Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech on transportation. I hope some day that the member will be the transport minister and indeed I believe he will be.
I am in a rural riding and agriculture is probably in the biggest crisis that it has ever seen. We have a crisis because of commodity pricing. Although the beef industry is starting to get back with some prices, certainly grains and oil seeds are hurting big time. I do not have to go into the pricing structures and why that is, but I have had a number of calls this past week about the transportation of our grain.
For example, I contacted a couple of elevator operators in my riding. One elevator operation down by Trochu, last year from June until September, loaded a thousand cars. This year it has been 150. In another community, another AgPro elevator operation, in the last two months it has not been able to ship one load of grain because it does not have the cars to transport the grain.
Farmers are beginning to wonder how they will pay their input costs. They are saying they cannot even sell their grain because the elevators cannot take it and the railroads will not move it. The government, again just before an election, is to be given an A for an announcement, but when it comes to delivery, it really fails every time.
Could the member make some comments in regard to some of the frustrations that we are facing out west? We have talked about western alienation. This is part of why we feel that we are being forgotten out west. The government has been in power for 13 years. Now it says it is going to study it. Where has its priorities been over the last 13 years?