Mr. Speaker, there can be no doubt that the Speech from the Throne is a very carefully crafted document. One thing I have come to realize in the short time I have been here is that there is probably no other piece of work that is done on the Hill that is so scrutinized and carefully put together. One can almost see dozens of bureaucrats burning the midnight oil in the catacombs of this building agonizing over every word that goes into it to make sure it is exactly, perfectly put together.
The reason I point this out is that there are no accidents in the Speech from the Throne. If there is something missing from it, it is not by omission, it is missing for a good reason. It has been thought through very carefully for the message that it sends.
We all know there are two ways to send a message. One way is by putting the message in the document and one is by leaving it out. As a westerner from the prairie region, the most glaring omission in the Speech from the Throne has to be the complete absence of any reference to the agricultural crisis that we face in the prairie region.
I did not come to Ottawa to get on the hobby horse about western alienation. Frankly, I did not even think I would ever be standing up in the House speaking about western alienation, but the longer I am here the more I realize how important and grating this issue really is for a person from the west.
We are all very sympathetic to the issue of the lobster crisis on the east coast. We realize it is a real problem. However, we have an emergency in western Canada in the prairie region.
It is not just an isolated incident. It is not just a part of our industry that is suffering. The whole shebang is at risk of losing what developed western Canada, which is our agribusiness. Forty per cent of all prairie farmers run the risk of being out of business by the end of this selling cycle if something does not happen. If some intervention does not take place, 40% of all people who work on family farms today will be gone, kaput, and that does not even begin to talk about all the many industries that rely on a vibrant agricultural industry.
With all due respect to our colleagues from eastern Canada, we do not see the minister hopping on the plane to get to western Canada immediately to deal with the crisis, as we do with the lobster fishery. The minister was on the plane the next morning, meeting with all the stakeholders down there and trying to carve out some way of dealing with that crisis. We do not see that in western Canada.
What are we supposed to think? Is it that our crisis is not as important as their crisis? Are we to weigh whose crisis is most severe? I put it to the House quite frankly that the other issue pales in comparison to what is going on in western Canada.
One might wonder why I would use my 10 minutes to talk about agriculture. I represent an inner city riding. I do not have a single farmer in my riding. There is hardly even a garden plot in my riding, frankly. It is the core area of Winnipeg.
However I do have the United Grain Growers. I have Cargill. I have the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. All the evidence of what built the prairies is located within the riding of Winnipeg Centre. That whole exchange area was built up because of a vibrant farm economy that we now stand to lose.
I raise this as the first point or as the most noticeable point about the Speech from the Throne for me as a westerner. There is not even a word, not a single line in there. I realize that the Speech from the Throne does not deal with specifics. That is for the budget. However, if there was a single line which said the Government of Canada recognized that it has to intervene in some way to protect the agricultural industry in western Canada, that would be some comfort. It would be some solace and people in that industry might say that at least the government appreciates that they have a problem.
It not just a matter of throwing money at it. I am not saying that everybody who lives on a farm, whether they are good farmers or bad farmers, should get a bailout from the Canadian government. Nobody is advocating that. It is a host of problems that have compounded and conspired to defeat the family farmer, whether it is world commodity prices or the corporate domination of the whole industry in terms of access to seeds.
One thing that scared the heck out of me recently was told to me by a group of farmers. It almost seems like this is part of some master plan: drive the small farmer off the farm so that the corporate sector can come in and make farming a corporate industry instead of a family enterprise.
One graphic illustration of why that is not just paranoia is the way that canola seed is dealt with. One has to buy canola seed from one corporate institution. I will not mention the name. One also has to sign a contract that one will sell the yield to that same institution. It controls the supply and purchasing of the product. At the same time it genetically alters the seed so that it cannot reproduce itself. It dead ends after one season. Unlike normal plants it cannot reproduce itself. It has been neutralized that way and the next year one has to go back to the same company to buy seed again.
It is a serfdom. It is a return to serfdom. Agro-serfs is what they really are. They are not farmers any more. They are agro-serfs, multimillion dollar agro-serfs.
These are the kinds of things that Canadians are trying to awaken the Canadian public to and nobody is listening. There used to be champions in the House of Commons for the prairie farmer. At one time we had a western protest party that actually spoke out on behalf of prairie farmers instead of just the corporate agricultural industry. Unfortunately we do not hear a great deal of that today and, try as we might, we cannot get that issue in the forefront. The Liberal government has missed an opportunity to buy some support in western Canada by at least being sensitive to that issue.
That is really how one could summarize the Speech from the Throne. It was a missed opportunity, in fact a series of missed opportunities, and that is only the first and most glaring one that I can identify.
Another missed opportunity that is self-evident for me because it is in my critic area is immigration. All summer long, for the past six months, we have been seeing an hysteria about immigration whipped up by my colleagues in the Reform Party and their right wing counterparts in western Canada. They are trying to convince us that we have an emergency on our hands because 400 or 500 Chinese migrants have drifted to our shore. I have heard terms like this is the biggest breach to national security since the FLQ crisis. That is one of the points they have made. I do not know how to say balderdash or poppycock in terms that are parliamentary, but I have never heard such nonsense in my life. I guess I just did.
Somehow we have to put the hysteria back into perspective and ease the public's mind that we are not facing a breach to our national security because a couple of hundred desperate people have foundered on our shore in British Columbia. It is a manageable issue and it is not the end of the world. However, again it is a missed opportunity where the Liberal government could have put one line into the Speech from the Throne to calm people down on that issue.
My colleague for Winnipeg North Centre raised the issue of child poverty. I was just reading the comments of the member for Winnipeg—Transcona in his speech. He reminded the House of Commons that we are up to the 10th anniversary of a unanimous motion in the House of Commons which said we would eradicate child poverty by the year 2000. That was moved by the leader of the NDP at that time in 1989 and it passed unanimously. Not a single person voted against such a laudable concept that by the year 2000 we would somehow eradicate child poverty within our borders.
I remind members of the House that we live in the richest and most powerful civilization in the history of the world. I ask members to defend in any way they can why there should be anybody living in poverty within our borders.
As I said, I represent an inner city riding and so does the member for Winnipeg North Centre. We have three of the five poorest postal zones in the country. Poverty is an issue that we are seized with every day. There is not a day when we go to work that we are not dealing with somebody's urgent social emergency in terms of poverty issues. Yet in the Speech from the Throne we heard very little. We heard nothing about the important resolution that was passed in 1989, and only passing remarks about the issue of the fair redistribution of wealth building equity into our society.
The government mentioned that in the EI program it would lengthen maternity benefits. That is a laudable idea, a wonderful idea. I would like to see some costing of it. I cannot wait for the budget to come out to see what it will cost the Government of Canada. I would suggest that it will cost very little. First of all, fewer and fewer women qualify for any EI. They have to get on to EI before they can have their benefits lengthened.
The EI surplus is $600 million a month and not per year. What the government will spend in lengthening the EI benefits for mothers on maternity leave might cost $50 million a year. I have sort of done some costing on my own. Some $50 million a year versus $500 million or $600 million a month. Where is the rest of that money going? The Canadian public is still being cheated and the EI reform is not nearly far enough. It is another missed opportunity. The government could have addressed that glaring oversight.