Mr. Speaker, when we speak to the Speech from the Throne, traditionally we like to talk about our constituencies and how the Speech from the Throne, which is the government's plan for the future, will affect our constituencies.
Over the weekend I was acclaimed as the candidate for the Conservative Party in my riding of Wetaskiwin, and I would like to thank my board of directors and the candidate nomination committee for all the work they have done. I look forward to representing them for another term.
My constituency of Wetaskiwin has a lot of petrochemical industry. There is every aspect of it, including exploration, a seismograph, drilling, production, the refinery and the shipment. We even have some substantial value added product whereby different products are made out of ethane and those products are shipped all over the world. Some of the largest ethane producers in the world are situated in my riding. This augments the work in our constituency and adds to employment and so forth.
The backbone of our community has been and always will be agriculture. Even after the petrochemical industry has been replaced by some other technology, agriculture will remain the backbone of our community.
My constituency is situated between Edmonton and Red Deer and is ideally suited for agricultural production, but not for agricultural export, and that is too bad. All of this is extremely important to me because agriculture drives the economy in my constituency, yet it has not even rated a mention in the throne speech. I find that appalling and absolutely unpardonable.
Producers in my area have suffered through three years of drought and have had a tremendously difficult time making ends meet. Their natural gas, chemical, fertilizer and fuel costs have increased. Their input costs are going up all the time. The price they get for their product has been going down ever since the discovery last May of one cow in Alberta with BSE. The largest problem in western Canada today did not rate a mention in the Speech from the Throne. I cannot understand that.
Probably it is just as well because we have heard that tradition is a very important thing in the Liberal Party. The Liberals bring in a Speech from the Throne and then follow through with or carry out only 23% of their promises or directions. It is probably just as well that western Canadians did not get their hopes up thinking that maybe the government would do something for them because actually it would do nothing for them.
For months people have been coming to my constituency office asking for the culled cattle slaughter forms. I do not have any idea where those forms are. We keep contacting the department, but those forms are not available to us.
In October I wrote to the then minister of agriculture and the then minister of finance about our situation. As a result of the drought and because of a lack of feed, people started to sell off their breeding stock for whatever they could get rather then starve their animals. They had about four or five years worth of income. They sold their breeding stock, their calve and their yearlings all at once. As a result, they had a large chunk of income that they would have to declare in one year and probably pay out half of it in income tax.
In the first year, government said it would defer part of that payment. Part of that could be deferred into next year's income. In October of this year, I think it was, I wrote to the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Finance to ask if they would extend that deferral so that producers could lessen their hit from Revenue Canada, because now their herds are gone and eventually they are going to have to buy them back. If they paid out all that tax money, they simply would not have the revenue, the wherewithal, to buy back the herd when the rains did come again.
Do you know, Mr. Speaker, when the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Finance announced that the program would be extended? It was on December 19, when there were five more business days in the year. They waited until everyone had made decisions, decisions that they did not have to make. They bought cattle to try to defray some of their taxes.
None of that was necessary. None of that was necessary, because this government has placed a low priority on the agricultural sector. I cannot imagine anybody in western Canada involved in the agricultural business seriously considering supporting the Liberal Party in the future.
The government does not have a plan to deal with the cull cows. To start with, the government said we had to have a slaughter ticket in order to pick up the subsidy on the cull cows. Because there was no program available, because the cull cows were worth only $40 a head or something, the producers asked, “What are our options?” Their option was to turn those cull cows back out with the bull and hope they were impregnated; then maybe they could get a calf out of them and by that time maybe the border would be open. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Now that has exacerbated the problem. We are going to have more calves born this year from cows that should have been knocked on the head and made into hamburger. It is going to make a bad problem even worse.
It was not addressed. I pointed out the problem to the Minister of Agriculture. I pointed it out to the Minister of Finance. I asked them if they could make a decision on this. They dragged their feet. At the last possible minute, after it was too late, when every producer had already made decisions that were irreversible, then and only then did they decide yes, by golly, farmers could roll some of that income into 2004.
There is more bad news. As if things are not bad enough, cattle receipts for the third quarter of 2003 fell by nearly 75% over the same period in 2002. What are those people supposed to do? Are they supposed to live on 25% of their income? In the early part of last year before we made the discovery of BSE in that Alberta cow, Alberta producers had strong export sales: nearly $160 million worth of cattle per month went out of Alberta into export markets.
This is a $30 billion industry that provides nearly a quarter of a million jobs in this country and yet the Prime Minister and the finance minister continue to ignore this industry. I cannot understand that. I think they ignore it at their peril.
Last week, the federal agriculture department warned that Alberta farmers could expect a 57% decline in their 2003 income compared with that of previous years. Both of the previous years were drought years and yet we are expected to suffer another 57% decline in our receipts.
This has a large spinoff in our community. When I was a kid, one of my first jobs was delivering groceries and stocking shelves in a Co-op store in Ponoka. That Co-op store has been in business for 87 years. Two weeks ago, it closed its doors forever. That gives us an idea of what the agricultural industry is going through in my area.
This is a devastating problem. So far we have not seen any movement on the part of the government to address it.
I appreciate this opportunity.