Mr. Speaker, before I go home for the weekend I want to correct the concept we heard from the government side regarding dynamic rural communities and dynamic agriculture and that somehow they were building rural communities. In the area in which I live nothing could be further from the truth.
I have seen villages disappear. Towns will soon disappear. Elevators are being bulldozed. Railroads are being torn up. Just to show how undynamic it is, seven farms were auctioned off the last weekend I was home. Four of them had young people in the same family that could take over the farm but because of the bleak agricultural outlook which has been brought on by the government opposite they are say no way. This is happening all over Saskatchewan.
The reason for Bill C-26 is that farmers are trying to make a living from the traditional wheat crop. They are trying their best. They are doing everything to make a penny out of it. The government, like the hon. member just said, never mentioned the word agriculture in the throne speech debate. The most dynamic and still the major industry, not only in Saskatchewan but in western Canada, never received one word of mention.
Now the government has come up with Bill C-26. Farmers in the west are disillusioned. They feel betrayed. They have been betrayed by the crow rate, by the railways and by their own grain companies. Farmers feel betrayed by the government. They could not care less right now about Bill C-26.
What they do care about is some way to pay their bills. Ranchers are asking for some way for them to pay for the increase of grazing land. Farmers are asking for a way to return to farms that have been in their families for three and four generations. There is no hope. The government has provided no hope.
In the town in which I live the elevators will be gone by the year 2000. The four curling rinks which surround the town have been closed. The government should realize that Bill C-26 does not address the problem of ongoing depopulation in much of rural Saskatchewan.
I can only compare it to another era in Saskatchewan, the dirty thirties when people simply gave up and moved out. Because of the policies of the government and because of lack of planning by the government, the same thing is taking place now. It is a disaster, but we have not hit the worst of it yet. The worst is yet to come.
In two years my daughter and her family will live over 80 miles away from the closest delivery point for grain. Over one-third of the cost of that ticket by the time they pay for the truck goes to freight.
Please, hon. parliamentary secretary, do not talk about Bill C-26 and its dynamics for rural Saskatchewan. Do not tell me about how this great energizing is taking place in agriculture. The parliamentary secretary needs to go out there and look. He will see for himself. Fifty-two towns had hospitals. RMs are closing. It is becoming a wasteland. Those people who have good agricultural wheat producing land are going to have to sell that land for grazing prices and get out.
We have a disaster. This government comes in with Bill C-26 which will do nothing to solve the real problem in Saskatchewan. I feel much better because I have said it. I hope the people in my province are listening.