Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Lethbridge.
I want to thank the Leader of the Official Opposition for giving us the opportunity today to debate agriculture, which far too often is missed out in the banter that exists in the House as we go through our speeches. In all the issues that we debate for Canada, we often lose sight of how important agriculture is to Canada. I want to thank our agriculture critic for bringing forward the motion which gives us the opportunity to debate the CAIS program and how it has not functioned well for producers across the country.
I am a farmer. The riding I represent is agriculture based. Our constituency office has been overrun with complaints. Producers are looking for solutions to all the problems they are experiencing with the CAIS program. There have been nothing but delays since the program was announced. People are still waiting for their cash advances going back to 2003.
We know by talking to administrators of the program that they were originally trying to get forms completed within 60 days. That stretched out to 90 days. Now we are hearing that new clients are still looking at a turnaround of 120 days if there are no problems. If there are problems, if there are any questions or things do not quite line up or reconcile with the producer's income tax filing, the whole thing is delayed even further. That is completely unacceptable.
Producers are extremely frustrated with the program. When they talk to people in the CAIS administration on the phone, they continually get different answers. The misinformation is creating so much confusion, producers do not know which way to turn. Producers have similar problems when they phone CAIS and get different answers. It just does not seem to line up. That is why the program has not been working. It is dysfunctional.
The other complaint we hear is that it is too complicated. The process is complicated. It requires expert accounting advice to get the forms done. Producers are taking out money to pay accountants to file their CAIS applications. They are paying fees in the $500 to $2,000 range, depending upon the size of the farm, money which would have been better left in the hands of the farmers. The joke around town is that CAIS actually stands for the Canadian chartered accountant income stabilization program. The accountants are being well-served by the program.
At the same time it costs the government a lot of money to administer the program because of the lengthy time it takes to process applications and the extra administrators required, which takes money out of the program. That money could have been better used to service the producers.
The other problem we hear about is inventory evaluations. The inventories are set at the end of the year by a very standard level that does not reflect what is the actual value on the farm. I know producers who have livestock and those mandatory values that are put in place do not represent the actual value of the animals they have on hand. We have even had problems with some of those numbers.
An example is that at the end of the year, the steer and heifer prices for 2003 were mixed up. The heifer price was at the steer price and the steer price was down at the heifer price and it screwed up the evaluations of those inventories for the eight-weights. That has created quite a problem. At least it got acknowledged, but it had already affected a lot of producers, and if they did not pick up on the discrepancy, they got shortchanged because of it.
There is also the complication for producers who have year ends that do not coincide with the calendar year. If their year ends occur in the middle of the crop year, crop on hand and crop in the ground mess up inventories again. Producers are really struggling with that, especially when farmers have cattle on feed and heifers on grass, and again, not having a true evaluation of how those inventories are working.
We are here to talk about the removal of the deposit program, which makes a lot of sense. Ever since the program was announced, the deposit requirements and the rules have changed continually. First producers had to put their money up front. They could take their NISA funds and transfer them over to match their deposits into the CAIS program. Then they were told that they only had to put a third in and they would get two-thirds back. These rules continually changed.
The cleanest thing to do especially for the individuals who put in NISA money and wanted to get that money back to pay taxes at the end of the year when the two-thirds refund was available is to cancel the deposit requirement completely. Let us make it a lot simpler.
We should allow producers to keep that money in their own hands. It is not giving them any benefit by having it in the CAIS program. With the dire needs today in agriculture, let the producers keep that money on hand to pay off some bills, to invest in next year's crops, to buy fertilizer, to buy fuel, to be better prepared for next year.
It is not just the opposition that is suggesting this. Keystone Agricultural Producers and the president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture have also announced that they would like to see an end to the deposit. It is something that does not make a lot of sense anymore considering the situation in agriculture today.
One of the things the Leader of the Opposition announced today is that we do not believe the disaster assistance part of CAIS should have been put into the whole farm approach. CAIS was meant to be there to average income over the whole farm aspect. When there are disasters such as BSE, such as dramatic falls in commodity prices because of trade actions, we need to take those problems out and not lump them into the CAIS program. The delivery is too slow. Producers need help quickly. Disaster programs should be set up as a third tier and should be available from the government standpoint to support the industry. That is something we believe in dramatically.
I realize that when BSE compensation was being bantered about in trying to figure out how to best deliver it, there was advice from the industry to the government that it should be delivered through CAIS. As a member of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association and as a producer, I am thoroughly disappointed that the recommendation ever came forward. It was poor planning.
I realize that the Minister of Agriculture has only been in his job for the past seven months. I realize that he inherited these problems from past ministers. However he has the power to make the changes necessary to implement the program that would work for the agriculture industry, that would support the family farm. As the House has heard today there has been a great amount of hurt on the family farm.
My family loves farming. My children and my brother and his kids all want to have a future in agriculture. We need to make sure that we build programs and support an industry so that it can grow and prosper and be an industry that we can continue to be proud of. As a farm family we are going to fight to make sure that opportunity exists for future generations. This is the time for the government to take action, to take the bull by the horns, as is said, and make the necessary changes.
There have been many comments made about how many government dollars have gone into the industry and how much support has been there. I have said in the House before that I know through the BSE crisis the losses that I have suffered on our farm have come close to $400 per head. The total government support available to me so far has been $45 a head.
It is a huge disproportionate loss over things that are not at all related to management or markets. It is about a complete reshift in what has happened through trade action because of one cow, although it is now up to three cows, with a disease that is not necessarily being evaluated on science. Hopefully we are getting there and we are making the strides necessary to make sure that all decisions and rules that are being brought together will be reflective of the science and the true problem of the disease.
In conclusion, it is great that we are able to debate such an important topic as the Canadian agriculture industry today.