Madam Speaker, the issue before us today is that there should be an all party delegation that goes to Washington as quickly as possible to intervene and get the border reopened to the export of live cattle.
We in the NDP caucus support that position although we think it is a relatively short term solution, and I will address that a little later in my remarks. Before I go any further, I will be splitting my time with the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle.
The situation is this. The border was reopened some three weeks ago to cuts of beef animals under the age of 30 months, and the United States border remains closed to essentially any shipment of live animals.
It is urgent that we remedy this as all speakers, including the Minister of Agriculture, have said in the debate today. However until that urgency is resolved and the border is reopened to live cattle, the other urgency is that there be programs in place to assist farmers, ranchers and cattle producers to get them over the hump this winter, and throughout the fall at least, until the border reopens.
Yesterday, when the federal Minister of Agriculture met with his provincial counterparts, such relief was not forthcoming. The argument was that the BSE recovery program for the mad cow case should be extended. The suggestion from the Minister of Agriculture was that we invite our so-called trading partners to countervail and put up objections to that.
I think that is patently ridiculous. That will not happen and it has not happened. Despite what the Minister of Agriculture says about the BSE recovery program, it has not been adequate. The point of proof is that three prairie provinces have put in additional supplementary programs to assist better their farmers and ranchers. Even more interesting is the United States is well aware of these additional supplementary programs and has not objected to them.
We find it passing strange to suggest that if they were to do something like this, it would jeopardize our trading relationships with the Europeans, Americans and other countries.
In rejecting the idea of extending the BSE recovery program, the government has put all its faith and trust in the agricultural policy framework agreement and has said that if provinces will sign on to that program, all the problems will be resolved and there will be lots of money there.
We know that six provinces have signed on and there are four significant agricultural provinces that have not signed on to this. I think one of the major reasons they have not signed on, but the government does not talk about it, is the fact that the industry itself is first very wary about the APF and second, they are even more concerned that we would take money from the agriculture policy framework and put it into the crisis called mad cow disease.
The APF was designed almost two years ago. It was agreed to in Whitehorse at a time when the Canadian Food Inspection Agency was telling Canadians that mad cow disease, or BSE, was “a European disease and it certainly couldn't happen here”.
The APF was designed for floods, drought, hail and all the other problems that farmers ran the risk of being affected by. It certainly was never designed for a crisis such as this, which is costing the country upwards of $10 million a day or more.
On a tangential point, the minister suggested that the money had all been paid out very equitably. I want to note for the record that one of the program designers at Agriculture Canada was quoted earlier this summer as saying that right from the start people who were designing the program were concerned that equity could become an issue but no one had a solution to control whose cattle went first to the slaughterhouse.
I want to underscore that point because I am aware that there were a lot of people, small operators, small producers, who desperately were trying to get their 30, 40 or 50 head of cattle into a packing plant this summer when money was available through the BSE recovery program, but they could not get their cattle in. Why? Because the feedlot operators had basically a monopoly on it, working closely with the packing plants, so it was business as usual.
In one incident a farmer in the Moose Jaw area tried every day to get his 40 cattle to market. The day after the recovery program ended on August 28, the packing plant called and said that it would be happy to take his cattle after rejecting him all summer. Of course the only difference was that he was no longer eligible for the approximately $500 of the federal money to offset the low price that the producer was being paid. That was the situation.
We have another situation now that I addressed the minister on earlier, and that is the whole matter of cull cattle. In a joint proposal from the Canadian Meat Council and the Cattlemen's Association yesterday, they proposed that there be a program to help get cull cattle to market. This would cost $195 million and would provide the producer with a choice of marketing the animal or wintering it, the feed costs of course being higher. It is examples like these that the minister said that would invite a countervail so we could not go there.
Going to Washington is a solution but it is a short term solution.
The Minister of Agriculture said in his remarks that until we had this health problem we effectively did not have an international border when it came to beef and beef products. The reality is that 60% of our live beef are shipped to the United States for packing and processing. That has never made any sense to me, and it makes even less sense today. It is akin to shipping raw logs to Japan or somewhere else in the world and buying back finished lumber.
Why in the name of higher employment would we not want to build packing plants and have the jobs here, then ship meat products into the Untied States and elsewhere around the world rather than ship the live cattle? However it is typical of the way we have always treated our overabundance of resources.
It does not want to hear this, but the Canadian cattle industry is far too heavily integrated with the United States. The two major packing plants in Canada are both foreign owned, the one in Brooks, Alberta, and the other, the Cargill plant, in High River. We should give serious consideration to building another packing plant Canada, perhaps on the western Manitoba border or in eastern Saskatchewan, somewhere in there, where there would be more opportunity for shipping beef and producing boxed beef to go into the United States.
To wrap up, we are in lockstep with the United States on this issue and the industry in Canada does not want to hear any suggestions that we should not be in lockstep.
For example, we should consider eliminating the use of bovine growth hormones and potentially opening up markets to the Europeans and Japanese who are not interested in buying our products because of that. The Canadian side of the industry does not want to hear that. They do not want to talk about banning all animal feed to animal feed.
These are just some of the examples we need to look at to have a more Canadian market and less of a market with the United States.