The hon. agriculture minister made that statement. He is also on record as saying that he has no evidence of this affecting the Canadian economy because of the restrictions on strychnine. This is highly debatable, as we are finding out today, because it has a great impact on our Saskatchewan farmers. That is evident.
Of course strychnine poison is perhaps not the only solution. The gophinator has been mentioned and I was interested to hear that the hon. member across the way mentioned that they had to test to see if there would be harmful effects from injecting anhydrous ammonia into the soil. It is interesting to me that we can inject anhydrous ammonia into the soil to raise our food, but when it comes to using it for pest control we have to make sure it is okay. I do not get the logic. I do not really understand it but I guess that is the way some people think.
There are some other chemicals or drugs that would kill gophers, such as anticoagulants. They may be effective if repeated doses are applied in a certain minimal length of time, that is, within two or three days. Perhaps that would be better, but as my hon. colleague has pointed out who wants to go back to all those holes over and over to make the necessary applications? If we examine the evidence I believe we will discover that strychnine is in fact the only truly effective way to control these pests.
Each province has regulations for the use of strychnine. We seem to be so worried about where it is going and what it may do but these regulations are already in place. In Saskatchewan the sale of strychnine is restricted to pest control operators, farmers or persons authorized in government approved pest control programs. Only those people are able to get it at all. They are held accountable and responsible. It seems to me that there is a lot more accountability and responsibility placed upon the people who would use strychnine for gopher poisoning than there is upon people who use a lot of other things that are a lot more dangerous for the general population of Canada.
The vendor of these products maintains a record of sales and has the name, address and signature of the buyer along with the quantity purchased. Detailed records are kept by the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, of which Sinclair Harrison, as I mentioned, is the president. In Saskatchewan alone there are around 250 pest control officers, one pest control officer for nearly each of the 297 rural municipalities, and they are quite well trained in the use of strychnine.
However, one of the problems with the strychnine poisoning method is that to be most effective it must be used at a certain time of the year, pretty well no later than mid-March. As cute as these little gophers are, they do not all come up out of the ground at one time. The first ones up are the males. They stick their heads up, look around and see what is on the horizon for the new spring. They come up one to two weeks ahead of the females. The females begin to awake from hibernation and stick their heads up and poke around. When the level of female gophers is high enough, that is when the chemical needs to be put down. It needs to be put down early in the year, before we have hundreds more little gophers later on. There can be five to ten gophers in a litter. For effective control, it must be done at a certain time.
We are having trouble at the municipal level in getting the supplies on time. There needs to be a distribution system that would get them there on time. This would include strict control methods as to how they are stored, proper training for those who use them and those kinds of things. These things need to be done. There is no reason we cannot be prepared and have that ready.
The government needs to have some sort of assigned mechanism in place and enter into talks with the municipal governments on how these kinds of things can be put in place and controlled. The government needs to talk to cattle organizations and various farm organizations to reflect their concerns and implement appropriate measures to control the increasing costs gophers are afflicting on our farm economy.
There is no direct pipeline held season after season to handle these kinds of things. Nonetheless these are problems that can easily be addressed. They need to be if that is the only way we have of controlling the gopher population.
It seems the government would want to know what the effects of the restriction on strychnine are. We are asking that this information be put out. If we need to find other solutions then the government should know that. This is a drastically increasing problem.
My hon. colleague mentioned gophers popping out and taking down all the tulip bulbs. I was here a few days ago when we had the memorial service for the police officers and firemen who lost their lives. I was wondering what would happen if the front lawn contained the population of gophers required to get all those tulip bulbs. Let us think of all the holes. How many of those firemen and policemen would have been injured, like our cattle are, by falling into the holes as they marched through the parade grounds blowing their bagpipes?