Mr. Chair, in the months leading up to the opening of this Parliament, I spent quite a bit of time discussing this problem with the people who were dealing with it day by day. I spoke to feedlot operators. I spoke to cow calf operators. I spoke to grain farmers who had just a few head of cattle as a means of diversifying. They are all looking for leadership and they are all desperately looking for assistance. Most important, they are running out of time.
I am not sure that the government and its agriculture minister really understand what is going on in this industry. I have met with producers in my riding, as I am sure many of my colleagues have, whose families have been on the land for several generations. Many farms in Saskatchewan are celebrating their centenary year awards, and that is 100 years of operating a family farm.
Through some of the hardest times in Canadian history, droughts, grasshoppers, crashes in prices, the farmers in my riding have toughed it out. Now they are facing a slow death as a product that they rely on selling to pay their bills and feed their families is not moving. Their credit is maxed out. They have nowhere else to turn.
This agriculture minister came to Regina just a few weeks ago. He and the finance minister trumpeted a new program which they claimed would help those afflicted by this disaster. To date not a single dollar has been paid out to producers. Not a single investment has been made in building a slaughter plant. The forms still are not even printed.
Had the minister actually consulted with individual producers, with family farmers or the stakeholders in the different facets of this industry, he would have heard with near unanimity that aid packages should never be administered through the CAIS program. The CAIS program is top heavy, with millions of dollars eaten up in administration costs.
My hon. colleagues have all spent considerable time in this debate outlining the disparities in the program, with opening and closing inventories, allowable expenses, and the problems in even accessing the funds.
In my short time as the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, my office has received dozens of calls from constituents seeking help with their CAIS applications. Most producers need to seek paid help from accountants to fill out their forms. Many producers do not qualify for CAIS, or they are not able to participate because the onerous burden of cash on deposits.
In the minister's aid package he announced some money for new slaughtering capacity. Where is it? Has a single dime been handed out? They called part of it new money. An advance on existing funds is not new money. When the government knows that money will not be accessible because of deadlines, it cannot be counted as new money.
There is a huge disparity between the dollar figures from the announcements and the from the dollar amounts actually received from producers.
The minister and the department should have actually developed the method to deliver before the announcement was made. Producers need outlets for their cattle and they needed it last year. They needed them even more this spring and now it is at the breaking point.
For all the money that went out last year, how much more beneficial would it have been if the government had shown some leadership and arranged for new slaughterhouses to have been built? That would have given a huge return on its investment, as cattle ranchers would have more options in where they sold their cows and with more cows being processed, the prices would have reacted accordingly.
We have heard about the rancher's choice efforts. Where is the government's leadership in getting innovation like that off the ground? The minister needs to develop a system where aid packages actually get to the farm gate. It is a phrase heard over and over, yet we find ourselves repeating it because no action has been taken. We have already seen government programs disburse money and none of it actually ends up in the hands of the producers. It is this government's responsibility to take ownership for that.
There is also much agreement on the fact that BSE is no longer a scientific or food safety issue. This is a political issue from protectionist movements in the United States. Where is the government's long-term plan for dealing with this? We need an agreement with the U.S. We need to be able to sit down with the Americans and we need to have the sort of relations between our two countries that facilitates dialogue, not Liberal MPs hurling personal insults.
We need to work within existing trade deals with the U.S. to ensure that when trade conflicts arise, there is an independent and mutually recognized way to work through it. We cannot have protectionist politicians being allowed to shut down sectors of our economy every time something pops up to disrupt it.
We have arrived at this dismal point because the government has placed this issue on the back burner. Having this debate where the minister defends his position, where government members keep repeating the myth that the government has taken action, that the farmers have received assistance is becoming futile.
We need the government to at least recognize the weakness of its many programs, stop throwing good money after bad and get the money where it needs to go.