Mr. Speaker, I know the member for Timmins—James Bay was a hard-working member of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food when he was there and he still remains very interested in the cause of primary producers in the country.
Simply put, he is right. What we saw in the agriculture committee a number of times when we were talking to the Farmer Rail Car Coalition, were the Conservative members on the committee, although I am not sure whether they were Alliance, Reform or CPC at that time but they are all one and the same, all from a neo-conservative party with neo-conservative ideas, being obstructionists in terms of giving farmers more power in terms of dealing with the railways.
It was a difficult issue because it was entrenched in the law that the railways did have a first right of refusal to acquire the cars and that did not expire until the summer of 2002. That moved the deadline back, although the intention of the previous government was announced to dispose of the fleet in 1996.
A simple answer to the question by the member for Timmins—James Bay is that the policies of the party opposite, the new government, are strictly based on ideology. That is what we are seeing with the new proposal it has now, which is to take marketing powers away from western producers by undermining the Canadian Wheat Board and taking the single desk authority away from the Canadian Wheat Board and doing it, if I might say, in violation of the Canadian Wheat Board Act itself.