Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague on his excellent speech. He is newly elected to Parliament and therefore a new member of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. I want to say that his contributions there have been very helpful. He has really good ideas and I am happy to sit on this committee with him.
He had some really good things to say as well in his speech, especially when he said that measures like the loan guarantees in the program that Bill C-29 would provide are little more than a band-aid solution when what we need is a real agricultural policy. People are entitled to that, not necessarily in this bill, but in general. How is it possible that since this government came to power in 2006, there has been a total absence of any agricultural vision or policy to help farmers?
My colleague knows, of course, that Ontario and Quebec grain producers have joined forces to promote a program designed by and for them and implemented by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. This is the AgriFlex program I mentioned earlier.
Can my colleague explain why the government did not simply look at what is in this kind of program, advocated by the grain producers of Ontario and Quebec, instead of trying to complicate things, because the government always says why make things easy when they could be made hard? The producers have their own income support program, but they would like the federal funding for agriculture to go directly to the provinces, which can then adapt the federal programs to their own needs and the needs of their producers.
Why did the Conservatives promise this in the election campaign? Why did they promise it just before the budget and then table a document that made a total hash of what the farmers had presented?
Can my colleague explain what the government was doing here?