As my colleague from Yellowhead says, it is not a joke. If people try to set their kids up in farming, what they do is saddle them with huge debt. They pay exorbitant prices with the taxation on fuels. They pay exorbitant prices for their machinery with the taxes and excise taxes, all that goes with buying machinery. They have very little expectation for profit. They can do almost anything else. They can train to become tradespeople and make many times more money and work far fewer hours.
My reason to speak to the bill today is to give my grudging support to it, but also to draw attention to the fact that agriculture has been and always will be the backbone of the country. Certainly we have manufacturing and service jobs and all the jobs in the information, tourism and energy sectors. Those jobs are all important, but without agriculture those people will go hungry. There is another old expression that says, “If you ate today, thank a farmer”. That is an absolute truth.
We have been neglecting the farm community far too long and have not placed high enough priority on its needs. We should be searching out markets for farm products. We should be helping to secure capital at least for individuals who want to set up packing plants, have good business plans and secure markets in other countries of the world. We should be helping people to realize that goal so they can kill off some of the old cattle that are plugging up our system and piling up more and more all the time. There are markets all over the world. It is a hungry world. People want beef and are willing to pay for it. We need an opportunity to realize that processing and packaging.
As my friend referred to earlier, we feel as though we are hewers of wood and drawers of water. To me that means we put everything in its most primal form and that is the wrong thing to do. When we ship raw product off our borders, we send jobs along with that product. There should be more processing in Canada. We should have more pasta and packing plants for beef.
Those markets are out there. All we need to do is have the packing and the processing capabilities of doing that. We need a farmer-friendly government to help that happen. We do not need its subsidies and we do not want to have it saying, “Check the mailbox because that is how you make your living”. They do not want to make their livings by checking the mailbox. They want to make their livings by a reasonable expectation of profits. I could go on and on.