Madam Speaker, I appreciate the chance to rise and speak to Group No. 2 but also to rebut what the parliamentary secretary has said.
I will begin with something he said a minute ago. He suggested that if the insurance plan was voluntary, some farmers might not actually become a part of it because they did not know about it. That suggests the parliamentary secretary takes a pretty dim view of the ability of farmers to run their own affairs.
Obviously farmers run extraordinarily complex operations when they run a farm. They make hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars of decisions every year. Is the parliamentary secretary suggesting that perhaps they might forget to plant their crops in the spring? Maybe we should have someone from the government come out and plant their crops for them. Or maybe they would forget to take off their crops in the fall. Maybe we should have somebody come out and take their crops off for them as well.
What the parliamentary secretary is suggesting is ridiculous, that farmers would not know about it, that they are just too dumb. That is what he is suggesting. I disagree with that. It is ridiculous.
Earlier I heard the parliamentary secretary say that I had misspoken when I suggested that all of the members of the special crops advisory committee should be appointed and that the government was not proposing to appoint some producers. Indeed that is correct. I have with me Bill C-26 which would amend the Canada Grain Act. The member is correct. In fact the situation would be that if there are nine members on the board, a majority of them would be chosen by the government and the others would come from elsewhere.
I simply point out that under the plan that is being proposed by the official opposition all of those nine positions would come from producer groups. The parliamentary secretary is suggesting that the government would still retain the power to choose a bunch of unelected hacks, political patronage appointees, for some of these positions. We say that is wrong. We say all nine positions should be filled by the producers. I do not think that is radical. I think it makes sense. That is what the witnesses told the committee and the member knows it.
He also knows that Canadians are democrats. They want to have their representatives on these boards which are supposed to represent their interests. That is just common sense.
Although the member was quite correct in pointing out where I had misspoken, I think he was true to the letter of what I was saying if not the spirit. That is where he was wrong.
I want to touch on the voluntary check-off idea for a moment. Reformers moved this in committee. It is now being moved by Conservatives at report stage. We agree with it. We agree with the idea of a voluntary check-off. The idea of having a mandatory check-off I know producers disagree with.
I have heard it from producers in my riding. They told me as much. They want the voluntary option. They do not like the idea of the government holding on to their money until the end of the year and then getting it back in some way, shape or form. They like the voluntary option.
I remind my friends across the way, if they wonder how this will go over with people, of what happened when the cable industry proposed to do the same thing with cable television, this idea of negative option billing. It went over like a lead balloon. There was a virtual revolt because consumers want to have the choice. Consumer sovereignty, what a novel idea. It should be the same thing in Bill C-26 but the government always wants to have its own way. It always takes the attitude that it knows better. It does not know better.
Why not give people the option? Why not let it be voluntary? What is wrong with that? Why not have the voluntary option? We know that the groups that appeared before the committee almost to a person said they wanted the voluntary option. What is so wrong with that? Why not listen to what people are saying? Why hold hearings if no one listens to what people are saying? I think that is fair. I think it makes sense.
Unfortunately the government has missed the whole idea behind the point of having witnesses appear before a committee. It is to get some guidance on how these things are supposed to work. Remember that the witnesses are the people who are affected. They have a stake in it. They have their whole livelihood in this so why would they not be the ones who are best suited to make those choices, to make those judgments? Why is the government not listening to the real experts? That is what it should be doing.
We disagree with the whole idea of the government's having the sole ability to pick whomever it wants to sit on this board, some of them of course would be producers but again it could go ahead and pick only producers with the right political credentials and some of them would be people who would probably be political appointments, probably defeated Liberal MPs from the prairies, of which there are many after the last election.
They have a lot to choose from, a big slate this time, even though some have already been scooped up into other patronage positions so perhaps they would have to serve in two patronage positions at once, I do not know.
Second, we disagree with the idea of the mandatory check-off. Not only do producers not want it, it is contrary to the whole idea of consumer sovereignty. I remind the government that if it is going to have witnesses, and a bunch of them tell it what to do, listen to them. Hello in there, listen to them. That is what people want. They want to have their testimony listened to and abided by, especially when they speak more or less with one voice.