Mr. Chair, it is kind of with a torn heart that I speak here again. I am very thankful to the constituents of Battlefords--Lloydminster who re-elected me to this place to continue this fight, but it is in continuing this fight that I have a heavy heart. We are a year and a half into this crisis. We are talking tonight about the very fundamental problem that we had a year and a half ago, and we are no closer to any sort of solutions.
I agree with the minister that we have to get past this partisanship and work in cooperation to try to come up with programs and policies that will see us through this crisis, and it is a crisis. It goes across the spectrum of the livestock industry. Every type of livestock out there is affected, and everybody who has inputs, or processing or handling of that livestock is feeling this crisis. They are feeling the pinch right in their wallets, so it is reflected out on the main streets right across Canada. We are seeing that. The government will see that in Revenue Canada because the taxation will not come in.
How has the government reacted? We have seen ad hoc program after ad hoc program. It has been given a passing grade on some and a failing grade on others. The problem is the government has not reacted to the failing grade programs. It continues to try to build on that flawed foundation, and that is the CAIS program.
The minister, who has only been the minister for a couple of months, is the third Liberal agricultural minister to promise a review of a program that is two years old and still has not started. People can try to get an advance from 2003, which was the first year. It takes 90 to 120 days for them to process the applications to even tell people if they qualify. That is not acceptable. We have cash-strapped farms and farm families who cannot even get a reply back from the minister and his bureaucrats.
When we talk to the bureaucrats, they say that they are ready to go. They just need somebody to push the start button. When we talk to the minister's people, they say that they do know what is holding up those darn bureaucrats. Somewhere in the pipeline it got clogged. The money is not getting through. The finance minister stood here earlier today and said boldfaced that $1.8 billion had gone out. It has not left Ottawa. Less than half of it got pried out of the finance minister's fingers, and out of that we got about a 37% administration rate on the clawbacks and everything else that is happening. the government is not helping. It is sending a message to urban Canadian consumers that it is doing everything it can to backstop that safe, secure food supply, but in reality it is not.
The Liberals are frustrating the producers out there on the land because all these programs hit the headlines in the big papers. The Toronto Star , the largest daily paper in Canada, even gives these guys a failing grade on this BSE crisis. It said that they were sleepwalking through it. That is an urban paper in downtown Toronto which gets that these guys are sleepwalking through this crisis.
How do we fix this? I guess the first thing we do is that if they are going to use CAIS as the pipeline, they have to get rid of the cash on deposit. The only way to explain that is that anyone who wants to insure a house for $100,000 has to put $20,000 in a bank account before the insurance company will sell the person a premium. That is what the cash on deposit does to farmers. If they have the cash, they do not need the program. If they do not have the cash, they cannot get into the program. It is double jeopardy and it is absolutely ridiculous. The bureaucrat or the minister who came up with that needs to be hung at dawn.
Inventory values are being based upon closing inventory rather than opening inventory. Guess what? They went down, so right away they are kicking people off the program. The ones who need it cannot get it.
Less than 25% of producers across the country had applied for CAIS as of last spring. We have those numbers from Agriculture Canada itself. There are reasons for that: the cash on deposit; the inventory values; and the problems we face year after year after year using that five year olympic average. Nobody qualifies. It is a shell game or phantom money, as our critic said awhile ago.
The problem with CAIS too is it cannot handle the program it was designed to do and now the Liberals are adding more work to it with this latest announcement of money that will never go anywhere. Announcements that are not bankable and that do not help are only a frustration. They are a hindrance and a hurdle for everybody to work around.
They want to put some money into processing and that is great and is part of the solution here. Thirty-eight million dollars will not go very far, but apply that to provincial plants that can be upgraded very quickly and apply that to existing plants that only need a floor grain moved, let us look the other way for awhile, and let us get this processing ramped up. I could go on and on for hours about everything that has gone wrong with this.
We started to have a panel that went to the OIE to say that it was minimal risk outbreak and asked for that trading system for North America. We have dropped the ball on that. Nobody else is going to help us. We have to help ourselves and we have nobody left doing that.
We still have not implemented the five points the international panel gave us a year ago in July. No wonder everyone is giving us the bum's rush when we try to sell them product. We should get on with the job at hand, forget these goofy announcements that do not help anybody and let us get rolling.