Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Battlefords—Lloydminster for proposing this emergency debate on this very important issue. I also want to acknowledge the presence of the Minister of Agriculture and the attention that he has given to this very serious matter.
We are rising in the House this evening to yet again examine the failure of the government to protect the interests of hard-working Canadians. It is truly unfortunate that we need to be in this position. I am sure that each and every hon. member would like nothing better than the prosperity of the cattle and dairy industry, but the border with the United States remains shut tight as a drum. March 7 came and went with not a single truck carrying cattle across the border.
The government will claim that it is not its fault. It will suggest that the problem lies in the decision of a local judge in a Montana court or with ill-informed and protectionist U.S. senators. These explanations sound more like excuses to me.
The Prime Minister and his cabinet are making excuses for their failure to get the basics of the Canada-U.S. relationship right in the first place. The border has been closed so long because of BSE that the Prime Minister actually inherited the problem from his predecessor. The Montana court decision last week does nothing but gloss over the facts.
The Prime Minister has been on this file for more than a year and a half and only got access to the President of the United States to talk about it four months ago in Chile. Every single day that the Prime Minister has been unable to contact the president costs Canadian ranchers and feedlot operators as much as $20 million per day, with $11 million lost in export revenue and the rest in lost value for the cattle they hold. I have seen estimates showing that the running total of losses for the beef industry is now at about $7 billion, and the cattle trucking business in Alberta may never recover.
With those kinds of losses and the amount of money at stake, one would think that the Liberals would have put some fire in their bellies and moved heaven and earth to get the border open, but no. The Minister of International Trade visited Washington for the first time officially less than a month ago, to meet with his new counterpart. The Minister of Agriculture just went to Washington for the first time a month ago.
This is just plain wrong and irresponsible with the livelihoods of so many Canadians at risk in the BSE crisis.
When the U.S. Senate voted to keep the border closed last Friday, it took our government by surprise. That says a lot to me about the government's complete lack of political intelligence on Capitol Hill. In business one always tries to know what one's competitors are doing in order to stay one step ahead, but here the custodians of Canada's relations with the United States were caught flat-footed and asleep. For $20 million a day, this performance by the government is just not good enough.
I have been out to feedlot alley with one of my colleagues to see the situation with my own eyes. I can tell members that the top priority for ranchers and feedlot operators is to get that border open so they can sell their products like before and like they do so well. That is really what they want.
Michael Ignatieff, the Harvard University professor, argued recently that Canada-U.S. relations is the defining issue for Canada in the 21st century, as Quebec-Canada was for the 20th century. The root of the problem is that the Liberal Party simply does not understand this, neither the Liberal Party of Jean Chrétien nor this Prime Minister. They are cut from the same cloth.
Is it the Liberals' anti-Americanism? Is it a belief that their polling tells them to pander to anti-Americanism because it will make them popular? It is a dangerous game. As a matter of fact, as this evening proves, they are playing a game of chicken with the national interests and livelihoods of our fellow Canadians.
The government should never have been so passive as this BSE crisis dragged on. Now there are some concrete things it should be doing. The cabinet committee on Canada-U.S. relations should be in an emergency session now to come up with a plan on how it is going to get this border open. When has it met? Where is the plan? If there is one, let us see it. Let us hear it.
Why is the Minister of International Trade not a member of the cabinet committee when the relationship with the United States is so driven by trade? This is amateur. It is just not serious.
The plan requires real resources dedicated to a strategic and sustained strategy to engage the United States on a political level, to build relationships with individual members of congress. A Canadian minister should be in the United States each and every working day to advocate and educate American lawmakers and interest groups, potential allies, not just a visit once in a blue moon.
The government should be launching a blitzkrieg communications effort to explain that the BSE testing regime is solid and as good as or better than the one used in the United States. The fact that the Canadian program tests on downers and dead-on-farm cattle, the types of animals hardest to obtain, led to the discovery of two additional cases in 2005. The U.S. department of agriculture has yet to identify the types of animals that entered the U.S. surveillance system, so we do not know whether in fact it is any superior to our own testing. Americans need to know this.
The government should be well advanced in a major international marketing effort for Canadian beef to demonstrate that Canadian beef is the best beef in the world. We should be innovating with beef in a box for new markets. The responsibility lies on the other side of the floor and instead, the border remains shut and the beef industry remains devastated.