Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to participate in the debate. I remind members that I represent a riding in downtown Toronto. There is not a single farm in my riding.
Having said that, I have always believed that national politicians should be sensitive to issues not just in our own riding or our own community but in every region of the country. Today is an example where this debate affects the people of my riding, not only in an indirect way but in a direct way.
I listened attentively to the member for Yorkton—Melville earlier. He described in very dramatic detail what was happening in his community. There were families with children facing the stress of watching their mothers and fathers working 80, 90 to 100 hour weeks and not making ends meet. He said that this was not a faceless problem, that these were real people.
He also asked one question I want to try to answer. What can we do to make the people who live in cities understand what is happening on the family farm? That was the question he asked.
As a downtown Toronto member of parliament I will attempt to answer that question. The basis of my answer comes from an experience that I had in the House 10 years ago when I sat in opposition. We had an agriculture critic from Lambton—Middlesex, the hon. Ralph Ferguson, who is a farmer to this day. He developed, at his own expense, a program entitled, “Compare the Share”. When I go into a store and buy a bag of cookies for $5, the program shows what the retailer gets, what the wholesaler gets and what the manufacturer gets. The family farm gets two pennies on that $5. On what we pay for a quart of milk the farmer's share is 11 cents. On a loaf of bread the family farmer gets six cents. When we buy 10 pounds of potatoes for $1.50 the farmer gets 12 to 15 cents.
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Egmont.
As someone who has spent most of my life as a city person, I had never seen that package before. One day we decided to put up a display at my constituency office, which is on a very high profile street in downtown Toronto called the Danforth, showing the various shares on a quart of milk, a bag of cookies, a package of pasta and a loaf of bread. We then showed how much a farmer pays for his land, machinery and equipment.
I can tell the member for Yorkton—Melville that the city people were shocked. They had no idea the number of hours that farm families put in to get the two cents out of that $5 bag of cookies.
We kept the “Compare the Share” display for about a month to six weeks and then obviously we had to change it. That was one little section of a downtown area in Toronto, one of 22 sections.
The member asked what we could do to make city folk understand. We have to revive “Compare the Share”. Even for our own rural members in the House, there are probably a lot who would not be up to date on the current share that exists on a whole line of products.
We also have to go as far as re-examining the packaging that goes on products. Maybe we should not just be doing “Compare the Share” in our offices. Maybe we should use our power in the House of Commons to explore the notion of putting the approximate share that a farmer gets on all of the packaged goods. What is wrong with that?
The reality is that if we, in three, four or five years from now, lose the contribution of the family farm in the country, or if we discover four, five or six years from now that we no longer have any young people who want to work on the family farm because they are tired of working for $2 or $3 an hour, what will we do as a nation? Without the family farm, the quality of food, which today is second to none, and even in terms of consumer price is as competitive or more competitive than most places in the world, we will find ourselves stuck.
This is a good debate today but we must not treat it as a partisan debate. I know most members have not. Let us get together and do something constructive. I really believe the way to get the city people mobilized is to educate them about exactly what the farm family gets for every little contribution they make to the quality of life we have in our cities and in the whole country which is ranked number one in the world.