Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to join in this discussion on what actually started out as a concurrence motion on a report from the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food that I chair.
The member for Malpeque wanted to somehow send a message to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and Minister for the Canadian Wheat Board as to what should be on the ballot question in the upcoming plebiscite on barley. He had quite a convoluted message to deliver. That is certainly his right as a member of Parliament, whether he sits in the Wheat Board area or not, and I have heard this argument here as well.
The member for Malpeque has a history within the region that we serve with his leadership of the National Farmers Union some years ago. He was very effective in throwing wheat at Prime Minister Trudeau when Trudeau asked why he should sell farmers' wheat. The member has since joined that party and is basically asking why he should not control the marketing of farmers' wheat? He is now on the side that he used to oppose. I think he was more effective when he was opposing this issue than he is now as a rubber stamp for the former Liberal government's agenda.
I stood here this morning during the opening of this place with you, Mr. Speaker. We say a little prayer here every day and it talks about how great it is to live in Canada where we enjoy freedom and opportunity. I thought that was quite apropos when I knew this concurrence vote and motion were coming forward today.
This discussion is about the lack of freedom and the lack of opportunity given to some western Canadian farmers. Some farmers agree with this single desk idea and we saw that reverberate through western Canada in the vote that was just held to elect five directors to the 10 member board. We saw that reinforced by a 51% turnout and a portion of those voted against. What we have is a two-third and one-third situation. Minority rights are being trampled on here.
The opposition party claims to be the party of the charter. Those members claim to be all about minority rights and all about this and all about that. When the rubber hits the road, they seem to throw that ideology aside or bend it and twist it, and shape it to fit the issue of the day.
Farmers in western Canada do not only vote for directors. They also vote on the type of product they will grow and market on their own. Some people enjoy growing canola and pulse crops because they are cash crops. These folks defend the board to their last breath. They do not have time to market their wheat and barley so someone else has to do it for them.
The member before me made a good case for the continental barley market that was selling more barley at a better price in the two months that it existed before the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool took the government to court. One of the cooperatives that the member opposite talked about so glowingly has since hit the brink of bankruptcy because it no longer represented the wants and aspirations of the farmer delegates that it supported. That cooperative is now crawling back from the brink and is one of the proponents of market choice. Imagine that. It had an epiphany on the way to the poorhouse and has come back saying this is what farmers want. It has redesigned itself and reoffered itself as a power of choice, as a power of doing things differently in western Canada.
The member for Malpeque spoke about the dire consequences of what would happen. He said the multinationals were going to take over. I have heard that statement flown for years. It has not happened. The multinationals, the Cargills, the Louis Dreyfus' and the Bunges, happen to like the Wheat Board very much. The Wheat Board is a monopoly buyer, so these multinationals now have a single desk to go to. They know the quality is there because farmers in western Canada are the best at producing a quality product. They know the quantity will always be there in certain areas of the Wheat Board. They only have to shop at the Wheat Board desk in Winnipeg. They do not have to go anywhere else. They basically get their job done for them.
The Wheat Board does have an accumulation system, if we want to call it that. It is a great system across western Canada for the bulk commodities that it handles because farmers are growing less of those commodities. It is probably over-designed at this point.
The market share of the board has been sliding. As it ramps up to hang on to the single desk and spend a lot of its money on communications and spin, it is losing farmers' support. We are seeing that in the types of crops that are grown.
I know that certainly in my own farming operation the folks who farmed around me, when I was actively farming before this crazy job, were growing less and less wheat, durum and barley. They grew it as a rotational crop, Mr. Speaker, and you know in your own riding how it is grown. One very seldom sees wheat, durum or barley grown on a summer fallow situation. That also is because of the multi-cropping that is being done and the advent of different farming practices.
The one farming practice that has never changed over the last 60 or 70 years is the marketing opportunities. We have seen products come and go. We have seen crops come and go under the board, but the basic facet, the single desk, even with the changes that have been made in offering price contracts and futures buying and so on, is that we still have to make use of that single desk. Very few farmers are taking that up and the Wheat Board will spin that it is a new program, it is not known, and farmers are not sure how to access it and how to make it work.
The farmers that I talk to are very much keen marketers. They tell me it is administratively heavy, bureaucratically obtuse, and the administration of it is extremely expensive. They just do not bother with it. They just do not bother growing those commodities, but do grow the canolas, the pulse crops, and everything else because they know they can make money at it and they can make the marketing choices when they need to.
I have a real concern. We are coming up to the time of year when the moratorium on clawbacks is about to lift at the end of this calendar year. The Wheat Board, as the vehicle for the cash advance on wheat, durum and barley, has been offering what in my neighbourhood has been averaging way less than $1, in some cases less than 50¢ a bushel on feed barley, but farmers are forced to sell their feed barley, which is of great quantity and quality this year, back through the board because they took the cash advance from the board.
They have to deliver product to pay off the cash advance. They cannot sell barley as feed barley outside the board, take the $3.50 a bushel they can get now for it and pay off their cash advance. They have to deliver the barley to the board. That is costing them in most cases $3 a bushel right off the top.
It is also going to cost them by the fact that 50¢ a bushel will not pay back their $2 a bushel cash advance and, therefore, they will be facing interest and penalties, penalties to the tune of 10% of their cash advance, which could be as much as $10,000, and then interest dated the day they took the cash advance out, not the day they were forced into not adhering to it. So, I have some major concerns with that.
It was great when all the parties agreed to changes to the AMPA legislation that extended those cash advances to other commodities and ramped them up for the grain commodities, but we did not do anything on the punitive side. That is going to come home to bite all members of the House of Commons when our phones start ringing in January. Farmers will be saying they are now being forced into bankruptcy because they were forced to sell their products cheaply, could not address their cash advances which were going to keep them away from the cash advance coming up this year and now the banks are not going to look at them. We have a real avalanche effect coming up in the next couple of weeks.
That speaks to the intransigence and lack of change and flexibility that we have seen on the board. Sure there are 10 elected officials but 5 are appointed and there is also a little thing called the Canadian Wheat Board Act.
I happened to bring a copy of that with me today. There are a lot of different things in it that the members opposite and the folks in the media like to use against the minister but one has to read the act. With the changes that the minister of the day made in 1998, the member for Wascana, he actually made the minister of the Wheat Board God in that he controls everything.
The members on the board, whether they are elected or appointed, have what is called a duty to comply. That is what got our friend, the president, Mr. Measner, and some of his acolytes in trouble. They forgot to read that part of it. They started to think that they could somehow go way out in left field and do their own thing outside of the mandate of the board.
Nowhere in the mandate of the board does it say, “Spend farmers' money to promote yourself”. It is not in here. The so-called gag order that the minister delivered to them said: “Please check out section so and so that says your duty to comply does not allow this third party standing in lobbying for your own self-interest”.
The members opposite spin that in a whole different way, but the reality is the Canadian Wheat Board Act is very succinct. It is a very short document and certainly spells out what can and cannot be done. I wish the members opposite would read it.