Madam Speaker, as always, it is difficult to follow the right hon. member for Calgary Centre. He speaks so eloquently and knowledgeably about the issue.
I am sorry that I must once again stand in the House to speak to an issue I thought the minister of agriculture and the Prime Minister would have by now realized is of such a serious nature. I am sorry that the hon. member for Selkirk—Interlake had to put forward a motion on his own supply day to once again profile what is a very serious crisis in our communities and in our country. Unfortunately that is what has happened.
It is necessary to continue to profile the issue because unfortunately the government has not seen the seriousness of the crisis. It is serious. It is extremely serious. I am talking of farmers whose livelihood comes from the land, farmers, whom I deal with on a daily basis by telephone and in my constituency office, who are absolutely desperate.
This is a way of life. It is their livelihood. It is all they know. Their families before them and their families before them came from the land and they are now in my office and on my phone saying that they do not know what to do. They want to grow products for the rest of the country and the rest of the world but they have found themselves in a position where they may not be able to.
This is spring today, March 20. One month from now a lot of them should be on the land. Unfortunately the government, without the necessary supports, has thrown them onto the garbage heap of our society. That is sad.
This is not just about farmers. It is about their families. It is about their children who go to schools in the communities.
It is about the wives who work off farm and have always worked off farm to provide a livelihood for those families. It is about the same children the hon. member for Calgary Centre spoke of who are concerned about the welfare of their parents. This is extremely serious. It is about the communities that surround my community and the communities of the member for Palliser and of the member for Souris—Moose Mountain.
In my community the backbone of our economy is agriculture. It is desperate when we walk into a small rural community and we see boarded up businesses, schools being closed down, and elevators being ripped out. We see the way of life being destroyed in those communities. That is what this is about.
It is not about the ego of a prime minister. It is about families, communities and farmers. It is about businesses that have tried to develop in communities and because of lack of support are closing their doors. When those businesses close their doors, they close the doors on employment. The people employed in those businesses then leave their communities. Where do they go? They go to Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto. They go to urban centres.
We have a rural way of life that we want to preserve, not only in western Canada but across Canada. That rural way of life that should and must be preserved is not even on the government's radar screen. Why has this happened?
It is not happening because farm families, communities and businesses said that they were making mistakes and therefore they had to live by them. That would be easy to fix. The reason they find themselves in this position is unfair competition with the Americans and with the Europeans. They are eating our lunch and the minister of agriculture is allowing it to happen.
What is happening right now with unfair subsidies is that the Americans, between 1998 and 2000, provided $48 billion of support for agriculture. In that same timeframe in Canada it was less than $3 billion. That is despicable. The government is allowing the Americans to put us out of business through no fault of our own.
Another problem we have right now is increased costs. In most cases when people are in the business of making things they can pass on costs to consumers. In our particular case the costs are going up quite dramatically because the fertilizers being utilized on the land are natural gas based. We know what is happening in the natural gas industry right now. Costs are going up by 100% over last year's costs. Fuel being put into a tractor, a swather or a combine has gone up again about 100%, or 45% coming back in the other direction.
These costs cannot be passed on because the commodity price that is being driven down by these unfair subsidies is now less than what it was in 1995-96. It does not take a very long time to realize that when it costs more money to make a product than to sell it one cannot stay in business very long.
We are not only finding ourselves in this position because of unfair competition and increased costs. It is also because, as was mentioned earlier, we have a government and particularly a Prime Minister who have lost the priority and the profile of this industry.
It was also mentioned earlier that the government wants to govern by polls. I was told by a member of the backbench that the Prime Minister said that they had done plenty for agriculture and that nobody out there was making any noise as to what the problems are.
Over the last four weeks we have had a minister of agriculture burnt in effigy in Saskatchewan. We have had a rally here in Lansdowne Park, at which I, the member for Palliser and others spoke in front of thousands of farmers. We have had people in the Manitoba legislature sleeping overnight with their families, without sleeping bags because they were not allowed to take them in. Why did they do this? It was because they were desperate.
Was there a profile given to the seriousness of the industry? Of course there was. Where has the Prime Minister been when he cannot see what is going on around him? We had members of his own party, his own backbenchers stand to say very effectively that there must be more support now.
There are three issues with respect to support. The first one is support now. The motion is very specific. It asks for an additional $400 million. The hon. member for Toronto—Danforth said that $400 million was an awful lot of money above the $500 million that has already been expended. On a per acre basis, that probably, in most cases in Saskatchewan and Manitoba alone, would mean less than $5 per acre. That does not even take into consideration the cost of what the inputs are that are going into the land for the coming year. Four hundred million dollars above the $500 million is the minimum amount that is necessary to make sure our producers can get onto the land. That is an ad hoc program.
I remember listening to the minister in the House saying many times that the government does not like ad hoc programs in agriculture. He said that the government would like a long term, well thought out safety net program that will solve the problem. I see no evidence that the government is leading in that direction. Everything that has been dealt with, in my experience in the House, in agriculture, has been totally ad hoc.
We all know about the ice storm in Ontario and Quebec back in 1998. It was ad hoc. The government gave money to Quebec and to Ontario for issues that have never been dealt with before on an ad hoc basis. I remember the 1998 flood in the Red River Valley. What was the program for agriculture? It was an ad hoc program. They received lost inputs, seeding requirements and a lot of programs that were kind of made up on the go and put into place ad hoc.
In 1999, when the hon. member for Palliser's area and my area in southwestern Manitoba were affected by extreme rain conditions, to the point where 1.1 million acres were not planted, we asked the minister for some programs. He told us that he could not do ad hoc programs. He said that we had a wonderful program called AIDA that would take into consideration all the losses suffered in the area and that AIDA would fix everything.
Half of what my office handles in my constituency are complaints about the AIDA program. The program has not solved the problems. In fact maybe the minister was getting off track. Maybe he should have gone to an ad hoc program. I would have been much happier, believe me, because I would have had some compensation for people who required it.
We heard the hon. member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough say that there is no program right now in P.E.I. The government came along, pulled $14.6 million out of the air and it is an ad hoc program.
We desperately need money now. All members in the House must vote in favour of the $400 million. We need long term programs that will put some hope back into agriculture. We need a government and a Prime Minister who will say publicly that there is a problem in agriculture and that, yes, they are prepared to fix it.