Madam Speaker, I appreciate the minister being in the House and for realizing that this is a very important issue.
I raised the issue previously as to how this is critical and needs extreme urgency in dealing with it. Many cow-calf operators in Saskatchewan will be taking their feeders to market in October. I think the minister has rightly analyzed the fact that there are politics behind a lot of this.
I do not think it is a secret that our relations with the U.S. are probably not what they should be and that we need to establish a very good working relationship with it so that when an incident like this comes up it will not become the full blown crisis that it has.
I would like to know what the minister is doing to ensure that the Prime Minister and the future prime minister will do all they can to get back to a good working relationship with the U.S.
I know the senators in the U.S. right now are getting a lot of votes because they can use this poor relationship that has kind of developed over the Iraq situation, poking our nearest neighbour in the eye when it was not necessary, as a way of continuing to get votes from their cow-calf producers by keeping the border shut because they are making huge profits there and we of course are on the opposite end of this.
However we also have the Japanese. Is it not true that we did not let them come in and review what we were doing with regard to safeguarding health here in Canada and that we do not allow them to export products here? Could this situation not be resolved, a situation that has been ongoing for seven years. They can use that as an excuse not to let the U.S. export to Japan and that is a way to leverage the U.S. into keeping the Canadian border shut. To me, that is another part of the dynamics that are at play here and part of the politics.
I come back to my original premise, that this is urgent. This has to be dealt with immediately. All these situations are intertwined to create the dilemma we are in right now. Would the minister concur with this and what is she going to do to rectify it?