Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his intervention. He is quite right that the net income on a farm is a very elusive target if there is any at all.
Seventy-five per cent of the farms in western Canada are viable only because of off farm income, that is husband and/or wife both working off farm to keep the cows in the barn.
The problem with the AIDA money, and he is talking about the $2.6 billion that was in the global budget, is that less than 60% of it ever left the cabinet table and got on to the kitchen tables. That includes 1998 and 1999.
Distraught farmers in my riding have been phoning me. Less than two-thirds of what they applied for in 1998 ever came to them. Now they are getting clawback notices from the minister of agriculture and his friends asking them to send back two-thirds of it because they were overpaid. Can we imagine being on the bankrupt rolls and being asked to send money back?
The government has rejigged the formula to include things that were not in the original formula. That would be fine if it triggers more money when the government could not get it all out in the first place, but it will now claw back the two-thirds it sent out.
The payments for 1999 are finally coming out. Guess what year it is? It is 2001. Is it a bankable program? My sweet aunt Fanny, it never got out there. It is sending out only two-thirds of the 1999 money because it is scared it will run out of money. What an absolutely ludicrous reason. The government never sent out more than 60% to begin with and it just put another $500 million in the same clogged pipe.
That pipe must be clogged with Liberal logic because we never saw any of the money out west. The Saskatchewan grains and oilseed sector is hardest hit in the country. How can the government sit across there and vote against any more money being topped in? It would not matter if we were asking for $10 billion today. Nobody would qualify.