Madam Speaker, a lot of things the member said we are certainly thinking about, but I really wonder from where he is coming. What track is he at with making statements that apparently did not seem to make any difference in the past and why we would want to continue that trail?
I am thinking particularly of his comments about how pleased we are that the help to Africa will be doubled, and I am sure that is in terms of dollars, yet we have done this year after year for many years. The member knows, as well as I do, that the problem is no better now that it has been for a long time; the tragedies that are taking place in these countries and the starvation. Yet we have one sector of people who are called the elite who fill their palaces with gold, their Swiss accounts with money, but these countries still have the starving.
I will ask the member my first question and then a quick one after. Does he not agree that there is not a poverty or rich and poor deficit in these countries? There is a democracy deficit and until they get true democracy and rid themselves of tyrants and dictators, how is it ever going to change; with more dollars?
Second, when we talk about the difference between some who prosper and some who do not in Canada, right now we have a group of farmers in my region who are not prospering. In fact they are losing their farms. There are bankruptcies as a result of the drought. I did not see the government step forward to the plate with any significant help in terms of this disaster as it has in other disastrous situations.
Having been part of the justice system as solicitor general in the past, in the member's view is it right that farmers in half of the country go to jail if they sell their grain across the border without a Wheat Board permit when farmers in the other half of the country can sell their grain without a permit? Does that sound fair?