Mr. Speaker, I will be glad to split my time with my seatmate, the member for Nanaimo--Cowichan, who as we all know is one of the most hard working and effective MPs in the House.
Today we are speaking to the opposition motion:
That this House has lost confidence in the government for its failure to persuade the U.S. government to end protectionist policies that are damaging Canada's agriculture and lumber industries and for failing to implement offsetting trade injury measures for those sectors.
Today's debate reminds me of that old saying that failure to plan is a plan to fail. We see failure on a number of levels and we will talk about some of those levels today. We see it in both the agricultural sector and the softwood lumber sector. I will talk about agriculture today for the most part. We see failure on two national levels. We see failure in the United States with the new ineffective and defective farm bill. We see failure here with the ongoing inaction and lack of vision with regard to both of the issues but particularly with regard to agriculture.
We see a failure in the U.S. A year ago as we were working toward the Doha talks, the U.S. was pretending to lead the way. It wanted to have free trade. It wanted to lead into that to reduce subsidization. The Americans took a strong position apparently at those talks. Now we find they are going in a different direction. We may have to look to the Cairns group for the support we need to turn back some of the subsidization which the U.S. is engaging in now.
The Americans have pulled off a new farm bill as basically an attack on their neighbours and friends. I would suggest they are giving us the impression they are free enterprisers but that is a phony impression from what we see in the bill. We can see there are some closet socialists in the United States on their way to a wreck. Apart from the farm bill the Americans are running a $100 billion deficit this year and we all know that cannot continue. Their deficit and their farm bill have been brought about by a lack of vision.
The United States' agricultural subsidization over the years has not saved its rural areas. In a lot of ways it has destroyed its rural economies. In a small town across the border from us a lot of people put their land into the CRP. They let their machinery sit or else they sold it off. When they brought the land back out of that program, they did not have the money to buy new machinery. They did not have the money to get back into farming so they turned the land over to their neighbours and the farms just get bigger and bigger. The massive amount of money that has been spent on the U.S. side has not saved its rural economies.
The bill is a complete failure. We keep hearing there is about $180 billion in the bill but it has been suggested it will be a lot higher than that. It has been suggested it may rise as high as $400 billion U.S. over 10 years.
I would like to quote a couple of U.S. agricultural economists. Daryll Ray is from the University of Tennessee's agriculture policy analysis centre. He has great concerns that they have vastly underestimated the amount of money they are going to spend in the farm bill. The second person who has a concern about this is John Dittrich, who serves as a policy analyst to the American Corn Growers Association. He said in Better Farming :
If ending stocks for program crops remain in the same range or higher, as they have been for the last several years--10% for corn, 7% for soybeans, for example--then the average annual cost of these farm bills could be around $32 billion [U.S.] per year. I think Congress has underestimated both bills' cost by more than $10 billion per year.
That is an almost 50% miscalculation by congress on the cost of the program. This is not a solution. Dittrich also added “These bills maintain and then add to the distress in farm country which means these distresses will accumulate”.
The farm bill will be a complete failure. We not only have failure in the United States though, we have failure here as well. That is the failure to lead in the agricultural sector. In the agriculture department we see once again there is a complete failure and a complete lack of connection with the farm community.
A few weeks ago the assistant deputy minister came to the agriculture committee. One of the questions he was asked--and he had to be asked it a number of times before he would answer it cleanly and clearly--was whether he had a plan to deal with the drought situation. His answer once we got it out of him was that no, they did not have a plan. It is one year into a drought in Saskatchewan and two to three years into a drought in Alberta and the agriculture department does not even realize it is a situation for which it should be planning.
Another $15 million has been spent on the implementation of the new APF and the farmers were basically excluded from the closed door consultations.