Mr. Speaker, I rise to support the motion before the House today because I believe agriculture is in a real crisis, particularly the livestock industry. The government needs to be more aware of that and it needs to do more than it has done in the past.
I want to focus on the crisis by giving a few numbers that have surprised a lot of people and of which the general population is not aware. I have here the statistics for the cash receipts received by farmers in Canada. If we look at the year 2002, their realized net income, which is the income farmers have after depreciation, after paying all their expenses, after paying bank loans and so on, was exactly $2,744,000,000.
In 2003, the net realized income of farmers in Canada was minus $13.4 million. That is a negative income. To make this even more startling, this is the lowest income Canadian farmers have had since they started keeping statistics in the 1920s. Most Canadians are not aware of the seriousness of the situation. This is a major crisis.
I want to now look at my own province of Saskatchewan. In 2002 the realized net income was $606 million. In 2003 it was minus $465 million. That is a drop of 177% in the farmers' income in one year. We can just imagine the crisis when the net income of a group in our society in the province of Saskatchewan was minus $465 million and nationwide it was minus some $13 million. In Alberta, it was minus $229 million.
I want to talk primarily about the west because I am splitting my time with my friend from Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore, Nova Scotia who will talk about what is happening in Atlantic Canada and elsewhere.
We have a major crisis in agriculture today. The motion before the House today asks that we take some money from the sponsorship programs and the gun registry program and put it into the farm crisis. I could not agree more. The sponsorship programs have been major scandals. We have seen major corporate scandals all the way from Brian Mulroney right through to the present Prime Minister. They were a common thing during the Conservative Party government of Brian Mulroney and they continued through the Chrétien days to the present day. There is not much change except in magnitude. There is the same kind of coziness between the corporate elite and the government of Brian Mulroney and the government of Jean Chrétien.
I also think we should scrap the gun registry. We have now spent about $1 billion on the gun registry. I am proud to say that the NDP governments in Saskatchewan and in Manitoba are opposed to the gun registry and are not co-operating in the implementation of the registry. The NDP government in Saskatchewan is helping the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations in its legal challenge to the registry as it affects its treaty rights to hunt.
We could have taken the $1 billion that was spent over the last while and put it toward the farm crisis. We also have money in the federal surplus which, according to many economists, will be about $6.2 billion, and that is after the $2 billion goes into health care as announced by the Minister of Finance about two weeks ago.
I introduced a motion in the House on Monday of this week saying that because of the crisis in farming, in health care and in education, for this year alone the federal government should agree to send half the surplus to the provinces to help them cope with the farm crisis, health and education. Most provinces are now facing a deficit or are dipping into their fiscal stabilization funds to balance their budgets.
The federal government has the money to help the farmers.
Agriculture in general is in a crisis but the livestock industry is in even more of a crisis because of what the mad cow disease has done to the industry. This has happened through no fault of the farmers. It was discovered that one cow in Canada and one cow in the United States had BSE, or mad cow disease.
The government should take some short term measures and provide immediate financial support in terms of interest free loans that would help the farmers in the immediate sense. It should move to temporarily reduce the cow herd by paying farmers to, unfortunately, slaughter some cows.
Canada has had one cow with mad cow disease and the United States has had one but the Americans have closed their border to our cattle and, consequently, we cannot export live cattle to the United States. What we should be saying to the Americans is that if they do not open their border to our cattle, then we will close our border in eastern Canada to the importation of American beef and start moving western Canadian beef into eastern Canada. The time has come to get tough with the Americans. They close their border to our beef and we keep our border open to their beef.
My final remarks on mad cow are that I believe the federal government should take a look at a challenge to the United States under both NAFTA and the WTO. If we look at chapter 7 of the WTO it talks about the importance of restrictions based on scientific evidence. All the scientific evidence shows that with one case of mad cow there is safety for the Canadian consumer, the American consumer and any consumer anywhere in the world to consume Canadian beef.
What we have been dealt here is a very unfair hand by the United States and I think we have the grounds to consider a challenge under NAFTA and the WTO.
We have to look at the long term stability of agriculture right across the country. The one thing on which I certainly disagree with the new Conservative Party is its stand on orderly marketing.
I come from a small farm near Wynyard, Saskatchewan. I have a lot of farmers and a lot of towns in my riding. I know how important the Canadian Wheat Board is to our farmers. The Canadian Wheat Board is extremely important for the marketing of Canadian grain from western Canada. The board is supported by the overwhelming majority of farmers across the prairies, particularly in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. It is important that we have strong support for the Canadian Wheat Board.
However, over the last number of years, many members of the far right, of the Conservative Party, the former Alliance Party and Reform Party, the Saskatchewan Party, the cold porridge party, whatever members want to call it, the Brian Mulroney party, the Grant Devine party, the Eric Berntson party, they have been standing up and talking about an end to the Canadian Wheat Board.
It has always been the Conservatives who have stood on the regressive side of things. They have now changed their name from Progressive Conservatives to Conservatives. They have dropped the progressive. I guess they are now regressive Conservatives. However we know where they stand and it is not on the side of farmers. They do not stand in support of the Canadian Wheat Board in Canada, and the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster knows that. A lot of them are talking about a dual marketing system, where farmers are offered the so-called freedom of choice to market their grain, knowing full well that it would undermine the Canadian Wheat Board which is there to market the grain of all western Canadian farmers.
I can tell members that we on this side of the House stand four-square with western Canadian farmers who have overwhelmingly indicated their strong support for the Canadian Wheat Board as a single desk marketing system to market western Canadian grain.
The Conservative Party is showing its true colours. It does not want the farmers to have this collective right in the marketplace. It wants to get back to a dog eat dog free market where the farmer is up against companies like Cargill grain.