Mr. Speaker, on February 4 the United States department of agriculture report confirmed that Canadian and the United States beef industries are so highly integrated that “the first case of BSE in the United States cannot be considered in isolation from the whole cattle production system in North America”.
Yesterday North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan issued a statement which read “Dorgan says keep ban on imports of Canadian cattle”. On January 27 Senator Tom Daschle issued a statement calling for the border to remain closed.
These statements ensure only one thing, and that is that farmers in Canada and the United States will continue to suffer. If Senators Dorgan and Daschle were concerned about opening markets for their producers, they would join us and tell the world together, based on science, that there is no BSE problem in North America.
The world community knows that we have a North American industry. Canada knows it. Mexico knows it. These senators are more concerned about playing politics than the well-being of their farmers or ours.