Mr. Chair, I want to thank my friend. I know how important this issue is to him. I know he talks to people on the farm and the ranch every day.
To underline the point on feed, not everyone has a lot of feed. There is a fellow I talk to a lot, a rancher just north of where I live. He is out of feed. He told me he can feed animals as long as his bank account holds out, but he is almost done too. That is what we are running into. The feed is starting to disappear. Animals that farmers did not have before they have this year, so there is more feed they have to come up with. It is getting real tough.
I appreciate the point that my friend made, which is that farmers do help farmers. When we had that problem with hay, my friend the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough phoned me and asked, “Can we deliver hay?” We had a lot of hay then and I said, “The guys north of us could use it, but we are good right now”. I appreciated that.
That is something that farmers do, but this time we are going to have to ask for help from the government and say, “Will you step up and give us some help right now?” Year after year we send our tax dollars faithfully in to the government and now we are asking for a little of it back to sustain an industry that is going to provide a lot of revenue and a lot jobs for people for many years to come if we can get over that hump.