Mr. Speaker, the question for the debate this evening relates to a question that I asked on February 2. At that time, it was related to the issue of Standard & Poor's rating agency, identifying not once, not twice, but 11 times the federal government as directly responsible for the reduced credit rating of the Wheat Board.
As I stated at that time, the Prime Minister and his ministers stand accused of wilfully harming the economic viability of the board, not its directors, as the parliamentary secretary alleges, not farmers, but the government. It likes to call itself the new government.
However, instead of answering and admitting to the truthfulness of the Standard & Poor's report, the answers the parliamentary secretary provided the House on February 2 to this critically important question were at best misleading.
That is not unusual for this parliamentary secretary because even though he has responsibility for the care of the Canadian Wheat Board, he has done everything to undermine it, to misrepresent it, and further erode its authority in terms of operating in the interests of primary producers through single desk selling.
The question was whether the minister denied what the internationally respected credit rating agency, Standard & Poor's, stated in its report of January 30:
Standard & Poor's expects that government support of the CWB will continue to deteriorate as long as the current government lasts.
Standard & Poor's did not identify the Conservative government once, as I mentioned a moment ago. It identified it, in a two page statement, 11 times. Standard & Poor's also stated:
--given the desire of the government to reform the wheat market and the current strained relations between the government and CWB’s board, the level of support from the federal government for CWB and its current public policy role will not recover to a level that is consistent with a ‘AAA’ rating in the near term and could deteriorate further.
The parliamentary secretary, instead of responding to the accusation of his government's complete and total responsibility for undermining the credit rating of the CWB, stated that one of the reasons for the credit rating's reduction was the presence of “radicals on the board”. That kind of McCarthyist smear tactic only serves to further diminish those making the charge than to anyone connected with the Wheat Board.
I would simply ask the parliamentary secretary to indicate where Standard & Poor's made the allegation about radicals. The radicals that he seems to imply are the farmers who were duly elected to that board, 80% of whom were pro-single desk selling. The parliamentary secretary has the gall to call them radicals. I think the parliamentary secretary should apologize to them and to this House for his drive-by smear.
On a second point, the parliamentary secretary continued in his effort to avoid responding to the question relating to Standard & Poor's condemnation of the government's actions by alleging a story out of Algeria concerning the Wheat Board underselling in order to gain access to the Algerian market. That was--