Mr. Speaker, agriculture is in a crisis. Currently in Saskatchewan there is a sit-in in the provincial legislature.
The causes of the crisis are numerous. International subsidies by the Europeans and the Americans place our farmers at a competitive disadvantage. We have a grain transportation system that is broken and needs to be fixed. Grain marketing problems and the monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board are preventing value added processing. User fees imposed on farmers by the Canadian Grain Commission and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency could be removed by the government. Most of all, the high taxes that the government imposes are directly faced by farmers. As the end users they have no place to pass on their costs. Half the cost of farm inputs, such as fertilizers and chemicals, consists of taxes.
Why does the government not act immediately to cut taxes to take the burden off farmers, to remove the unfair user fees which they are paying, to reform the marketing system and to fix the grain transportation system?