Mr. Speaker, I hope my time will not cut short off because of this sort of nonsense. You seem to be nodding your approval, and I thank you.
I was therefore saying that the Liberal Party has discovered another ploy, which is to liberate certain relatively safe ridings for friends that could take over. Incumbents are appointed to prestigious positions that are usually paid more than an MP, and this frees up the seat.
I wanted to make a prediction. The president of the future Canadian Wheat Board will be a Liberal. This Liberal is sitting across from us now, and probably does not know the first thing about the Canadian Wheat Board. We will pay for many years so that he can find out, and just as he is starting to get the idea, he will leave to collect his gold plated pension. He will then have two hefty pensions.
The Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, on which it is my great pleasure to sit with several of my colleagues whom I see in the House now, is a committee that I believe takes its work very seriously. It astonishes me that certain members opposite, who sit on the committee with me, do not wish to take on an additional, collective responsibility and voice their opinion on the future president of the Canadian Wheat Board.
For how many hours and weeks did the standing committee examine this problem? The entire committee trooped out west. We visited the four provinces. No one in the House, I am speaking about members, is more familiar with the problems of farmers and the Canadian Wheat Board than the 12 members now sitting on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. I am offering my colleague, the member for Bourassa, an unparalleled opportunity to feel like his party, his prime minister, is giving him an additional responsibility. But he is not interested.
In closing, I wish to raise a final point. The Canadian Wheat Board has traditionally reported to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food.
I do not know what is going on. When the Prime Minister shuffled his cabinet after the election, he put the former Minister of Agriculture in Natural Resources. No problem with that. But he did not see fit to leave the responsibility for the Canadian Wheat Board with our Minister of Agriculture. Why not? Too heavy a task? Incompetence? I am asking you the question, Mr. Speaker. I would like an answer from my colleagues over there, or better yet, from the Minister of Natural Resources.
Why has he grabbed on to this position, this role of directing the Canadian Wheat Board within the Department of Natural Resources? They do not seem to go together. We have a good Minister of Agriculture, who does the very best he can. Why not give him all the tools he needs? He is going to work for the Western producers, the grain producers, but when it comes time to talk about a very important tool, the Canadian Wheat Commission, he will say "For that, you need to see my colleague, the Minister of Natural Resources".
I await that response, Mr. Speaker, and I would invite you to ask the party in power to support this motion on Bill C-4, which I consider a highly constructive motion.