Mr. Speaker, I know the member made a slip when he said “this government”. I know he wishes we were the government, as do we, but we are not.
I need to make a point on this 13 years in which, yes, we formed the government. International trade, as the member knows, is 149 countries and we worked pretty consistently toward a solution at the WTO.
I want to make a couple of points which the minister and the Prime Minister fail to mention consistently. When the previous government was in power, producers had the highest payments in Canadian history. The previous government balanced the books and left the present government with a huge surplus. Never before has a new government come to power in such good fiscal shape.
What did the Conservatives do for the farm community with the surplus? Absolutely nothing. They announced in their budget more money but the more money they announced in the budget was actually less money than was committed by the previous government.
They talk about immediate cash for farmers but there was no immediate cash for farmers by the spring. However they did announce, which went through the House the other day, a $100,000 cash advance for farmers, which is a loan. Farmers cannot borrow themselves out of debt. I wish the government would realize that. It needs to give them some assistances in terms of payments to their commodities.
At the WTO at least this government was negotiating, negotiating tough and a sensitive products category in there to protect supply management and believed in state trading enterprises, which the government obviously does not do.