Mr. Speaker, members of the Reform Party would like us to believe that a majority of farmers on the prairies are against the wheat board, that they do not want anything to do with the wheat board.
If memory serves me correctly, not too long ago there was a plebiscite on the prairies having to do with barley. If there ever was an opportunity for farmers on the prairies to embarrass the government, to support the Reform Party and to show that they wanted nothing to do with the wheat board, all the farmers had to do was to vote against the board. In effect they could say “We do not want barley attached to the board any more”.
What were the results? Notice that the Reform Party in all its speeches will never say anything about the plebiscite, never a word. I wonder why. Is it possibly because two-thirds of prairie farmers showed in that plebiscite that they support the wheat board? Two-thirds of farmers said “We want our barley sold through the Canadian Wheat Board”. That was the fact but we will never hear that from the Reform Party.
The Reform members would never want too many facts to get in the way of their presentations because facts will kill them every time. They also say “We are not against the wheat board. All we want is the right to have dual marketing. We can have the wheat board but we would also like to sell our grain to other grain companies”. Is that not nice. If we were to adopt the Reform Party proposal, imagine how long the wheat board would last. We have to remember that the wheat board is in partnership with the federal government. Over $6 billion of its financing is underwritten by the federal government. That is something no other grain company has.
Imagine in a dual marketing situation if we had one agency, one company called the Canadian Wheat Board enjoying the support of all the taxpayers in the country, and all these other companies on the other side not having that privilege or honour of the support of the federal treasury. How long would that situation last? Two or three minutes. I suspect we would be in the courts just like that. A situation where one particular company is favoured and not the others would be untenable.