Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member from across the way for her speech. Although she talked about trade she did not mention too much specifically about agriculture. I come from an agricultural riding and I would like to pose a question that was posed to me this morning as I spoke to one of my constituents in the Provost area of Crowfoot. The question was this: How bad does it have to get?
My constituent was speaking about the agricultural crisis facing western Canada and Canada as a whole. The individual I spoke to this morning talked about the farmers around his area who had no grass, no pasture for the cattle and no feed for the cattle. He said that just immediately around his ranch he can count between 2,000 and 3,000 cattle for which there basically is no pasture and no feed.
The municipal district of Provost now has declared an agricultural disaster because of the drought. Other municipalities in my riding have done the very same thing. My riding is in central Alberta, but over the last four or five days there has been heavy frost in northern Alberta and farmers are reseeding up to 500 or 600 acres of canola.
The government continues to play the blame game. We have had subsidies in the European Community and in the United States before. The government blames the Americans for subsidies. Now we see that the Americans are increasing the subsidies and again it continues to blame the Americans.
The headline in today's paper states that farm cash receipts have hit an eight year low. What is the government going to do to combat the Americans, to combat the Europeans, and to show that there is the support from and a will by the government to step forward to save the family farm and to save agriculture in western Canada?