Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today to talk to Bill C-387.
The hon. member for Brandon—Souris has a lot of good points in the bill, but many of these issues have already been addressed. There is legislation in place to enforce some of these issues but governments in the past have failed to listen.
The safety net review committee and advisory committee are there to suggest to governments what should be happening as far as the three lines of defence are concerned.
The first line of defence is the crop insurance program, of which every farmer is aware and is making use. The second line of defence is the NISA program, which is very valuable to older farmers especially who are in a profit position. NISA does not help address the issue of young farmers who have just started out and whose revenue has not been such that they could make use of NISA.
The Liberals claim that in record time they set up the third line of defence. The AIDA program is probably a joke, as far as I am concerned. I was in my constituency for the last couple of weeks during the Easter break and did not find one farmer who would qualify for any aid from this program at all.
When I talked to farmers, they asked me whether I could at least tell the banker that something is coming. This is not bankable. The Liberal government promised before Christmas that the AIDA program would be bankable. No banks will look at it today.
Everyone with whom I talked in my riding had looked into the AIDA program, had gone to accountants who did a summary. They are wasting their money. It will cost from $500 to $1,000 to fill out the forms for this AIDA package. After that they probably will not recoup the costs of the accountants doing the job. People are not even filing them because they are so ridiculous.
The AIDA program has been designed for a few corporate hog farmers. If the Liberal government does not realize that, it better go to western Canada and find out. It has been invited a number of times by Saskatchewan farmers to come clean and come to talk to them about the AIDA program. Nothing has happened. Not even the parliamentary secretary has agreed to come to talk to them.
If the AIDA program is the third line of defence, God help those farmers. They will die before they ever get a dollar out of the AIDA program.
The government has been warned about this for the last five years by Reform. We told the government in 1993 that all the subsidies on the rail transportation system when done away with should go into some kind of trade distortion program with which farmers could fight the huge subsidies thrown at them by the Americans and the Europeans. This program will do absolutely nothing to resolve that problem. We need a long term fix for farmers in which they can participate. We must design it so it is useful to them, so that in good years they can build up an account on which they can draw in later years when there are poor crops or when prices drop to the point where it is not profitable to farm.
I will touch a bit on the Canadian Wheat Board. For the past four or five years I have tried to bring in a private member's bill to have the auditor general audit the Canadian Wheat Board and to make sure farmers get a proper price for their grain. I must thank and congratulate the auditor general. A week ago Saturday the wheat board announced that the auditor general would have a look at the books, that he would do a value-added audit, more or less, to see whether farmers are getting a fair price. The auditor general has finally heard the cries of western farmers that we need something done with the auditing of the board so that we can respect the board and have confidence in it.
About 100 farmers are willing to go to jail and this government is prosecuting them and putting them in jail because they have sold a few bushels of their own wheat, in some cases as little as five bags. And the government is talking about providing a safety net program? Maybe being behind bars is a better livelihood than being on the farm today. At least there they get food and clothing.
I do not know what the government is trying to do by prosecuting these farmers for selling their own product while we have sex offenders and robbers running loose on the streets. Are these farmers violent criminals because they have taken four or five bags of grain across the border to demonstrate that they want some accountability in the wheat board? Is that such a criminal act? If that is a criminal act, we should probably all be behind bars. I am sure that every member of this House has objected to some type of mechanism that is set out and that we have to abide by. Income tax is one of them. When I hear of the amount of income tax that is funnelled out through loopholes in the tax system, maybe every government and opposition member should be behind bars because they are objecting to overtaxation in the country.
I do not know what is going to be accomplished by Bill C-387. The idea is good. I can support it and I know this type of idea has been floating in the agriculture community for the past 10 years. I have talked to people who sat on the advisory board who were designing the third line of defence. The AIDA program does not have the character which people want in a third line of defence. They want a line of defence in which they can be participants in terms of designing it and establishing a fund.
The AIDA program is really doing nothing. I have held nine town hall meetings in my constituency. People have been phoning me, telling me that they do not qualify. What kind of line of defence is it if they cannot qualify when grain prices have gone from $5 a bushel to barely $3 a bushel? That is almost half the price, while input costs are still rising. Every year there are input costs for fertilizer and machinery. We hear again that there has been an increase of three to four cents a litre in fuel prices.
How are farmers supposed to continue when they have no marketing power? They cannot add one single cent of their costs to their product. They have to accept what the market will offer them. This is very discouraging for farmers. I see more young farmers having auction sales this spring than I have ever seen before. It is not the older farmers who are debt free and who can work on their savings for another year or two; it is the young farmers who over the past four or five years have risked everything and who are now at the point where they cannot dig themselves out, even if they have three or four good crops and good prices. They are disillusioned with the whole agriculture sector and with the income their families receive, so they are throwing in the towel.
The government better realize that. If we lose this generation of young farmers there is going to be a real problem in the country. It will not only affect the farming industry, it will affect any one of the agri-processors or agri-businesses: machine dealers, fuel dealers, pasta plants, millers, whatever.
When $1 is taken out of a farmer's pocket the community loses at least $5 or $6 of economic value. That is why the farming industry in western Canada has shrunk. We have about half the farmers now that we had two decades ago. If we want to continue this, let us simply follow the former Conservative and Liberal governments with their safety nets and we will have the situation very quickly where there will be no farmers.