to me and they are now in Maxville. It made them feel very much part of this great country.
The minister of agriculture said that it was almost over in the sense that people being reconnected. It is not over as far as the hurt, the anguish and the pain that have been suffered and will be suffered by these people. A small business operator who lost a month of income but has a mortgage suddenly has a significant problem on the doorstep to meet that mortgage payment.
Consider the insurance business. Many of these things were considered to be acts of God. Many were uninsurable. Our government and the provincial governments are attempting to deal with disaster relief assistance. In reality, when the smoke clears, these people will have major financial difficulties. There will be a grey area in which insurance companies will question the insurability of events.
Maybe a big insurance company or a big bank with lots of assets can be very generous. However situations will arise in which smaller insurance companies and financial institutions will not be so generously inclined. Suddenly these goal posts about what is claimable and what is not or how to assist a business person or a person who is making a car loan payment will become big problems.
I am very happy to say that the caucus on this side of the House has provided for a number of these organizations to come and visit us tomorrow. I want to give a personal appreciation for the Conference Board of Canada, which is going to appear before our caucus tomorrow; the Canadian Bankers' Association, which is going to provide members in the relief areas; the Caisse Populaire of Quebec, which is coming here to say how it is going to deal with these problems; and the Insurance Bureau of Canada, which is sending all its representatives to tell us on this side of the House at least, as parliamentarians, how they are going to deal with these people not only today but in the future and solve some of the problems that are going to exist.