Madam Speaker, it gives me pleasure to speak in support of the amendments by the hon. for Brandon—Souris to this legislation.
I am pleased to know it is the intention of the government to keep its program as simple as possible. That warms my heart. We hear quite a bit of this. This is the government of all governments that loves to regulate, loves complications, loves paperwork, loves to control people. As somebody said earlier in this debate, it likes to keep its foot on people's necks to keep them down. That is the traditional Liberal approach in both social and economic matters. I guess it is something one has to get used to.
I am very fortunate as a farmer in that I produce the one commodity which this government has not yet managed to get its grubby little hands on. I still have the possibility of raising a product and selling it. I do not have to get permits. I do not have to tug at my rural forelock when I approach some bureaucrat. I take my product, which happens to be beef cattle, to the market and I run them through the ring. The auctioneer says sold, I get all my money and that is it, finished. That is the last I see of them.
An hon. member says to just wait. Actually we have had to fight this fight on several occasions. There have been constant threatening moves on the part of various federal governments over the years to intervene in our market. We have always been able to stave them off because we have an extremely strong producers organization which defends us from the machinations of the politicians.
We have been able to keep ourselves independent. We do have a small check-off but it is organized by us for us. We deal with our own business and we do not have any government intervention. It is lovely.
There is a situation in my riding which I think is relevant. There is a fellow who grows organic wheat as he calls it, no pesticides and no herbicides. It is not a special crop in the sense of Bill C-26, but a special crop nonetheless. He has problems with his marketing. The elevator system cannot handle the product because the moment it touches a commercial elevator it is no longer certifiable. It will be contaminated with the product already in the system. That cannot be avoided. He has to find his own markets. He has to arrange the transportation. He does it all himself.
Right now Mr. Arnold Schmidt of Fox Valley in my riding has a trailer load of his product sitting at Emerson, Manitoba. This trailer load of product has been hijacked by the federal government. He wants to get it across the border. This is not a carload of grain in a hopper car. It is a bagged product sitting at Emerson, Manitoba. It costs the man $25 a day to have it sitting there effectively under seizure. He can bring it home if he wants to but this would not be a terribly productive operation. If he does, it will cost him more money.
He is supposed to buy that product back from the Canadian Wheat Board. In other words it can be sold to the Canadian Wheat Board and then bought back. In the process about 90 cents a bushel is dribbled off to the government for a service that was not provided. He is not in any pooling system. They cannot use his product but under those regulations he would have to pay into the pool. He has to pay ransom to get his product out of the country.
Understandably this man is a little upset. The problem is that this is his sole means of livelihood. He grows literally thousands of acres of organically grown grains. He is marketing it mostly in Canada but some of it goes outside Canada. There is an outfit in the states called Our Daily Bread which deals in nothing but organically grown grain.
All of a sudden, without warning and for no apparent reason, the government has decided it will enforce this and nail the guy down. This is an example of how the benevolence of government, doing things that are supposed to help us farmers, can simply make life difficult for us.
The people who grow beans, peas and lentils to a large extent are doing it because these products are not under government control. It is a free market out there for this stuff. People can do as they like just as I can do with my cattle. They have their own producers organizations which apparently function very well. However when the government sees something that is not regulated “My God, we have to do something. These people are dangerous. They are making a living and we are not involved”.
This drives me around the bend. How many years have we been growing specialty crops on the prairies? Not very many. Perhaps one of my colleagues could tell me. Is it 12 years, 15 years?