Mr. Speaker, I did listen with interest to my hon. colleague from Malpeque. I do need to suggest to our hon. member that we are thinking of his constituents right now in their trying times with the ice storm. We hope the member will be able to get back to his family this weekend to spend some time with them and maybe even put up power lines for his constituents.
I do take extreme exception to some of the comments the hon. member made, especially the suggestion that we should not make improvements to Canada's grain grading system because we need to protect 200 jobs. That should not be the reason to not go forward. However, I am not suggesting that any jobs should be replaced but, further to his comment that there is no company that can do the same thing for farmers, there are many. I will not make any advertisements but many companies are available. I used to use them on my own farm. Therefore, to suggest that these people would actually lose their positions, there are lots of other opportunities as we go forward with a better, more effective Canadian Grain Commission. Those people can play a very real part in a more effective system of grading grain.
I represented the Western Canadian Wheat Growers, an association that fought for about 30 years to get the Canadian Wheat Board and the Canadian Grain Commission to recognize that it was more than just visual distinguishability that should determine the value of grain.
The protein content of grain means more than its visual distinguishability. That group and many others fought a long time before we finally recognized that. That was one step.
We need to move forward in making grains available to the customer by their value and that value is their specific traits. It is not what they look like but it is the ash content, the falling number and it is the milling quality that need to be recognized. Those are some of the things that the government is trying to put through that did not get changed for farmers in the previous 13 years.
How would the hon. member suggest that we should not provide this benefit to farmers?