Madam Speaker, the member opposite did not take part in the avian flu hearings. I know he was busy crossing the country, airport hotel to airport hotel.
Madam Speaker, I do not really give a damn if he respects me, and politics does enter into this. I would much prefer that he respects producers. If he had heard the attacks they levied on the CFIA, the bureaucrats and the politicians the days that we were in Abbotsford, he would agree with me that this has become a political exercise.
The compensation is a political exercise. The direction to the CFIA, how quickly it goes in and what they do is a political exercise. It is non-partisan. However we heard from those people in the valley out there as to everything that went wrong.
One guy who had peacocks used them as part of the landscape around his yard. He had acreage and he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars landscaping this beautiful piece of property and he had some peacocks.
There is no science that says these birds are carriers for or can even fall to avian flu but the CFIA went in there under orders with shotguns, which I do not imagine were registered. They actually blasted away at these peacocks and feathers were flying everywhere in the wind. Now if there were a problem, the feathers would be carriers, but they blasted these things out of the sky and out of the trees. They ran out of ammunition because they were terrible shots so they commandeered more bullets from the farmer to finish off his birds. That is how bad this was.
The CFIA gassed flocks in barns three and four times because the argon and the C0
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they were using had no effect on ducks. After two days of trying to kill these birds, they went in with hockey sticks and bagged these birds off the walls. The SPCA came forward and said that it was ridiculous.
This has happened in other parts of the world. The Americans set the example. They took out the barn in Delaware the first day and did the same thing in Texas and had no more problems. We spent 30 days playing around with this issue, making the political decision here in Ottawa as to what needed to be done, and by the time it was done it was too late. It also was done in the wrong way because the CFIA did not know it was airborne. We have the wrong scientists and the wrong politicians. The electorate will choose.