Mr. Chair, first of all, let me say this. The new minister is obviously trying to deal with a problem that is pretty well advanced, but the government has been here for the entire year and a half that this has been going on. If the government wants to hold office--and some days I wonder if it does when I listen to it--for such an extended period of time and not deal with a problem sitting right in front of it, then the government has to take responsibility for the fact that this is still going on in this industry.
I want to talk a bit about the record on this. I rose in the House of Commons when this issue broke. I stood and urged the then Prime Minister, the leader of the Liberal Party, supported by that member and all around him, to get on the telephone to the President of the United States and deal chief executive to chief executive with this problem before it got worse, before third party countries got involved, before interest groups in the United States got involved, and before it descended into the bureaucracy of the United States government. That was not done. The Prime Minister did not do that.
Instead, what the Prime Minister and the government had time to do was to call an international press conference on a transatlantic flight to Europe to explain what a terrible job the President of the United States was doing running the domestic economy of the United States. This is not an issue before Congress. This is an issue before the chief executive of the administration of the United States. The only way these kinds of issues could be effectively dealt with is at that level. Talk to anybody who has been a bureaucrat. Instead, this atmosphere was poisoned right from the outset and exactly what we feared happened.
The member for Lethbridge, the member for Medicine Hat and I went to the United States to attempt to deal with this in the summer of 2003 and we were already into this morass. It did not end there.
We understand we had differences on how we handled the Iraq situation, but even after the international community agreed to work with our allies to resolve that situation, the government, the Liberal Party, ran ads that were seen by Americans in the entire northern tier of the United States attacking United States foreign policy. What good did that do our farmers on this issue?
To this day we get an endless tirade of useless anti-American comments. If the government wants to stand up to the United States, stand up to the United States on this issue because it is treating us in a way that is totally unfair. But the government should not be jeopardizing our farmers' livelihoods and our trading relations with the United States so a couple of wing nuts on that side could make anti-American comments.
The government will obviously be working with the minister tonight and we will do whatever we can do to help the situation from here. However, the government is going to have to accept some significant responsibility for this situation.