Mr. Speaker, for months now I have had farmers from my riding of Athabasca coming to me to tell me how they are suffering. Alberta farmers are being crushed under a burden of debt and non-existent profits due to crop failures, high input costs and low commodity prices. Many of the municipalities in the province of Alberta have declared their regions disaster areas, and life is not getting any easier for our farmers since this government is unwilling to provide them with any substantive relief or assistance.
I have been trying my best to help our farmers, but now I realize that what I should have been telling them all these months was, instead of lobbying the agriculture minister for assistance, they should have sent in bogus applications to the Minister of Human Resources Development. No doubt they would have received more money than they could ever have hoped for.
When I go back to the farmers to give them an update I can tell them that the reason they have not received any real assistance is that this government was too busy losing over a billion dollars to worry about western farmers.