Madam Chair, it is a privilege for me to speak on this issue. I am coming at it from a different perspective because I speak as a senior health critic, so I want to address it from a health perspective. However, I also want to address this issue from a personal perspective because I have spent a number of years, in fact all my life, in agriculture.
We have heard that the dairy industry is very concerned as well as the beef industry. I have spent most of my life in the dairy industry. There have been comments here this evening, talking about whether this is a western issue, an eastern issue or a central Canada issue. This is an all Canadian issue and the dairy farmers in Quebec are no different than the dairy farmers in Alberta. They fight with the same problems and from the same perspectives on this issue. It affects them in exactly the same way.
I can tell members that the beef industry is the same from coast to coast as well. The difference comes in the magnitude of the problems and the number of them in different provinces as they relate to their respective provinces and geographic areas.
I am a little upset about how this debate started and how it has gone this evening. It started with everybody bragging about how wonderful it was to bring this debate into the House of Commons as a take note debate. It is absolutely ridiculous that we would have a take note debate on something that we already know about. This is an emergency debate. The lives of families are at risk. They are on the line right now and it absolutely must be an emergency debate. The government must step up to the plate and do something about it.
I can tell members what I spent most of my summer doing, besides eating beef. I spent most of my summer talking to the farmers and the people who are affected from one side of my riding to the other, and it is a large geographic area. I can tell members that it affects not only the beef and dairy industries, but the chronic wasting disease that is in the elk industry, of which I also have firsthand experience. It is actually into its third year of what could be called the BSE crisis because elk have been impacted with chronic wasting disease and then all of a sudden got impacted by BSE, out of no fault of their own. There is no scientific proof behind it.
I want to address this situation because we say that it is all about health and safety. I believe it is health and safety; however Canadians understood it to not be a health and safety issue. This summer they increased their consumption by 15%. Thank goodness they did. We know that one mad cow in this country does not constitute a national disaster as far as a health crisis when that cow did not even get into the food chain.
Thank goodness that because of our surveillance system and the kind of discipline that we have around the industry that it was not the case. Nor does it matter whether the animal came from the United States or Canada because we both use the same protocol and stopped feeding animal by-products to ruminant animals in October 1997 on both sides of the border. It is immaterial as to where the animal came from because it is just the luck of the draw if it happens on one side of the border or the other, if this is indeed where this BSE originates from. Let us stop the rhetoric about where it came from. It is an integrated market in this industry on both sides of the border.
This is about politics. This is not about health and safety. I would challenge our government to ask why the relationship with the United States deteriorated to the point where we cannot talk constructively about it.
I will say that the government is playing politics too. I have heard a number of government people say tonight that this is all about politics, that it has nothing to do with health and safety. If that is the case, why are we not allowing American beef feeders to come into our market right now? We have had one case of BSE and we have stopped them from coming in and feeding their animals into Canada at the present time. I am saying we should put our money where our mouths are. That is the kind of relationship stuff that destroys the integration of the market.
I could go on about what we must do politically to ensure that this industry sustains itself and that we get the border opened up, but we must show some good faith on both sides of the border, and we have to see this as not about health and safety. We have to talk about the science of it and the science will prove that it is not about health and safety. This is about politics. This is not about mad cow, this is mad politics, and it must stop. We have to get this industry going again and the government must step up to the plate and support the farmers in their time of need.