Madam Speaker, I appreciated the speech made by the leader of our party. As an Ontarian and a person who has not been a farmer, he has come to understand the situation very well.
When many other people find out the facts about the Canadian Wheat Board they begin to change their minds as well. That includes Liberal backbenchers who have approached me over the last year to talk about the issue. They have said to me that this cannot be the way it really is. After the situation is explained to them, they cannot believe it. This goes beyond a partisan issue. I would suggest that is why a Liberal dominated agriculture committee approved the agriculture committee standing report last spring which called for a voluntary marketing option. It called for a short term free market option for farmers.
The committee travelled across Canada and listened to farmers, especially farmers in western Canada and their comments about the Wheat Board. I will give credit to the chairman of our committee because he was willing to listen. He said to us, “The farmers have told us that they would like to see this option and we are willing to support it”. There were other Liberal members travelling with the committee, such as the member for Lambton--Kent--Middlesex, the member for Dufferin--Peel--Wellington--Grey and the member for Huron--Bruce. They all supported the recommendations made by the committee.
It looks to me like we are going to have some interference with that report. There are rumours that when it comes back to the agriculture committee, we will see some interference from the government. Given the history of the minister responsible for the Wheat Board and also the Solicitor General, we expect to see their fingers somewhere in that pie.
I have a greater concern that there will be some interference with the way things are run. This concern comes from an article in the Western Producer . Barry Wilson interviewed the minister responsible for the Wheat Board and he wrote:
Goodale said last week that farmers don't have to go to jail to protest the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly. They simply have to convince a majority of Canadian Wheat Board permit holders that they want marketing freedom and presto, the monopoly is gone.
One would think that would be the end of it, but I am afraid there are some qualifiers with regard to that. I would like to read them into the record. Later the minister was asked directly, if Wheat Board elections returned a majority of farmer directors calling for an end to the monopoly, would he change the legislation? His answer was, “If that is the democratic will of farmers, obviously the government would have to respond to it, yes”.
That response is not necessarily freedom for farmers because, and I quote from the article again:
Then came the qualifiers. A recommendation from the Canadian Wheat Board [not farmers] to end the monopoly would trigger a government organized vote among permit holders.
We have already seen one of those. I quote again:
A majority vote against the monopoly would be persuasive [the minister tells us] in the campaign to convince the government to amend the legislation.-
One would expect that a majority vote would make the decision, but no, it would be persuasive.
This is a tremendous concern for us. We are debating this issue today and already the minister is apparently telling us that it does not matter what farmers want, it does not matter what the vote decision would be, it would only be persuasive to the government. The article goes on to say:
“But a majority vote in favour of change would not necessarily be accepted by the government as the voice of farmers”, Goodale said. “There is a technical question about how big the vote would have to be”. He said the government would have to decide if the turnout and the margin of victory were large enough to be sure that an end to the CWB monopoly is really what farmers want”.
I have to ask, what do farmers have to do to get the government's attention and to get change? There is a long history here.
I have farmed for 25 years and have watched as people around me have battled this issue for decades. Many of them have spent most of their lives trying to bring about changes to the Canadian Wheat Board. As I was growing up, farmers were told that they needed the Wheat Board, that they were not capable of doing their own business. I know for a fact that is not true.
In the early 1990s we went through a fall when there was a lot of frozen wheat throughout a good part of the Prairies. Farmers began to wonder what they could do with their wheat.
Farmers in my area actually went down to Great Falls, Montana and talked to one of the grain companies and made a deal as to what they could get for their wheat. The company was cooperative. Unfortunately, as part of the buyback program, farmers had to tell the Canadian Wheat Board whom they were selling their wheat to, which they did. They got a call from the grain company saying it did not need their wheat and would not deal with them. The company said it had as much wheat as it wanted. It named a price which was between 50¢ and 80¢ a bushel less than the farmers had negotiated.
That began to open up people's minds. New crops were introduced in our area. People saw they were capable of marketing their own product.
It is interesting to note that in the early runs when farmers decided to take their wheat across the border, the minister said there was nothing that the Wheat Board could do. As it began to pick up momentum, it changed its mind and began to charge the farmers under the Canadian Wheat Board Act.
Interestingly enough, on May 16, 1996, the first farmers, and David Sawatsky was one of them, were found innocent. Mr. Sawatsky should have been able to walk out of the court and continue on his way and to move his wheat where he wanted to move it. What did the government do?
That same day the minister changed the customs regulations to ensure that all other farmers who were charged would be convicted. He rewrote the legislation, the Wheat Board minister who presently sits here and is supposed to be representing western Canadian interests. He wonders why his party is out of touch with western Canada. He has made those comments himself. He is not part of the solution. He is actually part of the problem. Not only that, the government rewrote the legislation to lock in the repression. Our position has been consistently that people have the right to do their own business.
The example of Mr. Sawatsky was not the first nor was it the last example of repression by the government. Andy McMechan who is a farmer from Manitoba grew 20,000 bushels of a specialty waxy barley. The Wheat Board told him it had no market and it would only market it as a lower grade of barley and pay him about $3 a bushel. The U.S. market told him he could get $6 a bushel, so he started moving his wheat down to the United States.
The Canadian Wheat Board, customs, justice and the RCMP all got involved. The gentleman spent 155 days in jail because of what the government was trying to do to him, which was trying to break him. There were multiple strip searches. He was thrown into cells with people who threatened him. How is a regular citizen supposed to survive that?
Last Thursday I was in Lethbridge. Premier Klein came to address the rally. Almost 1,000 supporters were there. I would say it was a historic day in the struggle for freedom.
I said that we had come to support a group of people who are holding to their convictions over comfort, to their commitment over convenience, and to their faith over fear. One of the things that really bothered me, and I think it was the most frustrating moment of the day, was watching the families say goodbye to their fathers.
The rally was on one side of the street in a parking lot. When the time came that the rally was over, people lined up on both sides of where the farmers were walking. They walked through the group of people. Their wives were with them. Their teenage daughters were crying and their little kids, who did not understand what was going on, were crying. There is a picture in most of the national papers of one little nine-year old girl who did not even understand except that her dad was being locked up for trying to sell his grain.
For most of the weekend I was really angry. I am usually a pretty controlled person but it just made my blood boil to see normal, hardworking people run that far afoul of the government that they were being locked up. Several of them are still there today.
They are not standing alone because there is tremendous support for the farmers. Their families were there, their parents and their wives. Their neighbours were there. One of the farmers' wives approached me and said, “We thank you for what you are doing in trying to help our husbands out”. Other farmers were there.
Consistently surveys have shown that there is strong support for marketing choice. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business has done surveys which show there is 75% to 80% support for change. The Canadian Wheat Board surveys, which it will not release but which were leaked, show over 60% support for marketing choice. Our mail-outs show up to 80% support for marketing choice. The Edmonton Journal did a survey just the other day which showed over 90% for marketing choice.
The farmers just want choice. They want out of jail and they want to be able to market and do their own business.
For those who would like to support these farmers I would like to point out that a fund has been set up to support them. The mailing address is: Box 68, Cremona, Alberta, T0M 0R0.
I suggest that the real culprit is actually here. The minister responsible for the Canadian Wheat Board has served his party's interests consistently over the years against the interests of his constituents and against the interests of western Canadians.
In conclusion, we often hear there are only a few countries in the world that jail their farmers for selling their own wheat. That is not true. There actually is only one. That one is Canada. Even China now allows its farmers to sell their own wheat on the Chinese domestic market. So the freedoms we dream of and the freedoms that so many others in Canada have, farmers all around the world already have. We are here today to help work toward giving prairie farmers those same opportunities.
Therefore, today I would like to seek the unanimous consent of the House to make this opposition motion votable and that it not be considered as part of the total allotment of votable supply day motions.