Mr. Speaker, I will let you know that my colleague from Pictou--Antigonish--Guysborough and I are used to sharing our time in many other debates as well.
My colleague from Malpeque, Prince Edward Island said that there should be a program to help farmers. We on this side of the House say do it. Do it right away. Do not hesitate, do not talk about it, just do it.
Just sitting here thinking about what type of program we should have, a few years ago the government instituted something called the millennium scholarship fund. It put a couple of billion dollars into a fund and that fund generates revenues and those revenues are to help students. Unfortunately it only helps about 7% of the students in the country. However a program such as that would be much more effective to help all our farmers.
As was noted by my colleague from Brandon--Souris, this is the sixth emergency debate on agriculture we have had in the House since 1997. It is a telling sign when a member from the Bloc Québécois stands up for western Canadian farmers. The member from the Bloc deserves a real big hand for doing that. He and his party understand the difficulty western farmers are going through. It is too bad that although there are some backbench Liberals who understand it, the frontbench, the cabinet, still does not understand the devastation that is affecting our farmers.
A couple of years ago a farm lobby group came to Ottawa. We introduced it our NDP caucus. There was one young man who was about 12 years old. I think he was in grade six or grade seven. I asked him specifically if he was going to be a farmer like his daddy. He said no, absolutely not. I asked how many kids were in his school. He said about a couple of hundred. I asked him if any of the kids he knew were going to be farmers and he said, “Absolutely not. As soon as they can, they are gone”. When I asked him who he thought was going to feed us in the future, he just shrugged his shoulders.
That is the question I ask the government. Who will be the farmers of the future? Are we going to lose the capacity to feed ourselves? Very likely. We have heard reports of over 30,000 farm families leaving the farm over the last few years.
Coming from the east coast I know all too well the devastation we have in industry. We watched the 1992 cod collapse when John Crosbie shut down the industry and 40,000 fishermen were thrown out of work. The devastation to the farm families is just as real as what happened to the people on the east coast.
We have a crisis in our forestry industry. Those people who worked in the mills on Vancouver Island and elsewhere in British Columbia are feeling just as devastated as the fishermen on the east coast and the farmers in central Canada.
We have to ask ourselves, what does the Liberal government have against farming, fishing and forestry? I have not been able to figure that out. We would assume that these good people are well meaning and well intentioned. They must hear the same stories we hear. They must read the same newspapers we read. They must get the same phone calls that we get. Why are those traditional industries that helped build this country so devastated? I have a feeling I know why.
A former colleague of ours from Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, John Solomon, was in France on an IPU tour. He met some agricultural ministers from the European Union. He asked the one from France about the subsidies to French farmers which were having a devastating effect on Canadian farmers. The man told my colleague, “John, don't even worry about it. If you think for one second that the French government is not going to support their farmers in any way, shape or form, you are kidding yourself. You are out to lunch. We are going to do everything we can every year to support our farmers. It does not matter about trade agreements, we are going to support our farmers. That is what the French government does”.
When John came back home he told us he could only imagine if that kind of spunk were in the Liberal government, that it would have the courage to support its farmers just as much, while at the same time working in the international community to reduce the international subsidies that hurt farmers around the world. It cannot be done alone. The United States farm bill has been completely devastating to our farmers.
Our government needs to act tougher and more unified with the provinces to stop that from happening. It is like Yogi Berra once said, “It's deja vu all over again.” I feel that I am repeating the same words we spoke last year on this.
While I am here I want to thank the member for Cumberland--Colchester and my Conservative colleagues in Nova Scotia for their effort in organizing and assisting, not only financially but manually, with the Hay West campaign in our area of Nova Scotia. I received a lot of calls from farmers within the Musquodoboit Valley and from the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture. They did a great job of quickly organizing and working with colleagues across the country to get whatever hay we could at that time, but it took a long time for the federal government to understand. Even for a photo op government members should have moved more quickly. All the farmers wanted was to provide the hay, ship it out and have the federal government provide the transport. It took a mightly struggle to get the government to listen to that.
The government must ask itself who the farmers of tomorrow will be? Will it be the big corporate farms run by other countries, and we as citizens will have to pay whatever the market will bear, or will we stand up and support our family farmers so that when they wish to retire from a farm they will be able to turn it over to their sons or daughters with pride?
If we can do that then we will have a legacy for our people in the farming industry. I ask everyone watching, and anyone in the House, to stop for a second before consuming their breakfast tomorrow morning, to say a little prayer and to thank farmers who produced the food that nourishes us.