Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture seems to think that I am going to do the government's work and start calling people to tell them that a consultation process is going on, and that they should take part in it. The government must do its homework and ensure that those who are directly affected by measures are indeed consulted. If these people could not go to Longueuil on that day, for whatever reason, surely it would have been possible for an Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada official to meet with them, or to telephone them if necessary. At the very least, someone from the Fédération de la relève agricole du Québec should have been involved. As I said, I have the same five-page document to which the parliamentary secretary referred, and which mentions that a number of people were consulted. I never denied that; in fact I said it myself. However, among those who appeared in Longueuil were many bank people and Quebec government officials, but no one from the Union des producteurs agricoles du Québec, the Coopérative fédérée, or the Fédération de la relève agricole du Québec. These are all people who should have been consulted.
I want to tell the parliamentary secretary that, despite his claim to this effect, consulting is not his government's forte. Let us take the federal budget, for example. The Union des producteurs agricoles reacted by saying that this budget completely missed the mark, that it did not meet the needs of Quebec producers at all. This means that, if consultations did take place, then the government did not listen to people. Conversely, if there were no consultations, there should have been, so as to meet at least some of the agricultural producers' needs in that budget. Either way, there is something wrong.