Mr. Speaker, it is an extreme honour for me to have the chance to respond to the hon. member's comments and to elaborate on a couple of aspects which are of concern, particularly to the people in my riding and to people nationally.
The member spoke in glowing terms about his own riding. It was obvious the love he feels for it and his province. I feel the same way about my own riding and my country. He spoke of generations of expertise and of the concerns that he and his government have for the future and for the expertise we all want to see rise up inside our children in order for them to capture their potential.
Those are wonderful words and quite true. He also spoke of fair treatment, and that is of concern right now to many of my constituents and many farm families who have for generations done their best to adapt and to succeed. Right now they are facing a set of circumstances, largely not of their own making, that pose tremendous challenges to them.
As the minister knows, the level playing field we subscribe to and would like to see for all industries in all sectors of our economy does not exist for agriculture. That level playing field is something we desire to see. Until we see it, the unlevel playing field is largely in an uphill direction for our agricultural producers. The slope becomes ever steeper and causes many to fall and tumble downhill.
As farmers leave the industry, depopulation follows. Fewer and fewer people reside on the farmlands of our country. We are allowing other countries, which value their agricultural industries very highly through policies of subsidization, to shape the policies of this country. This government has adopted a policy of rural depopulation, which severely impacts on all of us who are thinking about the future as much, as the minister has alluded to, as his government apparently is thinking about the future.
Recently the minister made the decision to subsidize the aerospace industry through the tax dollars of Canadians. Knowing that was a difficult decision for him, has the minister considered that Brazil, through its own policies of reprisal against Canada for this decision, will very likely reduce its purchases of grain from Canada? Has he considered that the very people who have not been favoured by such subsidies by our government, the agricultural producers of our land, will be the most disaffected now and the most penalized by the decisions the Brazilian government will make?