Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the budget and economic statement implementation act. I will use this time to spell out how serious the hog and beef crisis is in this country and the absolute neglect that the new Government of Canada is showing toward that industry in its time of trouble. I will keep my statements mainly on the new government's lack of commitment to Canadian farmers.
Nothing is so glaring in this economic statement as the new government's failure to respond to the crisis that primary producers are facing. I could go into a lot of areas, including the fact that the Prime Minister committed 18 months ago to a cost of production. Nothing has happened. There has been no cost of production for Canadian farmers.
I could point out the fact that the new government promised to scrap CAIS but all it did was change the name and pass a few little amendments that are already in place. Even with those few little amendments, the safety net program does not meet the needs of producers in the livestock industry.
The simple fact is that this country's beef and hog producers are facing the worst crisis in a century, bar none. There is no question that BSE was a crisis in the beef industry but it does not have a patch in terms of the crisis in economic pricing that the beef and hog industry is facing at the moment.
The new government, with its huge surpluses, is failing to address that need. I do not know whether it is caught in the Ottawa bubble, where nothing exists outside of Ottawa, and it does not understand the concerns, but it is certainly not acting when it should be acting in farmers' interests.
Traditionally in this country when commodity crises have hit in the past, previous governments have acted with haste and resolve to do their part to support a commodity in crisis. It does not matter whether it was Brian Mulroney with his $1 billion and $1.2 billion Canadian grain payments or the previous government under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin in terms of BSE and other--