Thank you, Madam Chair. My apologies to my hon. colleague, it was my mistake.
Madam Chair, I am glad to speak today. All of my colleagues on this side who have spoken are farmers. They are people with current and past farm experience. I greatly appreciate their wisdom and the advice that they give me in rural caucus.
I am also an associate member of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-food. I sat in on some of the hearings last summer that had to do with the packers. I was shocked by the way we were prevented by members of the opposition from subpoenaing packers and packers' records.
I am not a farmer. I do not have a farming background. I am a member of Parliament who has the enormous privilege of representing farmers. I have worked very hard to do that. I have come to appreciate not only the agricultural community but the entire rural community in my riding, and its enormous strengths, its enormous patience and its enormous wisdom. The farmers in my riding have gone to a great deal of trouble to try to train me so that I know the difference between a cow and a horse now and very important things like that.
I appreciated what one of my colleagues opposite said: that one of the purposes of debates such as this, a take note debate on this critical issue, is to raise interest in the general public, particularly in the urban public, not just in the big cities but in many of the small cities where people either have forgotten there is a crisis underway or have misconceptions about it.
What I would like to do in the short time available to me is speak to that and try to again explain what is going on to people who are not as involved with it as my colleagues in the farming community are.
First of all, there is the point that has been made again and again. Over a year ago now, one cow was discovered with BSE and was very quickly traced and did not get into the food chain, but that triggered this crisis we face. Most of us, and this includes the farmers, I think, although we knew some of the things that happened elsewhere in the world with BSE, thought it was going to be a short crisis.
By the way, the medical and science experts, not only here but in the United States, the international science panel, which the Americans actually paid for themselves, said that it was going to be a short term problem and that the border, which was closed because of this risk of transfer of disease, would be open.
They were proved partly right, because in fact, very quickly, as some of my colleagues have said, we succeeded against all the odds in having the border opened to meat of younger animals. That meat has been flowing over the border ever since. I think that is one of the reasons why people think the crisis is over.
Now we know that we are faced with this longer term problem. The problem has nothing to do with health and nothing to do with science. It has to do with politics. The Americans will not open the border. Our colleagues have given some suggestions, the Prime Minister has tried and our ministers of agriculture have tried. We have tried to operate through customers of the United States, such as Japan, to encourage them to encourage the Americans to open the border. Those things have not worked.
Now we are trying to deal with the longer term problem. That is why I am glad we are having the debate. We are going to build new slaughter capacity in Canada because we do not have enough capacity to slaughter the animals we are producing, the animals we previously were selling into the United States.
We have the set-aside program, which has just come in and which is to fill in the gap between the building of the new slaughter facilities and to get some animals on one side and help the farmers a little while that capacity is being built. There is also a cash advance program, which is on now.
Our minister, as we speak, is in the east trying to open up other markets and diversify, which by the way is something we should have done long ago. The Prime Minister is in Russia and is pressing agricultural exports with Russia. By coincidence, about a year ago I had the opportunity to speak to President Putin of Russia for 45 minutes, and half the time I spent talking to him about restocking the genetic pool of the Russian agricultural industry from Canada.
He himself said at the time that we are such a good fit with Russia, with our climate and so on, that the Russians want our genetic stock and that they are looking forward to trading with us. That is a part of the program. There is no health problem. We are trying to deal with what is now a long term political problem.
There is another misconception out there. In addition to the fact that many city people think the problem is over, many people think it is a western problem. Goodness knows it is something that has hit the west very badly. We know from Alberta and Saskatchewan exactly what the impact has been out there, but this is a nationwide problem. It is part of this extraordinary food producing system that we have in Canada.
In the east and in my riding, the problem is not meat as such. People imagine that sides of beef are going over the border. In my riding there are over 1,000 livestock farms. Almost all the traffic is in livestock. The animals used to go over the border live. It is quite a complex industry, as some members here have said. We are talking about all ruminants. In my riding alone, in addition to cattle, there are llamas, buffalo, goat and sheep farms.
For the benefit of members and the people watching this debate, of the sheep farms in my riding, one of them produces milk and cheese, others are more focused on meat, and others are more focused on genetic stock. Before the border was closed, the Canadian sheep industry was in the process of replacing the genetic stock in the United States.
I have hardly spoken about beef, which I will do very briefly to explain because it is a complicated industry. As my colleague from the Bloc said, I have 125 or so dairy farmers. They are faced with particular problems from this crisis. I have people who are cow-calf operators, people who are essentially feedlot operators. Their problems are all different and they are all suffering.
I hope people watching this debate who are not farmers will feel for the farm families in this amazing, complex food industry that we are so proud of. In my riding over 1,000 families are directly suffering and many others are being affected in the rural areas and in the city by that suffering.