Madam Speaker, I am taking part in the debate this evening because of the conflicting signals that are being dispatched across the way by government officials, ministers, and the Prime Minister surrounding the agricultural income disaster assistance plan.
One movie I enjoyed was called Cool Hand Luke . There is a great line in that movie when the warden says to Paul Newman: “What we have here is a failure to communicate”. Truer words were never spoken when it comes to this program. I would like to give a few examples to support that.
When the minister of agriculture was in the province of Saskatchewan at Prince Albert last July, he refused to meet in any meaningful way with the farmers of Saskatchewan who had very grave concerns about the AIDA program. When the Prime Minister was asked by my leader to go out and inspect the flooded regions of Saskatchewan and Manitoba last July, he declined that invitation. So far as I know he has never gone there or flown over it to inspect it.
When the premiers and the farm lobby from Saskatchewan and Manitoba came last week to meet with officials in Ottawa, they were what can only be politely described as sandbagged by government officials. All of a sudden there were new numbers. They would not release the numbers.
Those numbers have been released as of today. For the record, it says that Saskatchewan remains significantly below the previous five year average and is expected to remain significantly below the previous five year average in the year 2000. Nevertheless that was reason enough to say that they could not give them any more money at this point because the numbers did not jibe.
Today I had an opportunity to meet with alfalfa dehydrators from Alberta and Saskatchewan. These folks are diversifying. They are doing value added, primarily in the two western prairie provinces. They are doing exactly what the government wanted producers to do, to diversify, to do value added and to have more folks working in that part of the world, rural development.
International prices on alfalfa have dropped far below their cost of production. The Europeans are subsidizing to such an extent that our folks cannot compete. Once again there is no additional money for an industry that is not yet mature but has been growing and has had a strong track record. We simply cannot compete with European subsidies. It is another example of a failure.
The AIDA deadline was extended yesterday for farmers in four provinces, including Manitoba and Saskatchewan, who had significantly expanded their operations. My office had a call this morning from a farm family who did not even know there was a program under AIDA for significant expansion. We were running around frantically yesterday because the deadline was November 1, only to find out after they got the forms in the mail that it has now been extended to December 31. They were running around literally like chickens with their heads cut off.
There are half a dozen examples of glaring failures to communicate effectively with the western Canadian agriculture sector. My point is that unless this is rectified immediately it will result in a very large problem in western Canada.