Madam Speaker, I rise this evening to follow up on a question I raised with the minister concerning agriculture in Saskatchewan.
Farmers are suffering the worst income crisis since the depression. The reason is that the cost of production far exceeds in most cases the costs and revenues they receive when they sell their products. Farmers are feeling very desperate and abandoned by the Liberal government.
We saw in the Star-Phoenix and the Leader-Post newspapers on Monday, October 25 headline stories, which by the way were during the Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar byelection, to the effect that the Minister of Finance said that there will be $900 million more provided to farmers in western Canada. When I raised the issue in the House of Commons, the Minister of Finance ducked the issue.
We have seen the Liberals, egged on by the Reform Party, cut more agriculture subsidies than has any other country in the world in the last five years. As a matter of fact the Reform Party wanted more cuts to agriculture than we have already witnessed. This has brought a great deal of hardship to our agricultural economy.
In 1995 there was the elimination of the Crow benefit. This was a transportation subsidy provided to farmers in western Canada, not for free but in exchange for billions of dollars of assets, land and mineral rights provided to the railroads so they could use that revenue and those assets to subsidize inland grain transportation to the ports.
The Liberals eliminated the Crow benefit and they supported the CPR in getting rid of all of the very high profit centres. Like the oil business, the pan-Canadian company which is now a CPR subsidiary does not contribute to rail transportation whatsoever. There is Cominco, the mining company. There is the land company from CPR. They have all made hundreds of millions of dollars of profits annually, yet the farmers are continuing to be squeezed by CPR and CNR at the encouragement of this government.
In the newspaper the other day, the minister of government services was quoted as saying “The disaster financial assistance arrangements are a good example of the co-operation and solidarity which characterize so well our Canadian society”. This is in reference to yet $100 million more going to Quebec for the ice storm. He talks about how proud he is to provide this financial help on behalf of the government to help Quebec farmers and others. Yet when it comes to the disaster of mega proportions in western Canada, the Liberal government is nowhere to be seen.
We are trying to find out today from the Minister of Finance if he was playing politics in the Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar byelection when he falsely announced $900 million more for agricultural aid. Was he misinforming farmers? Was he misleading the electorate in that byelection? What was he doing? Obviously, he did not come forward with the money. Or did he just not understand the hardship that the Liberal government and the Reform Party have inflicted upon western agriculture?
We look forward to having an answer from the Minister of Finance this evening. Will he come clean and tell the people of this country and the people of Saskatchewan why he misled them with respect to agriculture assistance?