Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments made my colleague across the way. As he says, he does not represent a riding that has cattle producers, cattle farmers and ranchers in it, but he recognizes that he represents a lot of people who I am sure eat beef. That is why it is as important to him as it is to his constituents.
I want to start out my response by paying tribute to Canadian consumers. By God, they really dug deep and tried to do what was right in this crisis. Canadian consumers from coast to coast looked at this situation and at least partially recognized the seriousness of it, even though they might not have lived on farms themselves or might not have understood it. They understood that it was serious enough that they wanted to do something, as the hon. member stated. What we saw was a fairly dramatic increase in the consumption of beef in Canada.
Unfortunately, as he has stated, which is accurate, it has not related to either a drop in the consumer cost to encourage even greater consumption to use up more beef or a return to the farmer. Whatever beef consumption went up, all that happened was the middle people, the packers and the supermarkets, said that there was no need to put the price down to encourage more consumption because it was supply and demand and as long as people were buying lots of beef, they would keep the price up.
Did it filter through to the farmer? No. Quite the opposite has happened. The price has continued to slide to the point where, as I said earlier in my remarks, cows are practically worthless.
Our very serious concern is that any program or money put in place has to go directly to the farmers, whether it is in the form of paying them to cull their cattle or whatever. It cannot go to the middle people. Also it has to offset to a large extent the fact that the cow is now worthless. If it does go to the middle people, the price that the packing plants or the feedlots will to pay the farmer will be correspondingly lower because they know the farmer is getting some assistance from the taxpayers and the government.
That is the dilemma and irony of the situation. Consumers tried their best to help out farmers by increasing consumption, but it is not filtered through to the farmers.