Madam Speaker, I welcome the suggestions in the discussion. I am very pleased to know that there is a horizontal plan for rural Canada, but the horizontal plan I have seen has been one that is laid out on the kitchen table with all the relatives going by apologizing for not having come to see the corpse before he died. That seems to be the situation with our horizontal plan for rural Canada.
In fact, over Christmas I met with a lot of beef producers back home, and let me tell members, they do not even want to talk about it anymore. There is despair. It is a fundamental despair.
We are talking about the money that has been put in. We talked about the big announcements that were made this September in terms of money that was going to be put immediately into the hands of the farmers. There must be some pretty wealthy farmers out there, because all the farmers I know never saw any of that money.
Then we talk about how we are going to revitalize the rural economy of Canada and we talk about slaughter capacity. Every time we talk about the increasing numbers it seems to me they are coming from two or three giant packers who continue to grow and expand their control over the beef economy of Canada. Meanwhile, there is not a single dollar, not a single one, going toward actually putting concrete into the ground in smaller rural regional plants. There are loan loss guarantees; money is not being put forward. It is money that is in the air but it is not money that is reaching into these communities.
In terms of the CAIS deposit, I think there are a number of problems with it. As I said at the beginning of my remarks, CAIS might have worked. It might have worked in a different set of times and it might have worked if we had had more people actually on the ground to administer it and respond. We have not had responses to problems. What we have had is nobody home; we did not have anybody in Ontario, as far as I could tell, who could even answer farmers' problems. That was our sense. When I had the MPs' hotline for CAIS, there was no one there.
I would throw out this question to the minister. When he is in a bureaucratic situation and suddenly has 13,000 applications and is only set to deal with 5,000 or 6,000, what does he do? He sends out 100% rejections and hopes that maybe 30% or 40% will appeal. That seems to be what has happened with CAIS.
What would the New Democratic Party do? We would have had people on the ground to respond to these issues. Farmers brought forward very serious problems with CAIS and they have not been addressed. They had questions about their inventory, questions about how the government continues to overvalue inventory the farmers cannot get rid of and then uses it against their margins.
We need some very clear long term goals in terms of a program. NISA was not a bad program. CAIS does not do the job for the beef industry. I think the minister's own CAIS staff will support us on that; at the agriculture committee they finally said that CAIS was not designed for an emergency like beef. Then why are they using it?
We are almost two years into this crisis. It is not over yet and we still do not have an action plan for dealing with it.