Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right. It certainly would interfere with what we do on a global scale. However, having said that, there are farmers out there who do not use any pesticides and herbicides and they would be the first ones to say we can control it without the use of pesticides, but not on the commercial scale that we are seeing.
Generally, organic farms, and I am generalizing here and I am sure someone will take me down a peg or two, are smaller because they are much more labour intensive in that they cannot go out there with a 100-foot-wide sprayer boom and make a swathe and say the job is done. However, we have certainly developed a lot of new products that are much more resistant to takeover from weed situations, for example, one-pass spraying.
Certainly, what created a lot of the hurt during the dirty thirties out there in western Canada was not necessarily just the drought. We actually had higher levels of moisture per year than normal but the problem was the weed infestation.
The member talked about the thistle. The Russian thistle used to go across and we would have fences 20 feet high and 40 feet wide because it piled up there and created such a problem that any little bit of moisture the crops were trying to get access to the thistle sucked it up. If it had not been for the advent of products like 2,4-D at that time, we would not have had any kind of farming left in western Canada at all.
There is good and there is bad, and there is right and there is wrong, but this type of motion is certainly wrong-headed in its application.