Mr. Speaker, various Liberal members like to claim that they are friends of the farmers. This is interesting because in each of the last two budgets the finance minister never allowed the word farmer to pass his lips during his speeches.
The Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food should tell his Liberal colleagues that many Canadian farmers are facing a full-blown income crisis which is getting worse day by day. Predications are that realized net farm income for Canadian farmers will drop as much as 40% in the year just ended.
Grain prices last year were at the worst level since the Great Depression and hog prices were not much better. We saw some farmers giving their hogs away to food banks because they were being paid next to nothing for them.
In December the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food promised a contribution of $900 million from Ottawa to be supplemented by $600 million from the provinces. Now there is a clear indication that the bureaucrats are fiddling around with the program design to ensure that Ottawa will pay less than it promised.
The minister says that the program will not cover losses or negative margins. It means if farmers actually lost money as they did in northwestern Saskatchewan because of the drought, those losses are not covered. These farmers say that this program will do nothing for them.
The minister is also going to deduct from his payments to farmers any contributions the government has made to the net income stabilization account, NISA. By setting up this program the minister will pay about $600 million or even less, not the $900 million he promised as recently as December.
I should mention that the forms the government is sending out to farmers, as another hon. member has stated, are long and complicated. A lot of farmers are throwing their hands up in the air and saying to heck with it.
Another problem is that the provinces are being forced to pay 40% of this program. That is not fair. North Dakota or Minnesota are not paying disaster relief to American farmers; it is Washington. And it should be Ottawa, not small provinces like Saskatchewan, that foots the bill to help our farmers through trade wars. Our small provinces cannot afford to take on the treasuries of the United States or Europe.
Until the late 1980s Ottawa took major responsibility for safety net and disaster programs. This Liberal government has walked away from its responsibility. The Liberals have slashed spending on agriculture by 60% since 1993. The money they plan to spend on the disaster relief program is just a brief two year blip. By the year 2000 the Liberals will again be spending less than they did last year. In turn, it is much less than what they had spent in 1993.
In addition, our farmers have been impacted by the falling commodity prices, as everybody is well aware, but their increased input costs have compounded the financial squeeze that is driving our families away from their farms. This government should immediately investigate the input costs in agriculture, the unrealistic fuel costs, the whole issue of concentrated control of our food supply, as referenced by the Western Producer recently, and claim it as food clusters.
Farmers have played a key role in the deficit reduction of this country and the restoration of the balanced budget this government is so proud of. It is time for Ottawa to put back money into agriculture. We in the NDP believe that Canadian farmers need stable incomes. Our federal caucus intends to keep the pressure on the agriculture minister so that a solid sustainable farm income disaster plan will be there not just for one or two years, but for the long haul.