Mr. Speaker, this unfortunate outbreak of avian flu that sparked tonight's emergency debate started in my riding. The Minister of Agriculture got hold of me shortly after it was discovered on the first farm in Matsqui Prairie. He warned me that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency had determined that there was at least one farm infected with some sort of avian flu, and at that time it was not clear whether it was high or low pathogenic strain, and that they were treating it as a potential crisis.
I thanked him for getting hold of me. I agreed with him that every precaution possible should be taken immediately. I did pass along to him a warning at that time. There is a heavy concentration of poultry farms in the valley. The valley is a narrow geographic area. There is not a lot of room for error. We are smack dab in the middle of a major flyway for wild ducks and geese. The combination of all of that could make for a very potent and very terrible problem for the industry.
Of course, as it turns out, the problem has necessitated the complete depopulation, or that is the plan, of the chicken, turkey, and feather industry in the valley. The industry players are asking the minister to address many issues, hopefully tonight during the course of this debate.
Just to be clear, there are 31 farms identified so far. There are 19 million birds affected. One million of them are infected with the flu and the rest will be depopulated in the regular course as they mature.
I want to thank people like Ken Falk, Fred Krohn, Marie and Mark Tupper, Ray Nichol, Rick Thiessen and others from organizations and from larger farms in my area who have helped me with this. They are very concerned this evening about what is going to happen in their industries in the weeks to come.
These are questions that we need answered. First of all, tell us when and how the compensation will happen.
I wrote a letter to the Minister of Agriculture last Friday spelling out many of the concerns of local producers. I urged the minister not to use an existing agricultural program to administer compensation if that program was not designed for the supply managed business and was not designed to address a crisis like this. The talk about using the GRIP or CAIS programs and so on has the local producers and farmers scared to death.
I also warned him that in some of those programs the trigger for the compensation is a drop in revenue of 30%. Yet, depending on their fiscal year end, some of our farmers may end up with a 50% drop in their income in a calendar year, cleaned right out for the next six months perhaps. What if it is split over two fiscal years? Then they will not make the 30% qualifying number and they will get nothing. That obviously is not acceptable.
Compensation needs to come quickly. If any of that compensation is held up, as has happened with the BSE for example, it will destroy the industry. It cannot afford that kind of lengthy delay.
While the CFIA has a formula to pay for the destroyed birds, it does not address the other issues like lost income and interruption to business costs.
I spoke with one farmer the other day who has a mortgage payment of $15,000 a month. That does not include any of his personal costs for him and his family. He also admits that it is not a big farm. Many farmers have mortgage costs of $20,000, $25,000 and $30,000 a month just to keep the banks from repossessing.
There needs to be some compensation for loss of income. Simply paying for the poultry, as important as that is, will not keep these farms viable.
I also urged Farm Credit Corporation and the banks to get into this now. They need to do their part to allow these farms to remain viable, to put off the interest owed on these loans, and so on. It is in no one's interest that these farms go under.
Tonight we heard from the minister that it is yet to be determined what kind of compensation they will be getting. There will be future compensation, sometime; they are looking at it. But any specific talk about deferred taxation, ways to look after the farmers going into this difficult summer ahead, there is just no talk of that. We need to get specifics and we need to get them soon.
It is critical that the government understand that this industry is so integrated, so finely tuned and interdependent that it is a just in time industry. Every component of the industry must be in place for any of this industry to work. That is why, for example, the sawdust delivering companies are as an integral part as are the chicken catchers, who sent me letters concerned about all the people they laid off. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union already have 400 people laid off. They expect thousands to be laid off in this industry.
The feed mills have contacted me. Many in my riding have told me they are closing the poultry divisions, laying off all their employees. It is the same for the truckers and so on. These people need to be around. The entire industry needs to be there when we come back on stream. If a part of it is missing, the industry cannot survive. It is a just in time industry. All parts of it have to be there when the flu has been treated and the industry comes back on stream.
That is why related industries are asking the government to consider waiving the two week waiting period for EI for example, not because people deserve something for nothing, but because people are being asked to sacrifice their jobs for the good of the industry and the country. If we ask them to sacrifice their jobs and give up their employment, even though they themselves have done nothing wrong, then it is only right that we address those particular concerns.
Finally, for the poultry industry which has some of the most sophisticated and prudent agriculture producers in the world, we need to work together to ensure this does not happen again. The industry folks are ready to do their part. Without pointing any fingers or demanding anything outrageous, we all want to get to the bottom of where this flu came from and how it spread so quickly. Then we need to develop protocols to prevent it from happening again. The farmers are ready to do that. They are ready to work with CFIA to do that. That certainly has to be in place as the industry gets back on its feet.
There are other people affected by this depopulation order. The specialty bird market could be especially hard hit since it is not covered under a supply managed system. Its birds are genetically unique and very expensive. While they are not sick birds, these birds are perfectly healthy and suffer no symptoms of any disease, they could be carriers. Therefore they are being sacrificed in this depopulation order.
In other words, an industry that has no sickness, no problem, no danger to human health, no danger to its own population may be ordered to be completely depopulated in order to protect an adjoining industry. The producers in that industry say if that is going to happen, there are some specific things they need for protection. They are very concerned and who can blame them?
On the duck and goose farms in my riding some of the birds in those areas have been under genetic development for up to 60 years. Some of them have a veterinarian living on site to look after the breeding programs and look after the health of the birds. They are as careful as they can be and now those birds may all be gone, after generations of developing a specific specialty bird that supplies fresh meat throughout the lower mainland in Canada.
Once lost, those birds, the quail, chickens, pigeons and commercial ducks which are superior in growth, uniformity and egg production to anything else and are not available anywhere else, will be lost probably forever. They cannot be replaced. They are not like a pullet. It is not like the chicken industry that can order up replacement chickens once this terrible thing is behind us. The chicken industry can phone up suppliers and that chicken is genetically the same from anywhere in North America. Those ducks, geese, quail and pigeons are not. They are a specialty and to depopulate them, to kill them all means they are irreplaceable.
If there is no way to preserve or isolate and protect these specialty birds, what happens to the people in the industry? These specialty breeders point out that the compensation suggested by CFIA will be totally inadequate. It will be $30 per duck. That is the same price as one could get for a chicken. However the chicken growers who are going through a crisis do not go through the same genetic development process that is necessary to produce the ducks. Those producers have to do that on their own. The chickens are developed. They are a genetically identical bird. They are ordered up by the millions, but these other birds are a speciality.
When we talk to a pigeon grower for example, pigeon or squab, it is a unique thing. Those pigeons mate for life. In other words, when growers start breeding pigeons for sale later, they have to mate them up. They mate for life and it is an ongoing process. It is not a matter of cleaning out the barns and hoping for the best. They are there all the time. It is an ongoing breeding program.
Simply put, if they are completely eradicated, the species for all intents and purposes, at least at the commercial level, will be gone forever.
I have appreciated the minister's willingness to talk with me and keep me in the loop, but we need in a hurry from the minister some specifics on the compensation. There are people like April Hanes who wrote to me about her backyard chickens. Other people raise them for 4-H clubs. They are like pets. Those people need to be informed and kept in the loop.
Right now there is just too much misinformation or rumours, or we just cannot get what we need in a timely fashion. Let us keep people in the loop and informed. Let us keep the locals, especially the young girls and boys who are raising chickens basically for pets, in the loop as well. Let us get adequate compensation, not just for the birds that are going to be depopulated, but for the businesses that we need to keep this billion dollar industry viable in the Fraser Valley. Let us do it soon.