I can show members, in black and white, statements that the Conservatives, then the Alliance and earlier the Reform, would cancel regional economic development programs for Canada, and these are programs that help rural Canada, including our farming communities.
I know that FedNor in northern Ontario--and in fact the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food was the minister for FedNor at the time--supported the Algoma and Manitoulin federations of agriculture in some research on the state of agriculture in the future. They did some excellent research work which has allowed those farmers to do some very good planning.
In fact, northern Ontario, and I mentioned this in my remarks, has produced a disproportionately high share of leaders for Canadian agriculture, going back to Ron Bonnett, who is the president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture now, and the former CFA president, who is also from the Claybelt area of northern Ontario, and others.
As a government we do understand that agriculture is an integral part of rural Canada. I will underline that I think the point here is that the truth hurts: that we have responded significantly. Our minister, his parliamentary secretary and his team, along with the entire government and the Prime Minister, shoulder to shoulder, have taken the time to try to understand and to look to the future. We have to get out of this going from crisis to crisis. Farmers know that going from crisis to crisis is not the way to live, not the way to live properly and to live a happy life.
We need to deal with things like the levels of U.S. subsidization. I hope that the Conservatives, who feel they are so well aligned with the conservatives in the U.S., might at least pretend to have some influence on those conservatives south of the border, to have them ease up a bit, to bring some sense to the American approach to agriculture. It is so balkanized in the U.S., so parochial, that the system is almost dysfunctional. It is very politicized. At least in our country it is not politicized. At least in this country we respond to the realities of the challenges facing the agricultural sector.
There is tremendous pressure on the U.S. to deal with subsidies. In fact, when people send troops off to a war in Iraq and spend how many hundreds of billions of dollars doing what they claim is the right thing to do in Iraq, that is only going to lead to the need to deal with their own budget deficit, a budget deficit which I think may be in the neighbourhood of $400 billion a year and which in fact may end up, by the back door, causing downward pressure on U.S. subsidies. So I suppose we could thank the U.S. administration for that much anyway; it may need to deal with farm subsidies because of the money wasted on an unnecessary war in Iraq.
I will conclude my comments by saying that I am very proud of what this government has done in support of agriculture. No government is perfect, but I can say that we are intent and this minister is intent on day by day, week by week and problem by problem improving this government and Canada's response and supports for Canadian agriculture.