Mr. Speaker, this is a very insightful question. Again it impinges on those broader principles. We can look at the details in a country like China where their people do not have anywhere near the freedoms that we have, but as I said earlier, before we go over there and pretend to have all the answers for them, we need to look at ourselves. There is absolutely no question in my mind that under the dictatorial government in Ottawa, not just under the Liberals but under the Conservatives before them and the Liberals before them, we have had a government granted monopoly given to some people, thereby totally taking away the freedom of some people.
For example, I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan and later escaped to Alberta. I have a lot of acquaintances in agriculture in all three prairie provinces and I get both sides of this. Some say they want to keep the wheat board and it should be compulsory. Others say they grew the wheat, and if they can sell their lentils wherever they want, why can they not send their durum wheat wherever they want? They say it is their property and how can the government have the right to tell them what to do with their own property strictly for commercial purposes?
I hear over and over again that we need to reach a balance here. I remember many years ago facing this question in my own profession. In our group at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology where I taught, a small group of people wanted to have a dental plan. Some of us in the math department did the computations on it and came to the conclusion that it was very costly. A philosophical question then arose. Is it correct to force everyone to pay for something they do not want in order to provide the few with the ability to get it at a cheaper price? I say no, that is not defensible, nor is it defensible to force farmers to sell their grain only to a government agency.