Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest, as I always do, to my hon. colleague opposite.
I heard him mention about a company not being able to get insurance because of the hazardous goods it carried. I want to develop this into a question for the hon. member because I come from a province that has about 50% of all the agricultural land in Canada. Sitting in front of me is my colleague from western Saskatchewan which has had two consecutive years of drought and what did grow, the grasshoppers ate later in the fall.
The premiums for Canada crop insurance, which the farmers have to enrol in in order to survive, went up 52% in the hopes of covering the losses. We did not hear too many complaints about that, with the exception that most of the people cannot pay the premiums and therefore, they are unable to insure isolated crops on their own farms. It seems to me with the vast amount of agricultural land across Canada that had a deficit of $.5 million, when I look at this budget I would have thought the government would have said it would do something about that. However, it did zippo because the amount of money it put in had to be divided by five.
I want to tell the hon. member that we are suffering out there and the crop insurance is not going to work because people cannot pay their premiums for total coverage.