Mr. Speaker, the motion is seconded by the Leader of the Opposition. This debate should not have even had to occur today because at the start of this session on October 12, after the prorogation of parliament, the Reform Party had asked for an emergency debate on the issue of farm income.
The farm income issue has reached a crisis proportion in the past year to year and a half and has been identified as such through committee hearings, by farmers themselves and by Statistics Canada.
The motion today sets out both short term and long term problems that have arisen. Certainly one of the long term problems that is identified in the motion deals with the practices of our competitors, namely the United States and the European Union. The program the government designed to address the farm income crisis was called the agriculture income disaster assistance program. I will be dealing with that a little later in my speech this morning. As an aside, I believe I indicated I will be splitting my time with the member for Calgary Southwest.
In dealing with this income crisis Reform knew as early as September 1998 that the farm situation in western Canada, in particular, and the cash crop people in Ontario were hitting a financial crunch which they were no longer able to handle totally on their own. As a result, the advisory committee on safety net programs was called to examine this issue. Reform put forward a motion to the Standing Committee on Agriculture to hold hearings with regard to the situation.
What came out of that was a solid recommendation to the agriculture minister as to the seriousness of this crisis and a suggested solution, which was a program of domestic support based on individual farm income situations. On receiving the recommendations from the safety net committee, which included all the different farm organizations across the country, the government took the program called AIDA and made it fit the amount of money on which the agriculture minister was able to get a commitment from cabinet.
The fact that the crisis was real, that the statistics were there from Statistics Canada, did not seem to matter. It was a situation where the government made the program fit the budget as opposed to taking care of the income crisis.
On top of that we had a situation where there was a natural disaster of flooding in southwest Manitoba and southeast Saskatchewan which certainly compounded the major problems in those provinces. We will see from the Stats Canada statistics that compounding will make for a negative realized net income in Saskatchewan and a drastically lowered realized net income in Manitoba.
Another statistic of great concern also comes from Statistics Canada. Total cash receipts for farms in Canada will be flat right through until the year 2003. When we look at whether or not the government has to do more for farmers in Canada to retain a viable agriculture sector, we see that the government has to do more in the area of domestic support than what it is doing at the present time.
The AIDA program was simply a two year program designed to provide funding for Canadian agriculture producers to cushion an extreme income reduction beyond their control. The government and the agriculture minister totally missed the point, missed the real crisis in farm income. The real crisis is that for many years now through the 1990s net farm incomes have been dropping due to the fact that commodity prices have been extremely low. This is mostly affecting commodities that are exported to other countries around the world.
We also see that input costs are rising dramatically. The cost of a pickup, for instance, which most farmers require, is between $30,000 and $41,000 for a decent half tonne. How can farmers continue to survive on commodity prices that are only designed to buy a $10,000 pickup? That is just one little example.
We can look at what the people who administer the AIDA program are saying in the media. The managing director said that despite all of the negative talk about the program not working cheques are flowing to producers. He said that he thinks the message is out there and that payments are going to the rural communities. Part of the problem is in getting our urban cousins, city dwellers, to understand and support agriculture. In essence, they are doing a spin doctor routine by telling Canadians that money is flowing, cash is flowing and that farmers are all right, when in reality there are tens of thousands of farmers who are not receiving any money. A relatively small amount of farmers are receiving money.
The results of this crisis are being reflected in the communities, in families and at the social level. In Manitoba even the United Church has seen fit to try to do something for farmers by way of financial assistance and by bringing this crisis to the forefront. That has not happened since the 1930s.
The Liberal government got us into this mess and it has failed in its efforts to fix it. That is why we had to force this debate today. The Reform Party has put forward many solutions for the government to consider because it has failed to bring forward a suitable long term program to fight this income crisis and it is now in the position of having to come up with some immediate domestic support to get cash into farmers' hands before the end of October.
The agriculture minister promised in December 1998 that he would have cash in the hands of farmers by spring. That did not happen and that is a condemnation of this government.