Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the parliamentary secretary's views on this issue and I really appreciate his taking the time to respond, but I have to say, where is the beef?
He listed all those numbers, but there are a few things he did not explain. Cash advances are loans. Not all of this money is in grants directed to farmers. They are loans. Some of these programs are money that is given, money that is taken back. If one only has $4,000 in before tax income, one could be lent all the money in the world, but if one has to pay it back, it is not going to help. We need something that actually gets to the farmers.
When I first got involved in this, the member for Yorkton—Melville told me that years later they would go back and look at programs, they would see what had been announced and they would find that one-third of it had stayed in Ottawa. That is the problem. All those numbers do not add up.
Where is the beef? A farmer cannot live off a loan if he or she does not have the money to pay it back. That is the problem. There are a lot of good words, but nothing has really been delivered.