Mr. Speaker, I really enjoyed my hon. friend's remarks. I had forgotten about this quotation from the minister. He was quoted in The Western Producer, saying, “We're not going to leave you hanging with nothing”.
As the NDP member has said, it has now been six months. We still see no proposals from the minister on what the government would replace bonding with. If the bill takes away bonding, all kinds of companies will go broke. There is only one person who bears the burden of a company going broke and that is the producer who shipped the grain. Without bonding, it is an absolute disaster.
We do know that there are all kinds of other cases where the minister has left producers with nothing. In fact, they were left with less than nothing. As I mentioned earlier, the hog plan leaves producers with no security and more debt. The CAIS program it replaced with AgriStability leaves them with even less returns than CAIS provided. Now, on its exit program for hogs, farmers have to bid against each other for who will sell the lowest to get out of the business. That is really a race to the bottom by producers so that the government can get the lowest cost possible.
When the minister said, “We're not going to leave you hanging with nothing”, there are all kinds of examples out there where this minister has left producers with less than nothing.
I would ask the member this question. He mentioned the fact that in the bill, deleted from the original Canada Grain Act, is “in the interests of producers”. He has worked with the fisheries. Who would ever believe that a minister would introduce a bill for an area that he is responsible for and drop the producer interest from that bill? Is that not crazy?