Mr. Chair, it is a pleasure to rise and enter into this debate. I want to start on a positive note. I do appreciate the minister being here and I do appreciate having been asked to go along with the minister on the recent trip to Korea, Japan and Washington. I do want to set the record straight. I did phone the minister and ask if I could be invited along. At that point there was no western member of Parliament on the trip and it is a pretty big issue that affects the west.
Despite that fact, I did appreciate the chance to go along and appreciated the hospitality that he showed me and that his assistant Andrew Sloan and some of the others showed me.
Having said all that and notwithstanding some of the things the minister said about successes, one of the things that concerns me is that when I pick up the throne speech I see a lot of mentions of SARS and a mention of avian flu, but the issue that is crushing agriculture in Canada today does not even get a mention.
I have to say off the top that it concerns me, because one of the things I look for in an agriculture minister--because it is not a high profile portfolio, I do not think, with the government--is how aggressive and how effective the agriculture minister is going to be at pushing his issues with the other cabinet ministers.
One of the ways I measure that is by the amount of ink the issue of agriculture, and in this case BSE, gets in the throne speech. It did not get a mention. That sends a pretty poor message as far as I am concerned. I just do not understand why an issue that is crippling the country does not get a mention from a Prime Minister who wants to do things differently. The last prime minister was himself a disaster on BSE. He did not do a thing. I would like to see this Prime Minister start off a little bit better.
I got a call about this today from a constituent of mine, a well known rancher/cowboy, if we want to call him that, in my part of the world. He was beside himself. He said, “I know there was no mention of it in the throne speech and I am very concerned about that”, but he told me that he and his sons, who run 700 cattle, are going to be done by April 1. They are finished.
Something has to happen. Cattlemen never come with their hands out. They do not do it, as a matter of pride. They refuse. But they must have some help and there is nothing in the throne speech. There is a mention. Here is what the throne speech says: “and to ensure that farmers are not left to bear alone the consequences of circumstances beyond their control”. It says that the government has to provide those safeguards.
But there are no safeguards. There is no money left. The money that is coming now, a little bit for cull animals, is not even close to what is necessary to sustain people over the next couple of months.
I do not know if the House understands how successful the cattle industry has become in Canada. It started out initially as an industry that was there basically to sustain people on the farm. It grew up slowly, but in the last generation it has become a big and powerful industry, an industry that has become, I would argue, the single strongest leg of agriculture in Canada. It has sustained the farming industry in Canada. A lot of people diversified and took advantage of that. Now the final leg has been sawed out and the government has not reacted quickly enough.
I appreciate the minister going to Japan, Korea and Washington. We have to do that when we have problems with our trading partners; that is one part of it. But if that is not working then we have to have the other part: the safety net. We cannot have a committee. There is no time. The financial services sector is closing in. Guys are finding out from their banks that their banks are not going to hold them. I have talked to so many guys. I go to hockey and sit down and talk with guys I have known for years who are basically selling their herds because they cannot sustain things any longer.
I am saying to the minister that we cannot wait. There has to be some help immediately. The minister has to push his way around at the cabinet table and get some money for the industry. If he can get us over this hump, ranchers are not going to be there with their hands out in years to come. They just want to get over this hump. That is the only help they are asking for.