Mr. Speaker, here we are again having another emergency debate so it must be about agriculture, another crisis in agriculture in Canada. It is just crisis after crisis. I guess that in the long term a crisis is an opportunity if we come out of it stronger than when we went in, but what have we learned from past crises in agriculture in this country? What have we gained? Have we come out stronger?
I should mention at this time that I will be splitting my time with the member for Fraser Valley.
The member opposite who just finished talking said the whole premise is to come out of this as good or better than we were before. That is a wonderful sentiment and I do not think anybody would ever argue with that, but how do we get there?
The debate tonight is not even about compensation. It is about the timeliness of that compensation. We are two months into this, two months almost to the day.
The member opposite was talking about how we eradicate this, the 21 days of cleanup, the 30 days of a sentinel flock and so on. That is after the last barn is cleaned out. But we already have guys who have been in this crisis for two months. That is one complete cycle in a broiler operation. That broiler operation has been taken out of business for one full cycle already and there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
So when the government talks about how compensation is going to come some day, what about interim payments? Let us keep these guys alive. They have to get up tomorrow. Not only that, these guys are carrying on with expenses. Getting rid of the flock is the easy part. They are gassed, put on a truck and hauled away. That is the easy part.
Then that barn has to be cleaned out. Something has to be done with that manure. It has to be composted to a certain temperature to kill the virus and the cost of that is left with the farmer. All of these interim steps have to be taken for which there will be no compensation. Let us get that on the record right now. Those guys over there can promise that and hang it out there, but they have never given compensation back into other industries. They have never done that.
My area had the chronic wasting disease with elk. Three years later there is no more outbreak, the area is absolutely clean, and yet I have guys in my area who still have their corrals, their yards and their land quarantined. They are still being held off from putting animals back on their property, their own property.
They skinned off topsoil, a foot of it, mixed it with lime, rolled it and did all the things that the CFIA said, but they are still not able to put animals back into their facilities, not even if they want cattle or buffalo or something else that is not even conducive to CWD. They are not even allowed to do that. They cannot put animals back into their pasture areas to graze it off. Some of those areas are rocky and cannot be cut for hay, which farmers are allowed to do, but that is not feasible.
There is so much more to this compensation than meets the eye. We have to talk about the cashflow of the business. This is big business. This is a billion dollar industry in British Columbia alone. We have to talk about cashflow for these guys. We have to talk about interim programs that will keep them alive so they are able to restock their barns in six months or eight months or whatever. That is not being addressed at all by the government.
The minister and the parliamentary secretary both stood up and gave us some placating signals about how they are looking after this. Farmers already know all of that. They have been to the briefing sessions.
One thing we learned out of the CWD crisis and of course the BSE crisis, which we are still mired in, is that there is a lack of communication, a lack of good, solid, grounded evidence and solutions and so on that can be talked about. It is all pie in the sky. The government says it will compensate at market value and will figure x equals y but minus a and so on.
That is just fundamental stuff. The problem is, what do we do in the meantime? What keeps these farmers moving and growing and going in the Fraser Valley? God forbid the avian flu leaps out of there and goes somewhere else. There is an excellent chance of that happening.
The message has to get out to consumers across Canada. They are smart folks. They know value when they see it. Canadians' food supply is the safest, the most secure and the cheapest in the world, bar none. That whole safe, secure package is borne at the farm gate; it does not matter what commodity one buys. It is borne at the farm gate because that is who pays the bills to make sure we have a safe, secure food supply.
Nine days into the year consumers have paid Canadian producers for their product, only nine days, so it is just unconscionable that when there is a crisis like this the producer himself has to pick up the slack. We have to get past that whole concept. When the Prime Minister was in Montreal he was asked about this by Quebec producers concerned about what could happen. The Prime Minister actually said, and I quote, “it's a problem hidden behind the Rockies”. That is an insult to agriculture as a whole, let alone the chicken producers and poultry guys in British Columbia.
It is unconscionable for the Prime Minister to say that it is a little problem hidden behind the Rockies. It is a huge problem in Canada whether it is on that side of the Rockies or this side. It does not matter: we are a Confederation. We all look out for each other and we do that whether it is fires, floods, snowstorms or whatever. That is what we do, Mr. Speaker.
When it comes to our safe, secure food supply, we had better ramp it up. We had better be there. I do not see that signal coming from the government. We are not proactive in any of these situations. Again I go back to the elk farmers and the BSE, and now there is the avian flu. Pork of course is on the radar screen and has had and will continue to have problems.
We have a whole agricultural sector in peril in the country. It comes from 10 years of saying, “Well, the producer can carry that”. It comes from a lack of funding and lack of fundamental thought process: if we do not have a robust farm gate, we do not need all of the other stuff. We do not need the food safety programs and all the process, because there is nothing to process.
If we let the farm gate go, if we do not backstop it every step of the way, we might as well kiss it all goodbye and start importing our product from wherever. Then we will have no control over the safety and security, absolutely none, and there are all the processors and all the jobs that go with it. The third largest contributor to the GDP in the country is that little thing we call agriculture and it gets half of one per cent of government spending.
The member opposite talked about the CAIS program. If the supply managed sector sees a 30% drop in its reference margins, it will be there for them. The problem with the CAIS program is that there is a little fly in the ointment called the negative margin, which is not covered. When we have no production for the amount of time that we are talking about, we are into negative margins, not 30%. We are talking 100%. That is not covered.
Those little glitches in this APF they have been playing around with for over a year now have to be fixed. They have to be addressed and the government does not seem to have the gumption to do that. I think we have a huge wake-up call in crisis after crisis in every aspect of agriculture in the country. It is a call for this government on the other side to wake up and smell the roses.
We are losing everything here very quickly. We are down to having 2% of the population left on the land to produce product. The 100% of us who are the consumers owe it all to the 2% who do the job and still contribute 3% to the GDP. Those guys are working 24/7. The whole family is involved in most cases. A lot of them have to go off farm to support the farming habit because of tax laws and everything else.
The fellows involved in the avian crisis will be very much like those involved in the BSE and elk and so on if they do trigger a cash payout, which is never enough: it will all be taxed. There is no deferral mechanism in place that will stage it out long enough so that they can come back and be stronger than they were before.
We need a three year or five year deferral on this. We have written these letters to the finance minister, to the agriculture minister and so on, on behalf of my constituent, Mel McRae, who had the search out herd for BSE--they think. He said he did not. He had pedigreed cattle. We talk about market value, but they just took him as a beef herd.
They did not give him any extra money for his 43 years of genetic work, none. Plus he had to clean up his corrals and bring his neighbours in to help move the cattle and so on. There was no compensation for that. There is no compensation for the heart sickness one endures after that. Then he got a “dunner” from Revenue Canada saying, “Oh, by the way, you are going to get taxed on this money”. That is before he has a chance to get back on his feet.
Those are the types of things that the producers in B.C. had better come to grips with and had better be prepared for. As for all the placating from the members and the minister over there about how they are there for them, let me say grab your butts, guys, it is going to be a long tough ride.