Mr. Speaker, thank you for recognizing the official opposition's responsibility in the House to ask the first question.
The history of agriculture in Canada is written one page at a time. The agriculture minister has been writing his pages certainly since the start of his appointment to the ministry in the House.
My question for the agriculture minister deals with his administration of the agriculture department. He briefly mentioned that he had responded to the drastic drop in income. In the good administration of a minister's department, particularly agriculture, why is the minister simply responding to requests as opposed to administering the department and foreseeing that ad hoc payments have not worked out over the past 100 years? Why has he not been able to put in place long term programs over the past two terms of this Liberal government?
My question relates to the $1.4 billion budget that he has to work with and why an additional $63,196,279 has to be appropriated in extra payments from taxpayers at this time.