Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak in this debate tonight. I understand that I will be the last speaker. I want to take a bit of a different approach to this tonight and talk a bit about what has led to this situation, as I see it.
Before I do that, I just want to acknowledge that the situation on the farm today is the worst than I have seen in the last 30 or 35 years. The drought is certainly the worst drought in recorded history in western Canada. There is no doubt about that. It is much drier than it was in the thirties. The only thing that saved farmers until now is their aggressive changes over the past 10 years, direct seeding in particular, which allowed every drop of moisture to be saved so that there would be crops in following years, where there would not have been any 20 short years ago.
Farmers have made any changes they possibly could to help them farm in a way that would allow them to make a living. These changes have led them to be the most productive farmers in the world. The evidence of that is that Canadian consumers only pay something like 11% of their income on food. That is lower than any other country in the world.
Our farmers are doing their part and yet we are in another situation where many farmers will lose their farms. Many farmers have been forced to sell their livestock. Many simply will not rebuild their herds again. This hurts. It especially hurts someone who has grown up on a farm, as I have, and who has been raised on a farm with livestock and crops.
I studied agriculture in university. That was my chosen field. I bought a farm while I was still in university, 100% financed. It was not with the family. I had some very difficult times on it. It was not easy. I watched my neighbours as they struggled.
Because I had the training in agriculture, I worked as a farm economist for Alberta Agriculture and did private consulting with farmers over that time period as well. I will never forget as long as I live those years in the late eighties and early nineties when I sat at the kitchen table with dozens of farmers who were losing their farms. I knew there was no way to save the farm and they knew that also. In so many cases, a father, a mother and their children would be sitting at the kitchen table. The father would break down in tears as he realized there was just no way they could save the farm. Then the mother would break down and the children would sit there wondering what was going on.
That is what drove me into politics more than any other thing. I had seen the impact of government policies on farmers and I was determined to change that, at least to do my best to change it. I was determined that never again would I see farm families in that kind of a situation. However here we are 10, 12 or 15 years later and this situation has come back again.
It is important to look at what led us to this situation. There is no one point in time or one cause which could be pointed to as starting this mess, but I think there is one that probably lends itself to that more than any other of which I can think. That was an action taken by the current leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, the right hon. member for Calgary Centre, when he was Prime Minister for six months in 1979. That member caused more devastation and hardship than any other political leader in the country by signing on to the trade embargo against the former Soviet Union. The then president of the United States signed on and decided to take this action and that member, as prime minister at that time, supported the United States. That has been the most devastating action taken by any politician in Canada, when it comes to the problems we now see in agriculture. I want to explain why.
I believe the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Part of the problems we see in Afghanistan now of course stem from that. Something had to be done. The mistake was when the United States and the Government of Canada decided to use food as a weapon. What was the response from our European friends? The Europeans said, “Never again will we go hungry”. They built subsidies and a common agricultural policy to the extent that they could be sure they would produce the food they needed so their people would never go hungry again, as they did during the second world war. The Europeans built their system of subsidies, including export subsidies, which drove world prices down.
The Americans to protect their farmers, then responded to those subsidies, including export subsidies, which further drove prices down.
What happened in Canada? Canadian farmers were left without the support that the Europeans and the United States farmers were receiving. They were not competing in a fair way. Our farmers remarkably did a lot of different things much faster than the Europeans or the Americans to help adapt to this very unfair trading environment. It is only due to their remarkable reaction that they have survived as long as they have, and many of them have done very well. Many Canadian farmers in fact are thriving.
I am here to say that I do not believe that subsidies are the solution to this problem in any way. That is not what we should be calling for. Subsidies are not the answer. Our farmers have done their part. They are producing the food more efficiently than any other farmers around the world.
We need compensation for trade injury absolutely, which is what we called for, and we need to improve the crop insurance program, which we certainly support. To portray farmers as charity cases is completely unfair because they have done their part. Governments have failed miserably.
First, we had the Conservative government with the member for Calgary Centre as prime minister and the tough, wrong-headed action which he took. Then successive governments since, Liberals, Conservatives and Liberals, again refused to deal with the base of the problem, which was unfair trade, particularly export subsidies on the part of Europe and the United States.
We have import restrictions in Asian countries, Japan, Korea and other wealthy Asian countries. They have refused to deal with these unfair trade practices and as a result have continued to keep our farmers in an unfair position where they simply cannot compete in an appropriate way.
I would like to close by saying that it is time for the government to finally do what it should have done all along, and that is to deal with some of the trade problems and high input costs that it has forced on our problems through high taxes, over regulation and red tape that is very expensive and takes a lot of time on the part of farmers.
It is time that the government gave farmers freedom to market their own grain, for Pete's say. It should not throw them in jail when they try to get a better price for it in the United States.
We have to allow competition in the transportation system so freight rates will drop. The government has to take action in all these areas. When it does that, our farmers will compete fine and there will be no need for subsidies in any way.